Exile on Main St.

"Let it Loose" is my favorite song in the world. I want it played at my funeral. Jagger is so dismissive of it in interviews, and it's hard for me to believe he can't tell how good it is. I wonder if the level of genuine emotion he brought to it makes him uncomfortable.

lol at genuine emotion
I think this is one of the weaker tracks on the album

Unless you’re taking the piss “lily” and “Wally” in which case I salute you

The Best Track On The Album Is Whatever's Playing

Stones should have covered “ramble tamble”

Imagine the Taylor solo over that middle section

I'm kind of honored that anyone might think my encomiums to "Exile" could be misconstrued as containing even the slightest hint of irony. That would've been a helluva commitment to faux praise.

I think Lily's noise: muddle:: beauty: meaning is as heartfelt and flawless a one-sentence take on the album as it gets. Now inextricably linked with Tom Waits whenever I think of "Exile."

And thanks to MatthewK & pplains for recognizing the sincerity from the get-go.

calstars is probably drunk, don’t mind him

The Worst Post On The Thread Is Whatever Calstars Is Posting

Aww

<3

Right back at you bro 🚶‍♂️

Calstars just letting it loose.

"Casino Boogie" is my favorite these years. Those off-key Keith harmonies and bits of nonsense ("open for bidness").

Maybe I’m wrong? But in re listening to this extra medium like warm turd I honestly can’t discern what makes this track so laudable. Like if you consider this so great do you spontaneously combust when “memory motel” comes on? Cause it’s far superior for sure

*luke warm turd

I love this album - my favorite Stones record by far - and "Let It Loose" and "Shine a Light" are the two tracks that I find least memorable on the whole thing. In fact, after reading this whole discussion, I had to call "Let It Loose" up on Spotify just to remember what it sounded like at all. Listening to it now, it's weird; musically, it sounds like early '70s Elvis attempting to cover Led Zeppelin's "No Quarter," with the horns and the female singers and stuff. It's Jagger's performance, so mannered it's like he's singing it into a full-length mirror, that wrecks it for me. Especially since it comes in between two songs I like a lot better, the almost Tom Waits-level weirdness of "I Just Wanna See His Face" and "All Down the Line," which is halfway to being the Pussy Galore cover of itself.

Yup. Coulda left those two on the cutting room floor along with All down the Line and Stop Breaking Down to get closer to a single killer LP

Man, the way y’all talk about this record makes me jealous... I wish I could hear even a piece of what you hear in it. Maybe it’ll hit me someday...

Just Want to See His Face > Let It Loose is my favorite 8 minutes by them.

― The Mod Who Banned Liberty Valance (WmC), Wednesday, April 17, 2019 4:56 PM

Wally think I'm going throw this on tonight

it’s the fkn best imo

@upper mississippi sh@kedown: Right there with you! Gonna pour a gimlet & make the speakers bleed in a few.

calstars suggesting they drop All Down the Line is straight-up trolling, right?

lol was gonna say

His comment on "Stop Breaking Down" must be trolling too. It contains what has to be one of the least praised bits of facemeltingly transcendent Mick Taylor guitar playing.

challop: "Ventilator Blues" is my favourite on this album

That's hardly a challop.

Xp that’s the one I go back to with the caveat it includes “I just want to see his face.”

I’ve been occasionally noticing lyrics that I think David Berman would’ve liked and “rocks off” struck me as one, “the sunshine bores the daylights out of me” in particular.

Misread that as I just want to eat his face

Listened to "Ventilator Blues" a lot during a long stretch of terrible air quality last year.

The nitpicking in this thread seems really counter to the spirit of this album which is sprawling but in a way that makes it feel like if you cut anything that something was missing

otm

the sloppiness of the album in its entirety is essential, similar in some respects to ‘tonight’s the night’ not in terms of thematic purpose but in terms of just the right set of circumstances creating a sound that both artists never quite precisely achieved before or since.

^^I always link up Exile and There's A Riot Goin' On for that reason.

"i feel so humble with you tonight just si-DANG in front of the fire.
see your face dancing in the flames, feel your mouth kissing me again, what a beautiful place..."

^this lyric just destroys me, especially the "feel your mouth kissing me again" line.. there's a yearning for romance and connection that is thwarted by experience, just so beautiful and heartbreaking

"I Just Want to See His Face" takes me to the same place that the best Spiritualized moments do.. hypnotized euphoria

As a person who has never been religious, I find that the older I get, the more I seek out secular things that feel like a religious experience, and this album is one of them.

^^^ I totally connect with that search, Lily. Exile seems like a weird choice though as it has a very down to earth vibe going on. That may have to do with the strong rhythm'n' blues component. But in general I also look for musical experiences which feel like religious ones. "Spirit of Eden" for example would be an album which to me has a stronger religious feel. But Exile is still one of the most amazing records of all-time. And there definitely is something deep and mystical going on there.

lol the gospel backup singing might have something to do with it

D'oh!

To imagine this particular double album boasting "filler" breaks my brain.

Yeah, it’s an example of some kind of standard logical fallacy.

Put this on this week while playing poker with my kids, on the grounds that it is the best-ever album to play poker to. Which is true, but I mostly wanted it imprinted somewhere in their brains.

The sequencing on side 3 is just great, especially how "I Just Want to See his Face" segues into those gospel chords on the start of "Let It Loose".

Just want to add to the praise for Lily's praise for 'Let It Loose'. Definitely one of those Stones tracks that really threw me for a loop the first time I heard it, pre-conditioned to the usual radio singles and whatnot as a kid and not yet intimately familiar with all of the albums as a whole. It's sort of the mirror-'Moonlight Mile', if only because both tracks meander in such a beautiful way musically, yet one is ripe with warmth and yearning to return home to intimacy, while 'Loose' is the dissolution and blurry post-impact of that end. The lyrics are great, even though what I heard/thought they were for years was apparently way,way off to what they were written as, which is usually the case for the Jimmy Miller-era stuff.

Another minor bit of useless trivia is that the basic track for Let It Loose was probably recorded in 1969 during the Let It Bleed sessions, evidenced by the brief bit of Mellotron in the beginning and the sound of Charlie's drums.

There was a tape that surfaced a few years back of rough mixes given to Nicky Hopkins that I thought I'd share a link to, in case anyone hasn't heard it before. Here's a brief rundown of some cool things in it:

-You know that swirling keyboard-esque part buried in the middle of the mix in Rocks Off? That's actually Taylor's guitar part that Keith buried when he put a second rhythm guitar down. You can hear it a lot clearer on this.
-Rip This Joint has Taylor's original slide part, and you can understand why Keith removed it and put a simpler one on as it would've cluttered the mix with vocals
-All Down The Line has somebody hacking a lung before the drums kick in, and Nicky is way up in the mix. It's stereo too, unlike the final version. No vocals but you can hear Mick yelling guide ones deep in the back
-Soul Survivor has Bill's original bassline, which Keith replaced as it was too busy for the song once he put all the other guitar parts on
-Another totally different version of I Ain't Signifying, not the same as the guitar-bootleg version or the Exile Deluxe version
-There's an untitled/unknown instrumental that's really, really good. A long ballad that could've easily been a contender for Side 3.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/oy1bf0acss4kao3/AADtjas2HEDqTuFsAm2cjJLLa?dl=0

I think when we got to Casino Boogie, Mick and I looked at each other and just couldn't think of another lyrical concept or idea for the song. I said to Mick, You know how Bill Burroughs did that cut-up thing - where he would randomly chop words out of a book or newspaper and then try to sort them up? That's how we did the lyrics for Casino Boogie, and that was Bill Burroughs' biggest influence on the Rolling Stones.

- Keith Richards, 2010

“Judge and jury walked out hand in hand” is a pretty Burroughsian line tbh.

Memo From Turner has a more direct nod too - "You're the man who squats behind the man who works the soft machine"

I fell in love with this album as a whole before a started making out individual songs. During my early listens, Tumbling Dice was a problem, simply because it was already familiar from the radio, so it sounded clearer and hookier and broke the soupy flow of riffs and Jagger sneer.

I can't really quibble about individual songs within the sprawl, any more than with Double Nickles or Trout Mask Replica or Tago Mago. The feel is the thing.