Album: Exile on Main St.
Year: 1972
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OK, here we go. Exile on Main St., arguably — and I’m going to spend the next several days making that argument — the Rolling Stones’ finest hour. Famously recorded in the basement of Keith Richards waterfront villa in the South of France — the evil Allen Klein’s machinations having forced them to live outside of the U.K. for a year in order to get their tax shit together — and finished in Sunset Sound Studios in Hollywood, Exile on Main St. is the perfect combination of Keith Richards’ natural tendency towards chaos and Mick Jagger’s natural need for order.
And it begins at the beginning, with the least-known album opener of the Stones classic period — no shame when the other three were “Sympathy For The Devil,” “Gimme Shelter” and “Brown Sugar” — the table-setting “Rocks Off,” which almost instantly sucks you deep into, well, the morass of sound that typifies nearly every track on the record.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2064: The Rolling Stones – “Rocks Off”