The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [53]
Their new home base was a mansion named Nellecôte. Keith, Anita Pallenberg, and their son Marlon lived upstairs, while downstairs became a kind of daily headquarters for the rest of the band and their friends. With the famous mobile recording truck parked just outside, the mansion’s basement became a recording studio and the sessions were going well. New songs, some of The Stones’ best, were born nightly.
Yet Nellecôte was not home. The Stones were still rolling, their eyes now set on the United States. Their original musical love, American blues, had by now moved over to make room for American country music, a new interest fed by Keith’s friendship with Gram Parsons, the former Byrd and country-music purist who visited Nellecôte that summer and taught Keith how to play and sing country classics. The band’s financial problems also pointed them to the United States, for they knew that only by creating a great album and following it with a successful tour of America could they get their financial problems solved.
Even the title of that future album, Exile on Main Street, pointed to America. There are no “main streets” in England or France, after all. And its artwork featured an unmistakable collage of photos from Robert Frank’s The Americans—a book that portrayed Americans in such a freakish, carnevalesque light that it only found a publisher in the United States after it had become a hit in (of all places) France. With snaps from The Americans on the cover, the new album seemed to say that Americans were just as freakish, out-of-place, and dangerous as England’s long-haired bad boys of rock’n’roll. If The Stones belonged anywhere, it was the cultural and ethnic circus of America.
The View from Guyville
Some twenty years later, Liz Phair was living in Chicago, writing songs, and listening routinely to one of her longtime favorite albums, Exile on Main Street. Her self-produced “girlysound” cassettes were a hit with those who knew them, and at least two local producers were eager to producer her album. When it was finished, Phair shocked almost everyone by calling it Exile in Guyville and saying that it was as a “song by song response” to Exile on Main Street.
Ever since, critics, journalists, and fans have wondered what this means and whether it’s true. There seem to be two camps—those who accept Phair’s album as a genuine response to Main Street, and take it to be about gender and the sexual politics of a woman in the largely male world of rock and pop. The second, larger camp is skeptical about whether or how Guyville has any relationship to Main Street. The album’s blurb at Amazon.com, for example, calls the claim “unlikely.” Rock critic Jim DeRogatis tends to agree, though he admits that he might just be missing something. “I’m still not sure whether or not I believe her,” he wrote.32
Even the liner notes to the fifteen-year anniversary edition of Guyville hold Phair’s claim at arm’s length. The writer takes a pass on the issue to say “I was never able to actually connect all the dots myself.”33 In the video included with the anniversary edition, Phair reminisces with friends and producers who were there as the album was being born, yet still remain at-sea about her “song-by-song response” claim. The co-president of Matador records recalls the hype about it and stops himself to ask her skeptically, “Is that true?” “Yes!” Phair insists. Her onetime producer, John Henderson, scoffs at the idea that Phair really “spent months assembling this song-by-song response to the Rolling Stones… .” Again, Phair interrupts. “John! I did! Cross my heart and hope to die. Why would I lie now?”
Good question. Phair does not need to lie about Guyville now, for if she were trying to promote it by spreading rumors about its kinship with Main Street that effort seems pointless. Her album long ago took its place alongside Main Street itself in critics’ best-of lists and in praise from other artists. Given