Exile On Main street. Not sure how old I was when i first bought it. First heard it. Over 30 years ago that’s for sure. I must have been 15 or 16 and of course this was way before CDs were around. Everything was vinyl. Were cassettes around then?. An album that was thrown into the musical melting pot that I was imbibing around 1977 – a concoction that included the Stones, the Clash, Reggae, Disco, Muddy Waters, the Buzzcocks, Van Morrison and all the other noises and sounds that were swirling around at that time. Exile arrived on my doorstep – and i think it did literally arrive, having bought it on mail order for some reason – after I’d already fallen for Beggars Banquet, Let it Bleed and Sticky Fingers. I was used to the spear like lunges and attacks of that trilogys piercing, focused, syncopated soundscape. And the punk I was listening to at the time was shiny, bright and new. And then Exile arrived. And I remember putting it on and feeling….what? – underwhelmed? a bit deflated? maybe a little confused and disorientated by an album that seemed, on first hearing, to be so disheveled and careless. Christ, that last track on side one – “Tumbling Dice” – at what time in the middle of the night was that unfocussed , lethargic, shambling, barely able to stand upright song ushered in to being?? Was Keith even awake when he laid this one down?? (dear reader, we know now of course that he might not have been). The whole thing seemed like a dense fog, a claustrophobic forest, a muddy swamp that I had to wade through. And It was all about sound, rhythm and noise. And it was hard to get a purchase on it, to get a foothold. Nothing hit you as a great song. Or was it that the sound was so unlike anything I’d ever heard from the Stones that I was momentarily thrown. Everything was submerged and obscured. Not buried, not irretrievably lost – but half rubbed out, like an artist smudging his thumb over the sharp contours of his drawing in order to blur out the edges and annihalate the definition. So you had to find the outline yourself, discover it and imagine it for yourself. And when this happened, then the music and the lyrics gave themselves up and showed themselves in a variety of shifting beautiful forms. And you would find yourself listening to ‘Let it Loose” for maybe the 8th or 9th time realising, half way through, that this song which had passed you by so many times before, without really making you notice, was actually the most perfect song ever recorded. And that the whole album was overflowing with emotion. But a shifting, changing, landscape that mutated and evolved with every listen. The whole thing felt like a beautiful dream and a wierd nightmare, and the dream was always the same – the cover of Marvin Gayes “I want you” coming to life and each time you were arriving you discovered new people, new rooms and new experiences and heard their mad confessional stories while the band played on and got higher and higher.
The ripples of this reinvention are still going on and for some people they just can’t let go. For the musicians you get the feeling it lasted a few months and then they reinvented themselves again and again.
