Cover of the Rolling Stones album 'Exil on Main St.' Quique
Before you, the quintessential billionaire rockers.
Exile on Main St.
It responds to everything that can be imagined to the maximum power of what it means to be a rolling stone:
rock and roll,
sex, drugs, waste, glamor, madness and all excesses that serve to distinguish itself from a human being.
Also contradiction.
This album, of such dazzling and feverish quality that it has never been achieved by the band again, is a contradiction in itself.
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“The Beatles were like brothers; the Stones, a company "
First, it was a miracle that such a great album (and double!) Came out in the middle of such tremendous chaos in that nineteenth-century French mansion. From the tug of war by the leadership of the group and the imposition of styles between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the method of the latter prevailed. The guitarist, who had so much heroin and
speed
on him that there were days when he couldn't get up, has always thrown this album in the singer's face to justify his strength.
Exile on Main St.
is more the result of the chaos of Richards than of the head of Jagger, who, without giving his arm to twist in the peacock fight, ended up denying him. Bad, Mick. Although understandable: he was at the forefront of the lawsuits to regain the rights of the group against the former
manager
Allen Klein while Keith was high all day.
From those jam sessions, a catchy sound came out, but full of
refreshing
riffs
. A
rock and roll
of magnetic drunken and rogue cadence, a whole fabulous apparent anarchy: despite the organizational disaster, the album keeps a strange little-known thematic harmony. It is divided into four parts, one for each side of the double disc. The first is a southern rock lightning ride, including
Slim Harpo's
boogie
homage
on
Shake Your Hips.
The second is the acoustic face with midbeats rich in weeping harmonics and a Jagger like singing through swampy swamps. In the third, the journey through the Delta picks up electric speed as it enters a feverish and dreamy
hoodoo
atmosphere.
.
And the fourth closes with four
soul
pildorazos
and a devastating
horn
section.
Everything that The Rolling Stones had been was here, but also everything higher than you could imagine.
That is another contradiction.
How is it possible that those billionaires who had a private plane and went into
exile
in France to flee from the British Treasury could they sound so youthful, innocent, adrenaline-pumping and full? Even more than ever! Aside from the mansion, Richards set up a mobile studio on a luxury yacht and Jagger bought Picasso's house in the Mougins commune. They were supernovae packed with pounds behaving like millionaires wasting dollars on the Côte d'Azur. The answer, beyond the talent of the Jagger-Richards-Watts trio, responds to the best accompaniment the group has ever had. On bass was Bill Wyman and the other luxurious squire was guitarist Mick Taylor, bringing his delicious funk touch. Big words. And you have to add a prodigious team: Billy Preston's organ, Bobby Keys's saxophone,
pedal steel.
by Al Perkins, the pianos by Dr. John and Ian Stewart and the drums and percussion by Jimmy Miller, who also served as producer.
No one squeezed out the group's festive fierceness better than he did, who, like Taylor and Anita Pallenberg, ended up junkie and wasted alongside Richards in those years.
Exile on Main St.,
whose cover was created by renowned photographer Robert Frank,
It is the pinnacle of the wild madness of The Rolling Stones.
Although great albums such as
Goats Head Soup
or
Some Girls
would still arrive in the seventies
, this double album is his last masterpiece.