How to be Rock and Roll

Exile on Main Street

The purest and most divine Rock and Roll record ever cut. When the Stones put this puppy out in 1972, neither Mick Jagger nor Keith Richards had yet turned twenty-nine; they were wild men, full of energy and life, at the joint peak of their musical and artistic greatness, living the Life as it was meant to be lived. The 1970s had begun two years before in riotous fashion, and Exile kept ‘em pushin’ with beautiful freakishness. 

“But, Trey!” you might say. “The production is sloppy, the music is hardly catchy, and everyone sounds high!” 

To which I say: “Exactly!”

That right there is the essence of Rock and Roll, amigo, with capital ‘Rs’ so big you couldn’t miss ‘em if you were as blind and deaf as a drunken salamander. 

You can’t listen to the opening track, “Rocks Off”, without wanting to go out and tear up the town like some kind of post-modern urban pirate, boozing and bluesing your way to Davy Jones’s locker. Then comes “Rip This Joint”, then “Shake Your Hips”, and by the time “Casino Boogie” comes jumping across the sound system you’re in for the long haul, so there’s nothing to do but hold on tight to the safety rail and go down happily with the ship. 

From “Tumbling Dice” to “Let It Loose” it’s a good, teary-eyed descent into the deep. The water is dark and pretty and a certain warmth washes over you that can’t quite be explained but by the sad, wonderful dirge of Richards’s guitar, Jagger’s vocals and Watts’s drumming. And of course Bobby Keys and Jim Price blowing away all the time on all that brass, reminding you where you are. 

Then the final four tracks—underwhelming on a first listen, not quite so ear-popping as the first half of the record, seemingly more generic, less imbued with that wild spirit you were searching for when you dropped the needle and strapped yourself in for an hour of heavy listening. But then you get to know the music, personally, and you see the finale for what it is: a last will and testament for Rock and Roll music, a deed to the rights of all the good old Blues and Folk and guitar-strumming mayhem that is the genre, a statement which says, defiantly, “This is the Life; this is the way; and to thee, brothers and sisters, we give the blueprint for how it should and shall be done. And now you can go out and burn these words with the rest of them. Because that’s what it’s all about!”

They say no copy of Exile on Main Street is complete until it has been christened by its buyer’s having railed a line of powder off its surface; well, let’s just say I made a point of getting my baby baptized. The bottom line is: if you want to be Rock and Roll—if you want all the booze, dope, and sex money can buy—you’ve got to start right here, man. And once you get that rock a-rolling—there ain’t no stoppin’ it.

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