Exile on Main St. turns 50!

The very first thing I ever did on the internet was search for lyrics - Wu-Tang Clan, to be precise, and like damn near every such adventure to this day, it did little to deepen my understanding or appreciation of the music. So despite Exile on Main St. occupying various positions (4-6) on my all-time top-10 list over the last thirty-plus years, I've never bothered to google the lyrics. In honor of its fiftieth birthday today, however, I played the Stones' best album while following along on Genius to figure out what one Michael Philip Jagger was on about. Granted, as a largely crowdsourced site with some of the most risible annotations since Cliff Notes, Genius is hardly infallible. And given that the band has never performed a good third of these songs live, it's likely that the only people on the planet who know the lyrics for certain are Rolling Stones Inc.'s lawyers. But reading them at last did indeed justify my love. 

One measure of how accessing lyrics has never been central to the Exile experience lies in the idiotic grin I sported when greeting its first two tracks. Precise wording wasn't going to make "Rocks Off" rock any harder and, as the punkiest blurt in their discography, "Rip This Joint" was always the most immediate track on this notoriously difficult-to-navigate album. But even after that one-two knockout, I still wasn't getting much from the words. The Slim Harpo cover "Shake Your Hips" represents Exile's dynamic-free strain. Along with "Turd on the Run," "I Just Want to See His Face," and, right, "Rip This Joint," "Shake Your Hips" is about maintenance not jouissance (e.g., the "what a beautiful buzz" money shot of "Loving Cup"), of a piece with such later milestones of buzz-brained constancy as The Feelies' Crazy Rhythms, Parquet Courts' "Sunbathing Animal," and acres of narcotic disco. "Casino Boogie" exemplifies the other strain, the one in which potential filler is rescued by the toughest song structures of their career - get-up-and-go codas, verses that slam out of druggy middle eights, Bobby Keys and Jim Price's horns reinforcing rhythmic shapes. Both strains instantiate the horizontal pull through the diseased thicket of the mix, combining to render the album's theme easy to hear rather than read - I get knocked down but I get up again, which is why Greil Marcus is only half correct when he opines in Mystery Train that “[t]he whole record was a breakdown, one long night of fear.” 

But it wasn't until side two that the lyrics began to amplify the theme: the "Sweet Black Angel" who keeps on pushing, the "just as long as the guitar plays" refrain of "Torn and Frayed," even taking just one drink from that "Loving Cup" before falling down drunk. He hasn't fallen down yet, though, available to shed his grace on thee for the penultimate track. As Lester Bangs put it, "Shine a Light" is “a visit to one or every one of the friends you finally know is not gonna pull through.” This is the one song where there may be no coming back from a breakdown. You're covered with so many flies they can't be brushed off. He talks about about angels, even thinks he can hear one sigh for you which might be a lie. But the gesture brings you solace. And hey - if you do pull through, there's always "Soul Survivor," Exile's greatest song which, as the album's last track, it must be. The woozy guitars introduce the song as if waking from a coma. But the music gets up once again. And it keeps getting up. After the last “gonna be the death of me,” the band stops for a moment and launches back into the track for the most kinetic moment in recording history, rocking out until the song fades out, as it must. You're never gonna keep 'em down. 

This is music of gargantuan charity. With the lyrics splayed out before me, I now hear Exile as a quite pop-like achievement - earnest, maybe even a bit corny, adjectives one rarely associates with the Stones. It epitomizes a line of Simon Frith's from Sound Effects I never tire of quoting: “The pop song banalities people pick up on are, in general, not illuminating but encouraging” (38). For Bangs' generation, a generation more than any other who expected their I's to resonate as we's, Exile encouraged the 1960s counterculture to keep on keepin' on in the midst of Nixon, Vietnam, and the inexorable force of capital. But it need not be wedded to that particular moment. In his lifelong crusade against solipsism, Bangs heard Exile as “an intense yearning to merge,” a yearning that will exist long after the early-1970s bummer party, as my fiend Whit Strub calls it, has been swept into the dustbins of history.

Rolling Stones: Exile on Main St. (Rolling Stones, 1972): A+

Bangs' quotes taken from “I Only Get My Rocks Off When I’m Dreaming: So You Say You Missed the Stones Too? Cheer Up, We’re a Majority!” written for the January 1973 issue of Creem but anthologized in Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste.