Contributing musicians: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, Mick Taylor, Nicky Hopkins, Ian Stewart, Bobby Keys, Jim Price, Bill Plummer, Billy Preston, Jimmy Miller, Al Perkins, Richard "Didymus" Washington ("Amyl Nitrate"), Clydie King, Venetta Field, Jesse Kirkland, Joe Green, Dr. John (Mac Rebennack), Shirley Goodman, Tamiya Lynn, Kathi McDonald, Merry Clayton.
 

A tremendous set which skilfully uses all the accepted musical mechanics of rock & roll.

An album that might take a few listens but is rich with Stones power and movement.

There are songs that are better, there are songs that are worse, there are songs that'll become your favorites and others you'll probably lift the needle for when their time is due. But in the end, Exile On Main Street spends its four sides shading the same song in as many variations as there are Rolling Stone readymades to fill them, and if on the one hand they prove the group's eternal constancy and appeal, it's on the other that you can leave the album and still feel vaguely unsatisfied, not quite brought to the peaks that this band of bands has always held out as a special prize in the past.... Exile On Main Street is the Rolling Stones at their most dense and impenetrable. In the tradition of Phil Spector, they've constructed a wash of sound in which to frame their songs, yet where Spector always aimed to create an impression of space and airiness, the Stones group everything together in one solid mass, providing a tangled jungle through which you have to move toward the meat of the material... One consequence of this style is that most of the hard-core action on the record revolves around Charlie Watts' snare drum. The sound gives him room not only to set the pace rhythmically but to also provide the bulk of the drive and magnetism. Another is that because Jagger's voice has been dropped to the level of just another instrument, burying him even more than usual, he has been freed from any restrictions the lyrics might have once imposed....

Happily, though, Exile On Main Street has the Rolling Stones sounding like a full-fiedged five-into-one band. Much of the self-consciousness that marred Sticky Fingers has apparently vanished, as well as that album's tendency to touch every marker on the Hot 100. It's been replaced by a tight focus on basic components of the Stones' sound as we've always known it, knock-down rock and roll stemming from blues, backed with a pervading feeling of blackness that the Stones have seldom failed to handle well... (T)alking about the pieces of Exile On Main Street is somewhat off the mark here, since individually the cuts seem to stand quite well. Only when they're taken together, as a lump sum of four sides, is their impact blunted. This would be all right if we were talking about any other group but the Stones. Yet when you've been given the best, it becomes hard to accept anything less, and if there are few moments that can be faulted on this album, it also must be said that the magic high spots don't come as rapidly... Exile On Main Street appears to take up where Sticky Fingers left off, with the Stones attempting to deal with their problems and once again slightly missing the mark. They've progressed to the other side of the extreme, wiping out one set of solutions only to be confronted with another. With few exceptions, this has meant that they've stuck close to home, doing the sort of things that come naturally, not stepping out of the realm in which they feel most comfortable. Undeniably it makes for some fine music, and it surely is a good sign to see them recording so prolifically again; but I still think that the great Stones album of their mature period is yet to come. Hopefully, Exile On Main Street will give them the solid footing they need to open up, and with a little horizon-expanding (perhaps honed by two months on the road), they might even deliver it to us the next time around.

The Rolling Stones are into a new thing: music. Well, that's not quite fair, because they've always been more than competent, but Exile on Main St. does tend to bury Mick Jagger's vocals in the band's sound and stress the group's eclectic musical abilities at the expense of words and messages. Which is too bad; we miss Jagger's mean, smartass trenchancy in most of these tunes. The zingers are on the jacket covers, in photos of assorted freaks, in penciled notes (I gave you the diamonds, you give me disease) and in the montages of Mick and the band. In the process of exposing the black roots of the Stones' music (Gospel, blues and boogie), the album shows how well the Stones can play in a variety of styles. Shake Your Hips is a dark, heavy-sounding boogie with a fine ricky-tick riff; Gospel comes on strong in Just Wanna See His Face and Shine a Light; there are good vocal tracks, like Let it Loose with Clydie King, Vanetta Fields, Dr. John, et al.; and the straight-ahead rockers, such as Soul Survivor, were never better. But where are the Stones of yesteryear?

The Rolling Stones: Exile On Main Street. Incontrovertibly the year’s best, this fagged-out masterpiece is the summum of Rock ’72. Even now, I can always get pleasure out of any of its four sides, but it took me perhaps twenty-five listenings before I began to understand what the Stones were up to, and I still haven’t finished the job. Just say they’re Advancing Artistically, in the manner of self-conscious public creators careering down the corridors of destiny. Exile explores new depths of record-studio murk, burying Mick’s voice under layers of cynicism, angst, and ennui: You’ve got a curtthroat crew / I’m gonna sink under you / I got the bell bottom blues / It’s gonna be the death of me.” A +.

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. 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... 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.

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