Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [60]
Exile on Main Street came out just three months ago, and I practically gave myself an ulcer and hemorrhoids, too, trying to find some
way to like it. Finally I just gave up, wrote a review that was almost a total pan, and tried to forget about the whole thing. A couple weeks later, I went back to California, got a copy just to see if it might’ve gotten better, and it knocked me out of my chair. Now I think it's possibly the best Stones album ever.
Meanwhile, what with traveling and general sloth, I somehow missed seeing any of their concerts this tour, and for some reason even the full bloom of my love for the album couldn’t make me care that much.
What was responsible for my dramatic turnaround on the album? I don’t think it matters much. Why don’t I care that much whether I get to see the Stones live this time? That's another story altogether. It's directly related, I think, to the difference that you find in the album if you listen, and what you couldn’t help but see operating on this tour.
The Stones still have the strength to make you feel that both we and they are hemmed in and torn by similar walls, frustrations, and tragedies. That's the breakthrough of Exile on Main Street.
Exile is dense enough to be compulsive: hard to hear, at first, the precision and fury behind the murk ensure that you’ll come back, hearing more with each playing. What you hear sooner or later is two things: an intuition for nonstop getdown perhaps unmatched since the Rolling Stones Now!, and a strange kind of humility and love emerging from a dazed frenzy. If, as they assert, they’re soul survivors, they certainly know what you can lose by surviving. As they and we see friends falling all around us, only the Stones have cut the callousness of ‘72 to say with something beyond narcissistic sentiment what words remain for those slipping away. Exile is about casualties, and partying in the face of them. The party is obvious. The casualties are inevitable. Sticky Fingers was the flashy, dishonest picture of a multitude of slow deaths. But it's the search for alternatives, something to do (something worthwhile, even) that unites us with the Stones, continuously.
They are the masters without peer at rendering the boredom and desperation of living comfortably in this society. If you recognized yourself watching the last TV station sign off at 3 A.M.in “What To Do,” chances are you reveled in the rich, sick ennui of “Dead Flowers” and you saw your own partial fragmentation between the sonic iceflows of “Sway.”
Most of us didn’t get the real words, because at their most vulnerably crucial moments they were slurred and buried in the tides of sound. Jagger had to sing it that way, in “Sway” and again in much of Exile, because that is the way his pride works. Besides, anything else would make it all too concise and clear—like putting the lyrics on an album cover, which is the most impersonal thing any rock ‘n’ roll artist can possibly do.
Exile on Main Street is the great step forward, an amplification of the tough insights of “Gimmie Shelter” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” A brilliant projection of the nerve-torn nights that follow all the arrogant celebrations of self-demolition, a work of love and fear and humanity. Even such a piece of seeming filler as “Casino Boogie” reveals itself, once the words come through, to be a picture of life at the terminal.
“Rocks Off” and “Shine a Light” present the essential picture, the latter song addressing the half-phased-out but still desperately alive person who speaks in the first. This music has a capacity to chill where “Dead Flowers” and “Sway” tended to come off as shallow, facile nihilism:
I always hear those voices
on the street
I want to shout
but I can hardly speak
I was makin’ love this time
To a dancer friend of mine.
I can’t seem to stay in step …
And I only get my rocks off
when I’m dreamin
Headin’for