– Jim Green was a Plano high school student when he discovered the Rolling Stones’ seminal Exile on Main St. album. It was the late ’70s. The Indiana native had recently moved to Texas. A music lover since childhood, Green found an immediate attraction to the bohemian rock ‘n’ roll vibe of the Stones’ enduring opus.
COURTNEY PERRY/DMN
It’s been more than 30 years since Jim Green first heard Exile on Main St. by the Rolling Stones, and his enthusiasm is undiminished.
“I had heard cuts from it on the radio,” Green, 47, says while sitting at his dining room table. “Of course, ‘Tumbling Dice’ was a hit. Back in the late ’70s, there was album-oriented radio and they would play deep cuts off of albums. I bought my first copy of Exile on Main St. at Half Price Books as a vinyl back when they had a store in East Plano.”
Fast-forward about three decades and Green is now married with five children. He’s made a career out of working in food services management, currently at Braum’s Ice Cream & Dairy in Sherman. Exile on Main St. remains a part of his life. He now owns the CD version, because his vinyl copy was stolen during college.
The new digital release is great, but Jim Green prefers vinyl.
“It’s a cultural signpost,” Green says of Exile . “When you think about all good music, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Irving Berlin , you could still pull that out and listen to it and go, ‘Gosh, that’s a good song.’ Same thing with the Beatles, Lennon-McCartney. What were these guys thinking? Same thing with Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. They sat down and there was chemistry putting together songs that you can listen to over and over again, and it’s not forgettable. It infiltrated the way we listen to music, the way other bands on down the line make music. It’s interwoven in our culture. We revisit a lot of things over and over again because they’re good.”
Exile on Main St., considered one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll albums of all time, was a huge success upon its original release in 1972. It spent four weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, sold 1 million copies and yielded the Top 10 hit “Tumbling Dice.”
Reverence for the record still smolders. In May, 38 years after its original release, Universal reissued Exile on Main St. as a two-CD set, including a second disc of 10 tunes, some spruced up and some undoctored, recorded during the Exile sessions but never released until now. That reissue has sold 208,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Part of the fascination over Exile on Main St. has to do with the creation and recording of the music. The original 18 tracks, which were first spread out over two vinyl LPs, found the Stones in total free-form, offering a raw, passionate and seething amalgam of blues, R&B, country and rock. Yet perhaps the most compelling reasons to continually re-examine Exile go deeper than mere notes, guitar licks and searing vocals.
Exile on Main St. was partly recorded at the Nellcôte villa in southern France. The Stones owed a sizable amount of back taxes in England, so they fled to France before their assets were seized – hence the “exile” tag. That anti-establishment attitude, copious illegal substances and the cloistered surroundings led to the sandpaper edge that fuels many of the Exile songs, particularly “Torn and Frayed,” “Rip This Joint,” “Turd on the Run” and “Rocks Off.”
So immediately there’s a sense of freedom brimming about the record. The liberating jangle at the core of Exile speaks to every person’s inner desire to escape the clutches of responsibilities and feed on what we love most. Jagger, Richards and company turned their omnivorous brand of rock ‘n’ roll into a testament for youthful rebellion.
For Green, whose living room is decorated with posters of the Beatles, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jerry Garcia, Dexter Gordon and the Blues Brothers, agrees that the Exile music carries significant weight.
“The fertile environment – ‘let’s just sit down and create something. We’ve got nothing else going on, let’s do this.’ Out of that comes this two-record set that over the years we’ve had a chance to digest,” he says. “You have to hear it a hundred times to go, ‘Oh. Oh, OK. I get it now.’ I could go on further and say you need to own it on vinyl and to play it on vinyl. It’s one thing to listen to it digitally, but it’s a whole lot colder. You need to listen to the whole thing as a piece, not just cuts. It’s a classic.”In stores
The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. deluxe edition two-CD set (Universal Music) featuring the original 18 songs on one disc, plus 10 previously unreleased tracks from the same sessions on the second disc, is available now for $29.99. Also, Keith Richards’ autobiography, Life (Little, Brown and Company), is on sale for $29.99 in hardcover.
Related Articles
No user responded in this post
Leave A Reply