The whole band is here, and it's satisfaction for the soul to hear the stellar rhythm section of Bill Wyman playing a steady bass-line groove of eighth notes inside of Charlie Watts' hard and typically crisp backbeat. The intro—played without bass—has a bit of that "Honky Tonk Women" vibe, with just a little of the tension that accompanies the wait for the rest of the band to drop in. (The album sleeve and some sources list Bill Plummer as playing acoustic bass on the track as well, but I just don't hear it anywhere.) Wyman is fiercely powerful here, content to stay pumping on the root notes until the chorus, when he slips into a James Jamerson-like Motown funk pocket with Charlie, slipping out of the choruses with very slick R&B runs (listen, for example, at 2:07-2:10). Additionally, we have that relentless early-70s-Stones percussion from Jimmy Miller, shaking it so hard that you have to shake it as well. Mick Jagger said his wish was for people to dance, not think, when listening to Exile.
The real star here, though, is Mick Taylor, who contributes the most distinctive instrumentation with his rapid-fire slide part. He rightfully gets one of the precious few actual guitar solos on this expansive record. The guitar tracks are very prominent in the mix, Keith leading the band with his characteristic five-string, open G-tuned chug, playing hammered suspensions slightly behind the beat. The horns again punctuate the proceedings with a Memphis punch, revving it up for all it's worth with a flurry of notes during the "oh won't you be my little baby for a while" coda. The song sports one of the most inventive horn charts of the album. Nicky Hopkins pounds away in one of his typical rock & roll barrelhouse parts, though with everything else at full-blast here, he struggles to be heard.
Jagger, also doing all he can do to be heard, has rebounded and fully recovered from the depths he plumbed on "Let It Loose." He is back to the madman yowls of side one, sounding like the wild hillbilly character of "Rip This Joint," screeching rebel yells as he barrels down country roads toward the next roadhouse. Though he needs a "sanctified girl with a sanctified mind," he is finding salvation this time as he "busts another bottle," again offering the beguiling mix of the sacred and profane that only good rock & roll can provide.
Mick sings and shouts through most of the song, as if to be heard over the mix. Here, he is just another instrument in the band, slightly above the horns and indeed almost part of the horn section, especially at the end, where his improvisations might as well be a Bobby Keys sax solo. The urgency is palpable in the timbre of his strained vocal chords, especially on lines like "keep the motor running, yeah!" (many of his lines are punctuated with similar extraneous ad-libs). He screams out of the Mick Taylor slide solo, sounding like a distorted guitar or guttural sax, rising in volume until he spits out the line "well, open up and swallow, yeah, yeah! / bust, bust, bust another bottle, yeah!" The chorus is a gratifying call-and-response between Jagger and the backing singers, including Kathi McDonald, who had been brought to the attention of the Stones by Leon Russell. She is almost an equal presence to Mick, especially on the coda. That's her solo at about 1:49. Together, they sound like the Ike and Tina Turner Revue at mil speed.
Stop Breaking Down
A slinky Robert Johnson blues with Jagger on guitar and a wicked harmonica, "Stop Breaking Down" is the one of the two or three songs on Exile that doesn't feature Keith Richards (depending on who is playing piano on "I Just Want to See His Face"). "Keith was in charge and pulled all the strings," explained Mick Taylor. "He was always the prime mover behind the recording of Exile . . . Having said that, the hierarchy of power was never that clear cut—it was Mick's idea to cover Slim Harpo's 'Shake Your Hips' and Robert Johnson's 'Stop Breaking Down.'"
The track is left over from the Olympic Studios sessions, and Mick "I know I play a bad guitar" Jagger does a nice chunka-chunk rhythm on the electric, while Taylor shines on the slide guitar. One of the few other distinguishing elements of "Stop Breaking Down" is the rare presence of Ian Stewart, who sits in with a bluesier version of his boogie-woogie oeuvre. His rhythmic timing swings impeccably.
As with many such twelve-bar blues tracks that might otherwise be throwaway bar-band versions of the real thing, it is Jagger's commanding vocal performance that makes the song worthy of more than one or two listens. Jagger is singing live, at least for some of the track, directing the band through the same microphone (via an amplifier) he uses for his harp—thus, somewhat muddied and distorted. We can hear him shout "one more time" over the penultimate twelve bars, with hoots and howls reverberating through the old-time sounding tape echo.
If nothing else, the track further establishes the Stones' mastery of the genre that launched their career back in the suburbs of London a decade prior. And it is well placed as a filler track that gives some breathing room between the ferocious "All Down the Line" and the deep soul of "Shine a Light." Still, to my ears, "Stop Breaking Down" sounds like a rare moment when the band went back to an older track to help flesh out the record.
Shine a Light
When I first started spinning Exile on Main St. as a kid, "Shine a Light" was one of the first songs to hit me deeply, even though it was near the end of this long record. It made me fully aware of the influence gospel music had on not just my favourite band, the Rolling Stones, but on much of the music I loved. The first album I bought for myself (as opposed to inherited) was Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life, another double record with heavy gospel roots. (I guess I had a thing for sprawling records; the latter even included a four-song 45!) By the time I was out of high school, I was buying Andre Crouch records and tuning into Sunday morning broadcasts of real big-choir gospel services, the kind that made me feel something significantly more spiritual than the elaborate Catholic masses of my upbringing. Eventually, I made the pilgrimage to Memphis to see the Reverend Al Green lead a marathon Sunday morning service in his own church, an event that has brought me as close to something God-like as anything else I have experienced. Such is the power of great music.
The Jagger/Richards track "Shine a Light" dates back to 1969 at least, when Leon Russell cut a version of it called "Get a Line on You." However, it is recorded on Exile as an almost solo Jagger track, with Taylor— who also plays a very groovy bass part—the only other Rolling Stones band member on the recording. It is perhaps telling that Keith makes no appearance on the track. "Shine a Light" begins with an ethereal sort of sound, a guitar being fingered, through a tape echo machine. It is the lead guitar of Mick Taylor that comes in for real at the one-minute mark. Again, we have a little extraneous noise that adds an enigmatic sense of atmosphere and texture to the multi-layered production.
Jimmy Miller is on the drums, and Billy Preston is the main man, with both an organ and a piano track. Preston, who played the awe-inspiring organ solo on "I Got the Blues" on Sticky Fingers, "had that gospel feel, you know, which Nicky did not have," said Andy Johns. While there is no doubt that, between the two, Preston was the more authentic gospel player, Nicky Hopkins did hone some impressive gospel chops and had made remarkable strides from his earliest days with the Stones, as is evidenced on Exile.
The Stones had taken stabs at the gospel form on Beggar's Banquet with "Salt of the Earth," and with "You Can't Always Get What You Want" on Let It Bleed. But both of those were bastardizations of the genre, each working on its own level, but neither would be considered close to authentic.
Let's briefly trace the development of the Stones' gospel influence. "Salt of the Earth's" vamp is gospel-like, but even the Watts St. Gospel Choir from Los Angeles can't save it from relative amateurism. But the Stones, with not only Billy Preston but also their longtime pianist Nicky Hopkins, pretty much nail a more authentic gospel sound on Exile, even while making it sound like something of their own. Listen, for example, to Hopkins' piano part on "Salt of the Earth," and compare it to his work on Exile. On the former, he seems to be locked in a jittery pattern, seemingly afraid to go out on a limb and take some chances. This is, however, symptomatic of the feel of the whole band. It is a nice try, and the song i
s good, but it absolutely pales in comparison to similar tracks on Exile. The artistic growth of the band, Hopkins included, is obvious.
"You Can't Always Get What You Want," on the next record, Let it Bleed, has the Jimmy Miller groove really settling in. Keith has started to play the five-string open-G-style guitar that would forever dominate the Stones sound. The rhythm is established right from the get-go, on Keith's acoustic guitar, soon after the London Bach Choir's introduction. Although the clearly no southern gospel chorus, the sound of the classical boys choir serves as an interesting combination, creating tension between the choir's straight on-the-beat phrasing and the loose gospel rhythms of Jimmy Miller on drums, leading the band through an otherwise convincing approximation of a gospel vamp. Jagger seems to sing far more freely, ad-libbing against (and seemingly spurred on by) the backing of true gospel-trained vocalists Madeline Bell, Nanette Newman, and Doris Troy (who had some hits of her own). Indeed, Jagger is screaming as the band reaches one of the most inspired climaxes in recorded pop music. Interestingly, the loose piano feel here is accomplished by Al Kooper at the keyboard, not Hopkins. And likewise, the feel of the drums is attributed to Jimmy Miller himself, who played the part after trying to demonstrate it to Charlie Watts, who ultimately deferred to Miller. Watts does the same again on "Shine a Light."
On Exile's gospel-inspired tracks, Hopkins sounds as loose as he was stiff on "Salt of the Earth." He now sounds at least as good as the Al Kooper part on "You Can't Always Get What You Want." However, you would be hard-pressed to surpass Preston's playing— who at age ten was already playing with Mahalia Jackson, the superstar Queen of Gospel.
Preston lays the bedrock piano chords on the introduction of "Shine a Light," and Jagger begins his lament: "saw you stretched out in room ten-oh-nine with a smile on your face and a tear right in your eye." If there was any doubt about the subject of Jagger's lyrics on some of the album's earlier tracks, it is crystal clear on "Shine a Light." At first glance, the song is ostensibly about a party girl, but upon deeper examination and within the context of the record, this seems to be the most overt of Mick's "worried about you" Exile songs for Keith. As implied, these songs didn't start or end with Exile on Main St. : "Worried About You," "Waiting on a Friend," "Sway," "Live With Me"—there is a litany of songs that make either explicit or passing references to Keith and his relationship with Jagger. Songwriters find inspiration in emotional strife, and little causes more emotional upheaval than a creative partnership replete with continuous "sibling" rivalry. And these images on "Shine a Light" are obvious, from the blissed-out nod in the high-rise hotel room, to the "Berber jewellery," to the "drunk in the alley, baby, with your clothes all torn." There had been a certain degree of factionalism in the Stones almost from day one, but a new era was ushered in with the making of Exile on Main St., one that found Jagger and Richards most often in separate courts. "Mick was always jumping off to Paris 'cause Bianca was pregnant and having labour pains," recalled Jimmy Miller in 1977. "I remember many mornings after great nights of recording, I'd come over to Keith's for lunch. And within a few minutes of seeing him I could tell something was wrong. He'd say, 'Mick's pissed off to Paris again.' I sensed resentment in his voice because he felt we were starting to get something, and when Mick returned the magic might be gone."
Seemingly bemoaning the often seedy hangers-on in Keith's orbit, Mick sings "your late night friends will leave you in the cold gray dawn," and "just seen too many flies on you / I just can't brush 'em off," with a little Elvis Presley flourish. The record's theme of decay is in full bloom on the song, and not merely the aristocratic European decadence of Huysmans, but the downtown desolation of Lou Reed. Here is a dynamic in which the principals could simultaneously be jetting off to Paris and drunk in some alley with torn threads.
Mick offers a bleak perspective of his friend's future:
Angels beating all their wings in time
With smiles on their faces and a gleam right in their eye
Oh, thought I heard one sigh for you
Come on up, come on up now, come on up now
The flies have now transformed into angels. For Mick, or at least his protagonist, the sentiment is nothing less than a matter of life and death. Yet there is no urgency in his voice; the performance is one of weary acceptance and, for the most part, hopelessness. That is, until the chorus, when Mick seems to pray for (and find) the light of a higher power. The song is very much a study of dark and light, with the slow, soulful, and mournful verses and the chorus that borders on jaunty. Preston's staccato piano part and Jagger's shift in tone on the vocals are most responsible for the change in the song's mood from verse into chorus. Jimmy Miller shifts from a sparse and inventive verse beat to a steady backbeat on the chorus. The oddball rhythm section of Miller and Mick Taylor on bass shifts into an R&B groove for the chorus.
Aiding the cause significantly are the stellar backing singers, assembled in part by Preston: Clydie King, Jesse Kirkland, Joe Green, and Venetta Field. At the end of the chorus, in a section that could be labelled the re-introduction, the backing choir's vocals are also filtered through a Leslie speaker, which has the effect of blending them in with the organ. Such attention to textural detail—also illustrated in the prominence of the ghost vocals from leftover Jagger takes—adds to the haunting spacey-ness of the record.
The Stones struck a rich vein on Exile —adopting a sincere and authentic gospel aesthetic with ease—one that they had been after for at least four or five years. In fact, you can date the first signs of the American gospel music influence even earlier, with the guitar line from "The Last Time," which, as Keith Richards notes, "had a strong Staple Singers influence in that it came out of an old gospel song that we revamped and re-worked ..." But until they hit the target with the Exile songs, the Stones had merely incorporated passing elements of gospel into their overall sound, as if either too timid or too amateur to tackle the genre more directly.
There seems to be no such inhibition on Exile. In fact, lack of inhibition of almost any kind might be the single most winning trait of the album. On later records, however, the gospel influence seems to have dissipated faster than it took to gather. By the late 1970s records it has all but vanished. Perhaps it's this gospel component more than any other musical root that makes Exile on Main St. such a special record, a standout in their catalogue. Though the Stones always retained soul music— which has gospel as its primary source—as a continuous and direct inspiration, it is a mystery as to why the band seemingly abandoned this true gospel sound. Their gospel exploits certainly didn't compromise their status as a rock & roll band. Indeed, it might have been the best style with which to soothe the frayed nerves of a generation. Whatever the reason, it was not likely a conscious move, but rather a natural, albeit regrettable, transition.
Soul Survivor
Lester Bangs points out that Exile on Main St. is largely about surviving casualties. As we have seen, these themes are easily heard on the record, which is why "Soul Survivor" might actually be the perfect way to end the whole album. I have never given much thought to this song. It is catchy enough, sure. But it almost seems to be boilerplate Stones, indicative of the formula they would exhaust for the next few records. The open-G riffing, especially as a coda over which Jagger improvises, has become prototypical Keith Richards, an mo he seems to have gotten stuck in at times. At first glance, the song seems like an anti-climatic way to end the record. But then you take a look at the lyrics, and you have to wonder if, despite the image of this record as a big sprawl, there is not some grand design behind it all, right down to the song sequencing—I mean, beyond the obvious groupings like the mostly acoustic side two, or "the country side." No, there seems to be a certain degree of lyrical organization, from the lead-off salvo of "Rocks Off" ("heading for the overload / splattered on the dusty [dirty] road / kick me like you've kicked before / I can't even feel the pain no more") to this album closer. Coming on the heels of what seem to be Mick's pointed ly
rics in "Shine a Light," he sings:
You've got a cut-throat crew, yeah
I’m going to sink under you . . . . . . Yeah, yeah, it's the graveyard watch
Running right on the rocks I've taken all of the knocks. . .
. . . Yeah, when you're flying your flags All my confidence sags You I’ve got me packing my bags
I’ll stow away at sea
Yeah, you make me mutiny
Where you are I won’t be
You're going to be the death of me, yeah
"Cut-throat crew?" "Graveyard watch?" "Mutiny?" Never mind what I said about "Shine a Light," every line in "Soul Survivor" seems to be tailor-made to articulate Jagger's feelings of alienation under the Keith regime. It is a stunning admission of humility ("my confidence sags" and "you're gonna be the death of me") until Jagger declares that he will be the "soul survivor," a clever pun for this particular strain of the sole survivor: a survivor in a soul band. Jagger's narrative voice veers sharply from that of a sainted compassionate presence to the winner of a micro-Darwinian struggle.
For all its nautical imagery, "Soul Survivor" sounds like a shot across the bow of the Good Ship Stones, with Jagger "packing [his] bags." Mick sounds like he has gone from worrying about Keith to worrying about himself. The sequencing of the album, now that we have reached the end of it, seems calculated with a perfect sense of balance and structure, at least from a lyrical standpoint. Musically, it would help if "Soul Survivor" was a rocker on par with "Happy," but its "Street Fighting Man" sort of coda is a fine way to end the record.
The pirate-movie theme is a silly, beat-through metaphor by the end of the song, but it falls in line with some of Exile's other cinema references—"Dietrich movies" and the pictures in the album sleeve of a screaming Joan Crawford and movie houses. Rolling Stone wrote in 1977, "Aural film noir, the richly textured Exile is to most records what The Big Sleep and Casablanca are to made-for-TV movies." The film noir comparison is suitable; as with noir, the hero throughout much of the album is an untrustable blur between good and evil, dark and light, happy and sad. We rarely know if Mick is singing songs about himself, others in the band, women, or no one in particular.
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