Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [61]
Stranded on a dirty road
Kick me like you kicked before
I can’t even feel the pain no more.
The sense of helplessness and impotence is not particularly pleasant, but this is the way it is today for too many. Such withering personal honesty is certainly a departure for the Stones.
“Kick me like you kicked before….”: the Stones talking to their audience, the audience talking back. Old lovers who may have missed the bourgeois traps of “Sittin’ on a Fence” but got waylaid anyway by various disjuncture; they certainly don’t yearn like saps to get back to where they “once belonged” but they do recognize the loss of all sense of wonder, the absence of love, the staleness and sometimes frightening inhumanity of this “new” culture. The need for new priorities.
When so many are working so hard at solipsism, the Stones define the unhealthy state, cop to how far they are mired in it, and rail at the breakdown with the weapons at their disposal: noise, anger, utter frankness. It's what we’ve always loved them for. And it took a lot more guts to cut this than “Street Fightin’ Man,” say, even though the impulse is similar: an intense yearning to merge coupled with the realization that to truly merge may be only to submerge once more. A recognition that joining together with the band is merely massing solitudes.
The end of the line and depths of the despair are reached in “Shine a Light,” a visit to one or every one of the friends you finally know is not gonna pull through. A love song of a far different kind:
When you’re drunk in the alley baby
With your clothes all torn
And when your late night friends
all leave you
In the cold grey dawn
Oh, the Scene threw
so many flies on you
I just can’t brush ‘em off…
When Mick says he can’t brush off the flies, it's not some bit of macho misogyny, but a simple admission that applies to himself as well. The sense of entropy, of eclipse, is as total and engulfing as the sorrow. “Soul Survivor” follows immediately, of necessity, carrying the album out strong and fierce because the Rolling Stones are about nothing if not struggle. They have finally met the Seventies totally.
What Exile on Main Street is about, past the party roar, is absorption. Inclusion. Or rather, the recognition of exclusion coupled with the yearning for inclusion: “Let me in! I wanna drink/from your lovin’ cup.” When I saw them for the first time in 1964, a friend turned to me and said, “The great thing about the Stones is that the Beatles are so distant and perfect that you feel like they’re from another planet. But with the Stones, you feel like you’re at home.” And it is still true, except in a much more profound way.
If Exile on Main Street is about the need for inclusion, the latest Stones tour is about the tactics of exclusion. If the album cries out for the reciprocal resolution of tension, the tour runs on crackling rails of tension, frustration, disappointment, and envy. It may not have been planned that way, but that's how it works out.
The entire project looks to a moderately jaundiced eye (what other kind is there with the Stones?) like an exercise in manipulation at the highest level. If “Rocks Off” asks for a recharge from the street, this tour has been designed to leave you stranded on a dirt road.
Consider the fact that the Stones consciously and carefully chose to do their 32-stop tour in a series of concert houses generally smaller than those of 1969, with audiences systematically limited. At every stop, only a certain percentage of those who want to will be able to see the Stones. Never enough tickets; they’re always gone in no time. Standing in the sun for hours until the man finally comes out and announces that this one's sold out, too. Tough luck kid. But, if you’re rich, maybe you can find a scalper.
These conditions, combined with the police and security measures which have been fantastically (and understandably) elaborate, have not set well with the underground press or the hip community at large—one paper after another has run denunciations of the Stones as mercenary