lenny kaye revisits ‘main street’

In 1972, a young rock critic named Lenny Kaye — soon to be serving as guitarist for the Patti Smith Group — was tasked with reviewing the Rolling Stones‘ Exile on Main Street for Rolling Stone. He panned it, writing “Exile On Main Street spends its four sides shading the same song in as many variations as there are Rolling Stone readymades to fill them, and if on the one hand they prove the group’s eternal constancy and appeal, it’s on the other that you can leave the album and still feel vaguely unsatisfied.” It’s always fascinating to read the perception of now-lauded records at the time of their release (Simon & Garfunkel‘s Bookends took a similar drubbing in RS), but since we’re lucky enough at eMusic to have Lenny writing for us on a regular basis — and since Lenny is one of my favorite writers, bar none — we thought, on the occasion of the arrival of Exile on eMusic, we’d give him another chance to assess the record. As always, Lenny delivers. His new review is below the jump)

The Rolling Stones
Exile on Main Street (Reissue)

By Lenny Kaye

The re-release of a treasured cultural touchstone is occasion for seeing how the work in question has telescoped the years, and, more to the point, how your own perceptions and persona have evolved and grown along with it. With the second coming of Exile On Main Street, the Rolling Stones‘ controversial and iconic masterwork, the looking-back not only encompasses myself, but the glimmering binary stars of the Stones, Mick and Keith; and, in some ways, these responses overshadow the album itself.

I have particular reason to welcome a chance for reappraisal, since two weeks after Exile‘s original release in the late spring of 1972, I reviewed the album for Rolling Stone, giving it a medium cool analysis I’ve had some cause to regret over the years. It was a classic case, as the cliche goes, of not seeing the forest for the trees. Song by song, even over the kitchen sink of a double-album set, individual highlights seemed hard to come by, though the thrill of hearing “Happy,” “Rip This Joint,” and “Shine A Light” has been burnished on this reissue by their many sing-a-longs over the years, and “Tumbling Dice” is a undeniable classic. But to my then rock critical ears, thinking with head instead of heart, this was a comedown from the Stones scaling the peaks of some of the most cataclysmic music of their career, an arc that seemed to ascend around Beggar’s Banquet, continue through Let It Bleed and burst into fireworks with Sticky Fingers, when, not so coincidentally, they were at their apex of creativity and influence. I was spoiled, and my disappointment showed, especially given the first long form double-album of the Stones’ career.

But Exile, as the title implies, is more about time and place, a mood and atmosphere, and its sprawling, ramshackle track listing, trying on blues forms and extending heightened jams, stretching out for long solos from Stones’ sidemen like sax player Bobby Keys and pianist Nicky Hopkins, with an especial nod to the group’s slide guitarist at the time, Mick Taylor, gives the album a documentary in-the-making feel, enhanced by a remastering, which seems to clear up some of the tube-driven haze of the original vinyl edition (whether this is a good or bad thing I will leave to your speaker system).

The tale has oft been told of the Stones setting up a mobile recording studio in Keith Richards’ basement in the south of France, inside a mansion called Nellcote, though the album was later pieced together in sessions that transported tapes from London to Los Angeles; and it is within this compressed, hothouse atmosphere, a heart of darkness on the verge of tropic (see the claustrophobic “Ventilator Blues,” and the booklet photos of sprawled bodies on the floor of the makeshift studio, not to mention Charlie’s striped jacket being used as a bass drum muffler!), that the Stones put together the loosest, most freewheeling album of their career.

That’s the way Keith wanted it, and his current view of Exile is that it is a sacred text, allowing no tampering within its concentric circles of recorded groove. Mick, however, couldn’t resist and in the bonus disc, gathered with the help of Don Was, adds new lyrics to four songs that are a call-and-response to his younger self: “You always brought out the best in me,” he lays his heart on the line in the frankly beautiful “Following The River,” and I wonder if he’s talking about Keith. The alternate takes and “bonus” material don’t change Exile so much as show its process, the tracks that didn’t make the official release holding their own: “I’m Not Signifying” is lascivious in its cakewalk, and “Plundered My Soul” is all impassioned romp, galvanized by Charlie Watts’ archetypal loping drums, affectionate regret coloring the remembrance.

Beyond bonus, however, it is Exile‘s remarkable resilience as an album that pushes play in this decade. Much of its myth is just that — a celebration of lifestyle and rock stardom that took root in a fecund, overheated basement as the hours ticked till dawn. It was Mick who gathered the tapes of the Nellcote sessions and overdubbed the gospel-ish feel that imbues Exile with its sense of redemption amidst decadence. The duality of the Stones’ was never more manifest than here, with Keith’s voice entwining harmonies with Mick, Mick slightly back in the mix, and the force of the band carrying them forward. It’s interesting to compare the two versions of “Soul Survivor” with each fronting the song, just as it is fascinating — now almost four decades later — to contemplate the roads not taken: in the opening “Rocks Off,” one of the Stones’ many nigh-trademark barrelhouse stompers, a bridge appears out of nowhere, and the song slows, turns psychedelic as tremolo phasers wash over the guitars and vocal. It seems almost contrary to the festive mood, a malevolence and an intimation of gathering storm clouds, and I find myself wishing they would have followed its tangent.

But then, I’m not so different than I was when I first took a stroll down Main Street. Neither is Exile.