Song of the Day: The Rolling Stones – Let it Loose

I accomplished two things while I was addicted to heroin: I wrote Exile on Main Street. Also, I learned to ski.

Keith Richards, 1972

Make no mistake, and this is for all time: there will never be a better Rock & Roll album than 1972’s Exile on Main Street, its murky, deliberately low-fidelity tracks laid down under rudimentary conditions in a drafty chateau in the south of France where Mick, Keef, and the boys, literal exiles, had fled to escape England’s punishing tax regime (the top marginal rate skimmed off by Inland Revenue was then a soul-destroying 90+%, and would soon peak at 98). Recorded mostly in the wee hours over primitive portable equipment (with overdubs added later by such studio legends as keyboard ace Nicky Hopkins and sax maestro Bobby Keyes), Exile was the culmination of a remarkable string of albums that began in 1968 with Beggars Banquet, and continued through Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers, a series of artistic and commercial triumphs that remains unmatched by anyone save the arch-rival Beatles (imagine living in an era in which, over a similarly compressed time span, the competition was releasing Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, The White Album, and Abbey Road!). The sprawling double album that emerged from all those dissolute, drug and alcohol fuelled late night sessions provided a stark contrast to the immaculate, polished studio sound perfected by the Fab Four, and sounded more like the Velvet Underground, or the punk and grunge records yet to come, than anything helmed by George Martin; at the time, it seemed like a step backwards, almost like a counter-revolution, sounding raw, muddy, urgent, authentic, and utterly unpretentious, like a bootleg of a live performance recorded on the sly in some damp, dimly-lit, off-the-beaten-path hole in the wall where the band had decided to pull over the tour bus and give an impromptu performance for the probably unimpressed locals. My recollection, which I’ve been unable to confirm, is that Rolling Stone, in one iteration of its periodic, comprehensive Record Guide, struggled to find the appropriate adjectives until arriving, finally, at the album’s sheer, gritty basementness; if they never actually wrote that, well, they should have. This is from the 1992 edition, written by reviewer Paul Evans:

The Stones’ final masterpiece, Exile on Main Street, remains the best double album in rock & roll history. Astonishing primarily for the guitar interplay – on Tumbling Dice Keith elevates riffing into grandeur, and Mick Taylor’s blues work was passionate throughout – the record was a triumph less of stellar moments than of relentless intensity. Sprung from a core of of hyper-driven Chuck Berry-style rockers (Rocks Off, Rip This Joint, Casino Boogie), Exile plunged into a soulful re-examination of the ethnic music that created the Stones. By now, however, they’d so completely absorbed the essence of the Blues, Stax/Volt and Country that songs like Sweet Black Angel and Loving Cup no longer pay tribute to their roots, but extend beyond them. This music is more knowing, more complex and ambivalent, sometimes more skillful and even more driven than its primal models. The Stones would never again sound so confident.

There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since 1992, a lot of opinions have been re-assessed, and no doubt a lot of worthy music has since emerged, but I’d be astonished if Evans, looking back now, would want to change a word of his review – though I would, because Exile, while definitely relentless in its intensity, very much is a triumph of stellar moments, none more astonishing than today’s selection, which features what may be Mick’s finest and most emotional vocal performance, and stands, to these ears, as the most soulful and heartfelt number in the band’s entire repertoire, rivalled only, perhaps, by Moonlight Mile, the majestic closing track to Sticky Fingers.

Song of the Day: Rolling Stones – Moonlight Mile

Let it Loose travels the same sort of ground, but strikes off in an entirely different musical direction, forging beyond Rock, Blues and Soul into straight-up Gospel territory, complete with the requisite – and remarkably passionate – female choir. Keith’s guitar work, its muddy (yet still precise) phrasing the product of being pumped through a Leslie speaker (an odd device that modifies the sound by playing the output through a rotating baffle), is excellent throughout, Charlie’s typically disciplined drumming is powerful in all the right places, the horn accompaniment is soulful and dramatic, and the vaguely honky-tonk keyboard work is moodily evocative of smoke-filled, after-hours speak-easies, but for all the superb ensemble performing the song still belongs to Mick. His vocal isn’t just stirring, it’s pained, tortured really, personal, as if this isn’t a character he’s playing, it’s him, recounting his own, miserable lived experience from the very pit of his increasingly hopeless soul. How remarkable, then, to read Jagger’s own impressions as related to Uncut magazine in 2010:

I think Keith wrote that, actually. That’s a very weird, difficult song. I had a whole other set of lyrics to it, but they got lost by the wayside. I don’t think that song has any semblance of meaning. It’s one of those rambling songs. I didn’t really understand what it was about, after the event.

No semblance of meaning? Impossible to understand? Oh c’mon. Mick couldn’t have been serious. He must just have been goofin’ around with the credulous interviewer. Good Lord, listen to that vocal. The man understood.

Anyway, what’s to figure out? It’s pretty straightforward. Written as a sort of dialogue between friends, Let it Loose is about settling for empty and corrosive relationships when aspiring to anything more meaningful feels like a naive and pitiable fantasy. So here he is, showing up somewhere with his latest fling, and his buddy can’t help but ask:

Who’s that woman on your arm
All dressed up to do you harm
And I’m hip to what she’ll do
Give her just about a month or two

To which the response, essentially, is yeah, so what? He’s always been a sucker for a certain kind of thrill ride, hasn’t he, and, well, some things you can’t refuse. So he doesn’t mean a thing to her, hell, she hasn’t even told her friends his name, that’s how long she expects him to stay in the picture, so tell him something he doesn’t know. Maybe it’s empty, abusive, and self-destructive, whatever. He’ll take what he can get. He’s disposable. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. You’d be ready to believe him if you didn’t hear the anguish in every syllable. This guy’s lost, alone, and close to dead inside, pretending not to care, but he’s not indifferent, not really. He’s just beyond trying any more.

Mick can tell the scribblers in the music press that the thing was a meaningless mystery, and he never understood it. I’m not buying it. He didn’t just get it, he lived it, while he and the band rocked out with abandon in the pre-dawn hours, reaching a peak on record they’d never match again.

Further reading:

https://www.salon.com/2016/05/15/secrets_of_the_exile_sessions_drugs_sex_and_madness_as_the_rolling_stones_took_over_france/