This was an underappreciated attribute when I was first learning the guitar as a young adolescent. I remember arguing on the school bus for the Keith Richards and Pete Townsend rhythm-first philosophy over the noodly wanking of those musicians primarily labelled as "lead" guitarists. The notion of there being a "lead" anything in a good band always seemed to miss the point for me. A great band fires on all cylinders, meshing, weaving, collaborating like a team, as the Stones do on Exile on Main St. Even a lyrical soloist such as Mick Taylor is best showcased in a song-oriented, rhythm-centred band like the Stones, far more than in a combo that spends inordinate amounts of time tediously trading solos, like some of the more traditionalist blues-based groups that featured Taylor.
On "Rocks Off," the arrangement Keys and Price play is an authoritative blast, supporting the rock & roll rhythm section, never in the way, though not shying away from leaving their mark. The horn chart is another hook, rocking as hard as any guitar. The band members all seem to feed off one another. Whether or not the horns were there for the basic tracking, or overdubbed soon after a take was in the can, they are right in the thick of it all, moving with the band in a common direction, particularly at the vamp at the end of the song. Everyone seems to be hammering away with purpose. Listen to the section between 3:34 and 3:40 for some of the most glorious give and take, an ecstatic climax to the song.
Coming in at 2:12, the minor-key bridge of "Rocks Off' incorporates elements of the psychedelic era, specifically in the backward tracking of vocals, as Jagger's and Richards' vocals swirl in upward vortexes, like ghouls sweeping up from the graves in a Halloween cartoon. The rest of the musical backing track comes out of a chorus and to a puttering halt. Charlie taps out time on the high-hat cymbals, hitting snare drum shots in a sparse new pattern, while Mick hits the tambourine. The guitars are no longer straight forward and chugging, but rather awash in a slow Leslie-speaker or phase shifter modulating effect. The dream imagery continues, musically and lyrically, as if the singer has been drawn back into sleep, fighting against the helplessness he finds in a dream: "feel so hypnotized, can't describe the scene / feel so mesmerized, all that inside ..."
Charlie dives in full bore on the vamp/coda (end) of "Rocks Off," with a number of staggering fills. Listen to the four bar-long fill around 3:33-3:40 for an example. Charlie sounds like he is answering the horn stabs and right-hand piano of Hopkins. The guitars, drums, and percussion hold the fort down while horns slur, Jagger drawls, and a bunch of backing vocal tracks from Richards and Jagger slip and slide all over the place, rarely crisp or on the beat. But closer listening reveals a tight pattern in the chorus backing vocals, punctuating and moving the chorus along with yet another percussive element: "only get 'em off, only get 'em off, get 'em off." All the vocal parts sound spontaneous and inspired, passionate, as if this is their last chance to sing them. And this, amazingly, is still the first track on the record.
Rip This Joint
Though Exile on Main St. eventually sprawls out stylistically over the course of its four vinyl sides, it begins with a mean one-two punch. We barely have any time to recover from the leading track before we're hit with the blistering assault of "Rip This Joint." With the boys springing from the musty basement as if with mouthfuls of trucker speed, riding shotgun in this punk-paced song that almost serves as an overture for the whole runaway train of a record—announcing stops in "Alabam'," Santa Fe, Dallas, Texas, New Orleans, even Washington, stopping to see "Dick and Pat down in old D.C."—the song takes off at a breakneck pace and never looks back. Keith Richards claimed it "was the fastest song [tempo] we ever cut."
If the sound of suburban hardcore punk ten or fifteen years later had not gotten so rhythmically rigid and straight (and straight-edge) as to all but abandon the swinging roots of rock & roll, it might have sounded something like "Rip This Joint." The Stones achieve a pre-punk energy, coupled with a sexy 1950s groove, years before punk-informed neo-rockabilly artists had any baby curls to grease down with Royal Crown. The song has the early, regional underground rockabilly flare of 1950s West Virginia wildman Hasil Adkins, who Cub Koda called "a true rock & roll primitive." And it is this sort of spirit, ripped from the raw, minimalist source, that the Stones channel explosively on "Rip This Joint."
Jagger's amphetamine rush of words is most obviously an homage to early rock & roll travelogue numbers like "Route 66" and Chuck Berry's "Back in the U.S.A." and "Sweet Little 16," though updated with the jet-set cheekiness that would later be on full display in "Respectable." Over the walking bass line (actually, it doesn't walk, it runs) of upright bassist Bill Plummer, in place of Bill Wyman (surprising, since Wyman loves this sort of rock & roll-purist number), Richards' relentless hammering guitar, and the pounding drumming of Charlie Watts, Jagger starts off the song with "Momma says 'yes,' poppa says 'no' / make up your mind 'cause I gotta go / gonna raise hell at the union hall / drive myself right over the wall." After a couple of throaty rebel yells, his more urbane and audacious self returns, with "Dick and Pat in old D.C. / well, they're gonna hold some shit for me." Jagger has the cheek to insert this latter insolent aside after a couple of lines in which he sarcastically humbles himself, the artist in exile, to ask "Mister President, Mister immigration man / let me in, sweetie, to your fair land."
Such lines should have made "Rip This Joint" the perfect opening song for the 1972 Stones Touring Party and/or the films documenting it. Jagger gives calls out to New Orleans, with "Dixie Dean" and "Dallas, Texas, with the Butter Queen," while warning "Little Rock, and I'm fit to pop," and "Alabam' don't give a damn." Dixie Dean sounds like a New Orleans figure, and that was probably the reason he slipped into the lyrics, but it's most likely a reference to the legendary 1920s English footballer. Barbara, the Butter Queen was apparently the same sort of creative groupie as Cynthia Plaster Caster, for, according to Keith (who recalls more than one Butter Queen) "they did loads of wonderful things with butter, apparently. I used to see them around all the time, but they never buttered me up. I used to avoid them like the plague. Anything that smacked of professionalism." In notes for the Gimme Shelter DVD, Stones assistant Jo Bergman recalled answering a motel door in Texas during the 1969 tour, when "a blonde with straggly hair announced 'I've got a pound of butter in my purse. Where's Mick?' She was the Dallas Butter Queen. Groupies had titles then."
Little Richard is the primary influence for "Rip This Joint." The song more or less quotes Richard's "Rip It Up," and not just its title. In the song, written by Robert A. Blackwell and John S. Marascaico, Richard sings, "I've got me a date and I won't be late / Pick her up in my 88 / trek on down to the union hall / when the joint starts jumpin' I'll have a ball." Charlie Watts says, "Richard, for me, is a very underrated person in that he really is a wonderful singer and piano player. He's fabulous. But because he's entertaining, which is what people loved about him, his playing is overshadowed by all that." Indeed, the Stones' generation might have been the last to understand the significance of Little Richard's contributions to the foundation of rock & roll—and even then, it was only the musicians who cared enough to be aware. Little Richard was in and out of retirement (to the Cloth) at this point, and in subsequent years, he slipped further into caricature and self-parody.
While "Rip This Joint" swings like the boogie-woogie piano-driven music of Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, the Stones amp up the Chuck Berry guitar and piano boogie to hard-rock level. Charlie Watts tosses off efficient tom-tom rolls like Berry drummers Ebby Hardy and Odie Payne, and Nicky Hopkins channels Johnny Johnson in his piano figures. Additionally, they quote one of the lesser-known Berry titles, "Let it Rock." Jagger seems to be pushed by the band and also to be goading them on. It would be hard to picture the musicians swirling up such a storm without the vocal encouragement of Jagger, most likely in a guide vocal. His final take sounds unrestrained, as if he's whooping it up between swigs from a bottle of Wild Turkey. His singing here is like Little Richard at his most raw.
Everyone in
the octet plays his heart out, trying to keep up with the others. In a caption for a picture of a wiped-out Richards lying on a mattress, Dominique Tarle notes, "Keith played it all night long, for days. He was exhausted. It was very difficult to keep the perfect rhythm, and Jimmy Miller wanted it to be spot on. Keith gave it everything he had," trying to nail down the rapid-fire guitar part. Bobby Keys plays baritone and tenor sax, with a couple of squealing solos on the tenor, while Jim Price, on the trumpet and trombone, punctuates lines along with Keys. Mick Taylor slips in some slide parts. Plummer, a jazz player brought in by Jim Keltner, overdubbed his parts in Los Angeles during the final mixing sessions, and his slapping-style upright adds an authentic 1950s flavour. Nicky Hopkins plays the sort of boogie-woogie part normally reserved for Stones stalwart traditionalist Ian Stewart. And Hopkins is a force to be reckoned with, playing the high octaves almost exclusively in seventh chord triplets. The song is over, as if in a blur, in a little over two minutes.
Mirroring many of the subjects in Robert Frank's The Americans, Exile on Main St. often betrays a sense of weariness. This was, after all, a band that had been through an awful lot in the years leading up to Exile: births, deaths, arrests, marriages, break-ups, drug abuse, financial turmoil, and the constant pressure of maintaining a successful band and business. And America was beaten down by the end of the 1960s as well. But as with Frank's book, there are glimmers of not just optimism, but also the sort of outright exuberance that led Kerouac to describe Frank's work as akin to "that crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and the music comes out of a jukebox or a funeral." If we were in New Orleans—mythical New Orleans—it would not matter which source it came from; it would be party time nevertheless. Like Frank, Tarle captures the weariness and joy, as well as all the emotional shades of gray in between, of the Exile sessions. Criticism of Exile as overly sprawling misses the point. Certainly the album is ambitious in its attempt to capture the breadth and scope of American music, at least the strains that appealed to the band. Though the Rolling Stones most likely did not sit down and preconceive it as such, the record seems to set out to cover nothing less than the wide-open spaces and shadowy corners of America itself via the nation's music— from urban soul to down-home country to New Orleans jazz: a musical accompaniment for Frank's photos. "Rip This Joint" sets the tone for this journey, as a modern-day "Route 66" travelogue from Birmingham to San Diego. It's as if the band had reached a tipping point, where the collective intake of influences—via the eyes and ears of all the individual members—gushed forth in a torrent, laying out a roadmap of where American popular music had been, and also where it was going: all captured on two pieces of vinyl.
Shake Your Hips
If so inclined, you can break down the songs on Exile into a few categories: full-tilt rockers, gospel-informed torch ballads, acoustic folk and country numbers, or bluesy grinders like "Ventilator Blues," "Casino Boogie," "Turd on the Run," and Slim Harpo's "Shake Your Hips." The latter songs find droning grooves, churning away in the middle register, and build in intensity mostly by sheer virtue of performance over arrangement—particularly via vocal inflection and emotional resonance.
Louisiana's Slim Harpo—born James Isaac Moore— was already known to Stones fans, as he was to followers of the Kinks and Van Morrison, both of whom had covered his songs. He wrote the early Stones favourite "I'm a King Bee." Though Harpo might have taken some cues from Jimmy Reed in the lazy, leering vocal department, Slim had a more distinct country-western twang to his inflections. And he seemed to be less beholden to a twelve-bar structure in his songwriting than some other modern blues writers. He was more country than city-blues. His songs are encompassed by a distinctive mood and sound: a swampy drone that worms into your consciousness and attacks you from a different angle than a straight-on song.
Jagger affects a particular Slim-style southern accent on "Shake Your Hips," nice and loose on the behind-the-beat falsetto "now ain't that easy?"—sung as "eeeeeeeeeasy," in a slippery howl almost as haunting as Robert Johnson's. It is the sort of howl that Jeffery Lee Pierce found so eerily effective as he moaned on the classic blues-punk Gun Club records in the early-to-mid-1980s.
After the dual sax and blues harp solo in the middle of the "Shake Your Hips," Jagger comes back in, his voice quivering on the verse with "met a girl in a country town," and then breaking on the refrain "SHAKE your hips, baby! SHAKE your hips, baby!" The intensity gets ratcheted up in the last chorus. Charlie plays mostly rolls on the side of a drum, while pedalling his high-hat and adding an inspired rim shot here and there. This is one of the few songs that feature Ian Stewart on piano, and it sounds like Keith takes the guitar solo here. Bobby Keys plays during the whole song, doubling the main guitar riff, which plays call-and-response with Jagger's entreaties in the chorus.
Mood and overall feel is important to the pacing and tone of Exile. This album is not concerned with serving up an endless parade of singles, but rather it is a collection that offers the opportunity to throw in a well-executed cover like this one to establish the vibe. Indeed, had many of these songs been buried in the middle of a later record like Goats Head Soup, they might have been lost and forgotten. And while they may not exactly stand out much here either, songs like "Shake Your Hips," "Casino Boogie," and "Stop Breaking Down" do find a home in the context of Exile, an album that works as a piece, wherein such songs are appropriated the attention they deserve, as pieces of a whole. Many fans, along with the Stones themselves, see Sticky Fingers and Exile as almost a continuous project. But with songs like "Shake Your Hips" and "Sweet Virginia," the band seems to leapfrog back a bit to Beggar's Banquet and pick up on some ideas started there. They take some of that record's stark country and blues bleakness and give it a bit more ground to spread out, even adding almost pure mood/sound pieces like "Just Want to See His Face."
If nothing else, on such cover versions the Stones solidify their roots and their musicianship, displaying an authoritative air of authenticity and a comfort in the blues vernacular. "You don't want to touch other people's stuff unless you've got something different to add to it, which I think we've got," noted Keith.
Casino Boogie
Has anybody been as good at making an entrance as Charlie Watts? Fashionably late, but steady throughout, Charlie tumbles in for real on the toms after slapping a creative beat on the high hat to keep time. And Keith makes it all possible by crawling out on a limb, with extreme confidence that his rhythmic riffing will be picked up and made exponentially more effective once
Charlie joins in and sets the pace for the rest of the band. This is the reciprocal energy of a band at the peak of its game—Keith sets down the groove, but can crawl as far out on the limb as he likes, because Charlie is going to be there with the footing he needs.
Continuing the drone of "Shake Your Hips," "Casino Boogie" is all mid-range: the melody is sung with just a few choice notes, with the harmony not spreading out much either; open-tuned slide and hammering guitars are added by Mick Taylor and Keith; and an electric piano from Nicky Hopkins is a part which hints at the Clavinet sounds the band would later use on songs like "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)." Before you even realize he's soloing, Bobby Keys emerges from a full eight bars hanging on the same two notes (mostly just one, really, with the other coming every three or four notes), busting out into more melodic phrasing for the last four bars. Keys takes a cue from jazz players like Miles Davis, or from the simple rhythmic figures that Chuck Berry would play. Melodic range is eschewed for almost pure rhythm. The tension is almost overwhelming. The band does not give in behind Bobby; they just stay in the same steady groove. You hang there with Keys on his one-note samba, waiting for release. The sexual undertone is palpable. And when Taylor takes over on the next break, he offers only a note or two more, along with Hopkins hammering on the same two-fingered chords as the arrangement fades out on the same chord. The blues of John Lee Hooker and the Chess guys are touch-points here. The music buzzes on a
nd threatens to take the sort of malevolent turn in tone and (double) time that "Midnight Rambler" does. Instead it simply stays put, increasing in intensity, Charlie switching to the ride cymbal, as someone clanks on a bottle or can in the background.
The lyrics are an impressionistic mix of dreamy film noir:
Wounded lover, got no time on hand Dietrich movies, close up boogies . . . Watch that hat in black . . .
And casual disdain for authority, drug-bust martyrdom, and the band's pressure to "exile" themselves:
Thrill freak, Uncle Sam
All for business, no, you understand?
Judge and jury walk out hand in hand . . .
Sinking in the sand
Fade out freedom, stand that heat on
And then with two simple lines, Jagger captures the essence of Exile on Main St: surreal rock & roll jet-set sexuality, decadence, and boredom with the tired themes of the 1960s.
Kissing cunt in Cannes
Protest music, million dollar sad . . .
Even when adding their own contribution to 1960s protest music, the Stones' lyrics made less of a statement than did their music. Perhaps this is a truth of all great "protest" music. Like Guthrie, Dylan, the Clash, or Elvis Costello with a song like "Oliver's Army," you need to hook me first with the music and then let me figure out the message. "Gimme Shelter" is another good example, its message writ broadly, wisely. "War, children, is just a shot away" is, after all, not quite Dylan. And as with that song, it is usually the tense and/or ominous music that makes the impact.
On "Casino Boogie" the Stones are playing almost straight-up American blues, but rather than trying to hide it, they embrace the themes most relevant to their "million dollar sad" lifestyle: an almost new aristocratic decadence that would seem antithetical to what rock & roll was supposed to be—street, rebellious, dangerous. Nevertheless, they obviously felt the need to push the porn-rock envelope in order to nurture their "dangerous" image. So, this being the era when Jagger came up with the Hubert Selby-like hustler-raunch of the song "Cocksucker Blues" to satisfy a record contract, the Stones figured they should just keep testing the limits of obscenity laws—a path they continued on with "Star Star" (or its previous title "Star Fucker") and "Some Girls." Here on "Casino Boogie" they sing about living as oversexed high rollers who pass the time at the casinos at Monte Carlo, just up the coast from Villefranche, not far from the villa that Andy Johns shared with Jim Price.
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