The Rolling Stones
Exile on Main Street

THE REVIEW

This album, despite being recorded under the most terrifying conditions and remixed an indeterminate number of times, remains one of the main cornerstones of the Rolling Stones' discography. In 1972, the Stones were truly fugitives, maligned and outlaws, more on the run from the UK tax collectors and London police—who frequently arrested Jagger and company for possession of illegal substances—than from the demons that had dramatically shown themselves a few years earlier during the Altamont gathering. Exiled and hiding in the damp, claustrophobic basement of Keith Richards' villa in Nellcote, in the south of France, the Rolling Stones managed to produce their great masterpiece. A warm, dense, raw, anarchic, and uncontrolled album.
"Exile On Main Street" is one of the most important and influential musical chapters in the history of rock. The work that, with "Beggars Banquet," "Let It Bleed," and "Sticky Fingers," gives miserable mortals a feverish and cursed musical four of a kind that has granted the Stones immortality. Never has a collection of tracks covered all aspects of rock music with such comprehensive precision of details.
The underlying theme of the album is a return to the essentiality and genuine purity of early rock 'n' roll. A jukebox of unadorned, ancient, anachronistic sounds rich in black music, blues, and profane gospel, packaged with a rich instrumental array thanks to the decisive additions of Nicky Hopkins, Bobby Keys, Jim Price, and completed by a mix that is in no way refined and highly toxic. The colors that dominate from the famous cover are black and white, and over everything, a sense of alienation hovers. The months it took to record this work were deleterious and hard for everyone involved. Drugs of all kinds and alcohol were a constant, as was the infernal frustration of living and working daily all together in an inadequate and uncomfortable place once used as a Nazi headquarters.

This double album remains essentially a creature of Keith Richards, with Mick Jagger almost absent and occupied in Paris where his wife Bianca was about to give birth. Keith, with the help of producer Jimmy Miller, organizes the group like a dirty and visceral rock-blues band, blessed by the ghost of Robert Johnson and illuminated by dear old Chuck Berry riffs, Stax brand rhythm 'n' blues, and the country-rock of friend Gram Parsons. The final and exhilarating result is a record with a dirty recording, with no clarity or technical precision, capable of reclaiming the spontaneity of their early days. A parable of the Stones' musical history from the origins up to the Seventies, with their perpetual musical roots as its focal center. An album seductive, nonchalant, and seminal that shows the wild and proletarian side of rock, capable of influencing generations of musicians from Springsteen to Petty, from the Clash to the Replacements, from John Mellencamp to the Black Crowes.
The sound of "Exile On Main Street" is light-years away from the technological productions of the Seventies and is not calculated or orchestrated. It is merely the result of approximate, precarious, and often chaotic recordings conducted among the rooms, kitchen, and cellar of Richards' villa. It is pointless to quote or comment on all eighteen tracks of this classic. Those pieces remain there, unchanged since that distant 1972, to bear witness and demonstrate the complete musical mastery the Rolling Stones had at the time and to remind us, with each reverent listening, what it really meant to produce a rock 'n' roll album, conceived on the road when all dreams had vanished and unease reigned supreme.