Universal'Rocks Off,' the first track of the Rolling Stones's Exile On Main Street,with a scratchy Keith Richards Telecaster riff punctuated by a singleCharlie Watts snare hit. Mick Jagger lasciviously intones an 'oh yeah,'pitched perfectly between earnestness and irony. This sequence lastsall of five seconds, but you'd be hard-pressed to find five secondsthat better articulate the brilliance of the Rolling Stones, much inthe way that Exile, the band's 1972 shambling sprawl of a double-albumthat has recently enjoyed a,perfectly captures a too-brief period during which Rolling Stones werefinally and indisputably the Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World. Then it all ended nearly as soon as it began. Exile on Main Street maywell be, as many claim, the finest album of the Stones's career, butit's also the sound of a slow implosion, of things falling apart, boththe end of the Rolling Stones as the world had come to know them andthe end of an era of rock and roll music as well. After Exile theband's dual appetite for drugs and infighting grew increasinglyconsumptive: 1973's Goat's Head Soup had moments of brilliance but alsofelt disjointed and fragmentary, while 1974's It's Only Rock 'n' Rollseemed half-baked and half-hearted. By the time the forgettable Blackand Blue was released in 1976 the Stones were sounding more and morelike hucksters, lazily plumbing fans' memories of former glories.
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It'san image they've never entirely managed to shake since, despite acareer of unprecedented longevity. The lineup may have changed—Ron Woodreplacing Mick Taylor in the mid-1970s, Darryl Jones supplanting BillWyman in the mid-1990s—but the chords remain the same, with returnsdwindling artistically just as steadily as they increase financially,the line between song and shtick growing blurrier and blurrier. Noneof this had been foretold in 1972, of course, when the Stones werecapping off a startling run of creativity that began with the sonicriot of 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' in 1968 and culminated in Exile on MainStreet. The Damoclean sword under which the band made Exile has sinceassumed appropriately mythic proportions: recorded in a French villathat had once been a Gestapo headquarters, abetted by nightmarishamounts of drugs, the marathon recording sessions were infused withcriminal depravity and an overall air of violence. Attending all this,albeit less spectacularly, was a world-weary exhaustion that had beenencroaching upon the band since at least the mid-1960s. From the Redlands drug bust of 1967, through the departure and subsequent death of guitarist Brian Jones, through the murder of Meredith Hunter at Altamont in late 1969 and its renewed controversy via the Maysles' in 1970, the Stones had spent their period of creative windfall outrunning forces larger than themselves, and they'd run themselves ragged.
This exhaustion surely wasn't helped by dope,and by the recording of Exile it had grown oppressive and nearlyunbearable. It was also the most compelling component of the music theStones were making with an urgency that verged on a death wish. 'Thesunshine bores the daylights out of me,' drawls Jagger in one of themost beautifully mordant and oft-quoted lines of 'Rocks Off,' and thesnarl in his voice leaves little doubt that he means it. Only once weget past the cheeky pun of the sentiment do we realize the depths ofits terror. Exile found the Stones finally becomingthat which they'd always wanted to be, that which they'd alwaysworshipped: existential bluesmen crafting art-for-art's-sake out ofnothing more than desperate necessity. For all of their countryflirtations in this period the band was always, at its core, a group ofrhythm and blues musicians. And during the recording of Exile on MainStreet they became, for a small meaningful moment, the greatest R&Bband in the world.
Sticky Fingers
If this sounds hyperbolic, listen to the uptown dinof ','with its raucous out-chorus ('won't you be my little baby / for awhile'-the Ronettes with a time limit) and soaring horn lines. Or theheart-stopping ferocity of ',' Keith Richards' autobiography distilled into three minutes. Or the glorious, lusty grandeur of simply the finest soul tune Jagger and Richards (or damn near anyone else) ever wrote and arguably Charlie Watts' finest hour. Itis here, as the apotheosis of the Stones' ambitions as purveyors ofAfrican-American music, that the greater significance of Exile on MainStreet takes shape. The Stones' relationship to race is perhaps themost endlessly controversial topic surrounding the band, and to acertain degree this is understandable, as the love of black music thatfloods the Stones' records has often mingled uneasily with the band'sracial politics, from the dubious taste of the slavery backdrop of'Brown Sugar' to the racist sexual boasting of 'Some Girls' that drew apublic rebuke from Jesse Jackson. Even ','an otherwise beautiful paean to Angela Davis on Exile, contains anegregious reference to 'ten little niggers / sitting on a wall,' a wordthat no amount of name-checking Slim Harpo grants Jagger such casualaccess to.
Still, by 1972 the Stones were in anever-increasing minority of white rock musicians that openly sought tointegrate not simply African-American musical influences butflesh-and-blood African American music and musicians into their music.Despite rock and roll's famously interracial origins, and the deservedreputation of the 1960s as a decade of musical crossover—with labelslike Motown and Stax and groups like the Beatles and Stones achievingpreviously unthinkable popularity among both white and blackaudiences—by the end of the decade popular music had once again becomeincreasingly segregated. Woodstock boasted a rhetoric of colorblindinclusion but only one act of the more than 30 that performed there—Slyand the Family Stone—had sustained success on the R&B charts. Andwhispers persist that the bucolic location was partially chosen topreclude the attendance of 'urban' audiences. 'There is at the heart of this music a deep strain of mysterious insurrection, and the music dies without it,' Stanley Booth——oncewrote. If Exile on Main St.
Isn't the sound of the Rolling Stonesdying, it is at least the sound of them going down in flames. But whata sound, and what flames. As Jagger sings on ',' thegorgeous, gospel-infused love song that's Exile's penultimate track: Angels beating all their wings in timeWith smiles on their facesAnd a gleam right in their eyesI thought I heard one sigh for youAs epitaphs go, you could certainly do worse.We want to hear what you think about this article. To the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
.Length3: 56,singles chronology'(2006)' Plundered My Soul'(2010)'(2011)Professional ratingsReview scoresSourceRating' Plundered My Soul' is a song by featured as a bonus track on the 2010 re-release of their 1972 album. It was the first song released by the band from the new recordings, limited-edition copies of the single shelved in independent stores on 17 April 2010, in honor of. The single peaked at number 200 on the, at number 2 on 's and number 42 on Billboard 's.
Rolling Stones Exile On Main Street 2010 Rar File Windows 10
It also reached number 15 in France, and remained there for one week. The was directed by.'
Plundered My Soul' features vocal and guitar overdubs from and, recorded at a London studio in November 2009 as arranged by Sherry Daly and Saul Davis.Personnel The Rolling Stones. –,. –.
–. –Additional musicians. –,. –. –.
Cindy Mizelle – backing vocalsCharts Chart (2010)PeakpositionFrance 15Netherlands 3Sweden 27Notes.