Album: Exile on Main St.
Year: 1972
. . .
A track like “I Just Want To See His Face” is why double albums were created in the first place.
While it’s a song that is too weird and off-brand to have ever made the cut on a single album, it’s perfect for the second disc of a double album, where some of the weirder songs tended to live back when double albums were originally a thing.
Depending on the source you wanna believe, “I Just Want to See His Face” either came from a jam session in the basement that may or may not have involved Mick Jagger, Keith on electric piano, Mick Taylor on bass and Charlie playing only his toms or a session in London that featured Bobby Whitlock from Derek & The Dominos playing the electric piano. I want to believe that it was cooked up in the basement on a day when the ventilator was totally not working, everybody stoned and shirtless. When in doubt, print the legend.
In any event, it seems like Mick Jagger improvised his lyrics over the jam, which fades in from the ending of “Ventilator Blues,” with overdubbed gospelish vocals from Venetta Fields, Clydie King and Jesse Kirkland, who are singing “my my my.” (I think.). At first, Mick just wails in the background, not singing any words, and then eventually he turns into a preacher from the old time gospel hour as heard at 2:00 on a fuzzy Bakersfield AM station.
That’s all right, that’s all right, that’s all right
Sometimes you feel like trouble, sometimes you feel down
Let this music relax your mind, let the music relax your mind
There’s a great bit here where Venetta, Clydie and Jesse all come in when Mick sings “relax your mind”, and they’re way louder than he is, which doesn’t stop him from continuing.
Stand up and be counted, can’t get a witness
Sometimes you need somebody, if you have somebody to love
Sometimes you ain’t got nobody and (you want somebody to love)
Alright
Then you don’t want to walk and talk about Jesus
You just want to see His face
Then you don’t want to walk and talk about Jesus
You just want to see His face
Once again, the backing vocalists come in at just the right moment, putting the emphasis on “you just wanna see his face”, and then taking it over entirely, repeating “you just want to see his face” as the electric piano comes to life and Mick hand claps and shouts “alright” behind them. It’s really the only bit of tension-breaking in the entire song.
After that, “I Just Want To See His Face” begins its fade out, enhanced by some jazzy bass runs from Bill Plummer, who overdubbed upright bass on a few of the Exile tracks.
Like the acoustic songs on side two, “I Just Want To See His Face” initially struck as an anomaly — there was no guitar anywhere near this track — but to me, it now stands as a prime example of the flow of Exile on Main St., a voodoo bridge between the sharp blues of “Ventilator Blues” and the straight-up gospel of “Let It Loose,” about which more tomorrow.
Oh, and in his excellent 33 1/3 book about Exile on Main St., Bill Janovitz — who, of course, is also the leader of Buffalo Tom — points out that it makes perfect sense that Tom Waits considers “I Just Want To See His Face” his favorite Stones song, as it clearly seems to prefigure some of Waits’ work.
“I Just Want To See His Face”
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My second-favorite Stones song, not only on this record but in their entire catalog. It’s in the same category as my favorite Low song, “Last Snowstorm of the Year”: bites of spiritual ear candy that end just when they feel like they should start picking up, but are all the more powerful for their brevity.