“People didn’t like it”: The controversial 1972 album Mick Jagger wants to be remembered for
A guant Mick Jagger shuffles around backstage, an empty sack of nerves. He hasn’t been able to eat properly for days. There are a few snacks laid out before him in the dusty dressing room, but he feels so hollow that he could likely swallow the plate and it would drop straight out of him like a coin in a faulty vending machine.
The Marquee Club has always been a traditional jazz joint where the blues is belittled as an aberration. The stuffy locals look on the genre like a Pizza Hut in the heart of Naples. But every band has to start somewhere, and on a sultry July 11th in 1962, The Rolling Stones started amid a chorus of beery boos.
Clashes broke out between the trads and mods in the audience, and the band suddenly began to thrive among the hostile ruckus. It has often been said in the years that have followed that the band brought a punk edge to the staple sound of the blues. In truth, they didn’t have a choice.
They were born playing Little Willie Littlefield’s ‘Kansas City’ in a volatile swill of ale and firm opinions, and they simply continued in that vein. They’ve always been at their very best when the purity of the blues traditionlism that first inspired them is partnered with potent aggression. That singular sound almost came about accidentally thanks to a ferocious debut performance.
Jagger went from a shivering wreck to a superstar-in-the-making that night. And he’s never lost sight of the unique blend that prognosticated the band’s inevitable rise to the rafters of modern pop culture. It only took around 20 months for the group to go from closing their debut show at the Marquee Club with ‘Got My Mo-Jo Woking’ by Ann Cole to delivering their debut album. It was a rise buoyed by their inherent edginess, where the blues was blasted out of a blunderbus of pouting attitude.
“Our aim was to turn people on to the blues,” Keith Richards said of the Stones’ early outlook. “If we could turn them on to Muddy [Waters] and Jimmy Reed and Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker, then our job was done.” Jagger’s view was largely similar, with one notable twist: he wanted the band to push forward a profound new sense of liberation in the process.
”The grown-up world was a very ordered society in the ’60s, and I was coming out of it. America was even more ordered than anywhere else. I found it was a very restrictive society in thought and behaviour and dress,” Jagger said. Well, within a few years gingerly jostling at the Marquee Club, the singer would be gladly accepting interviews with satanic cults.
Jagger endeavoured to shake-up that sense of stifling order with perhaps more vigour than anyone in the mainstream. He wanted to bring a new edge to the blues. Even when punk came around, he claimed that it failed to match their incendiary approach. ”No matter what Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious do,” he said, ”they can’t be more disgusting than The Rolling Stones are in an orgy of biting.” So, that became the steadfast mission statement of the band: traditionalism sharpened to a searing point.
When the group ventured too far from this ethos, Jagger figured they never quite rang true. “It’s not very good,“ he said of the convoluted psychedelia they attempted on Their Satanic Majesties Request. “It had interesting things on it, but I don’t think any of the songs are very good. It’s a bit like Between the Buttons. It’s a sound experience, really, rather than a song experience.”
So, for subsequent records, they decided to get back to the heart of their own ideals rather than following the whims of fads. Or rather, to make the blues once again the tip of the spear of the people’s zeitgeist.
They returned to their signature blues style on the albums that followed, honing its musculairy with each new release until they arrived at their proudest, most defining moment. It was a moment that Mick had been angling for since that first night in the Marquee Club when their covers journeyed through the best of American music in a whirlwind blur of boysterous attitude. That attitude returned with searing aplomb on their 1972 masterpiece, Exile on Main Street.
When discussing the record with The Talks, Jagger was quick to praise the album as his greatest achievement. “My finest hour,” he proclaimed. “Well, it is certainly good and certainly it was a very creative period, a really good period. Some very good things came in that period in music.” He had found that by the band returning to their roots, they almost inadvertently achieved a synthesis of all the music they loved in the process. Using the blues as their canvas, they bolstered this stern backbone with a smattering of country, soul and everything else that they admired in a shimmering mirage of modern music placed on a rolling boil.
”The fascination has always been that four or five guys can create a sound that sounds a lot larger than the actual number of members actually involved.”
Keith Richards
As Jagger said upon initial release, “This new album is fucking mad. There’s so many different tracks. It’s very rock ‘n’ roll, you know.” It’s a blunt appraisal, but it showcases his view that it achieved the ragtag ruckus that he always looked to recreate since he first caught the buzz of performance. Even the fact that Exile failed to take off from the start was proof to the frontman that it had achieved the necessary affront that the Stones needed to assert. ”I always had a lot of respect for it,” he told Andy Greene, despite the initial reviews.
In part, those initial reviews were also tied to the Altamont concert from a few years prior. Four people tragically lost their lives at the infamous Stones event. Plenty of the press and rock punters alike saw this as a symptom of a ‘step too far’. A sentiment crept in that rock ‘n’ roll needed a greater degree of order and propriety. Exile boldly thumbed its nose at that notion. So, while it might be easy to look back retrospectively and wonder why it wasn’t hailed upon release, this added context makes the mixed bag reception much more understandable.
”It was difficult,” Jagger continued, ”because people didn’t like it when it came out. I think they just found it quite difficult because of the length of it. People didn’t access it quite so easily at the time. It got kind of mixed reviews. People found it a bit impenetrable and a bit difficult.” Such a proposition proved to be the perfect seal of approval for a fellow who has always lived by the adage that if something is worth doing, then it is worth overdoing.
Exile on Main Street remains a moving masterpiece that defines the true satanic majesty of the band. Even though Jagger marvels at the lack of singles and the utterly non-commercial stance of the double album – one which has sold around 2million copies – it certainly captures the ethos that Richards explains that they had from the outset.
“The idea was to make the fucking band slam together,“ he said. “A quick, short, sharp solo here, boom, great. Otherwise, to me, the fascination has always been that four or five guys can create a sound that sounds a lot larger than the actual number of members actually involved.”
In the right light, Exile on Main Street sounds like every great band in America playing at once. And it certainly made Jagger proud to stand at the front of that wailing racket, simply doing what he’s always loved, and doing it bloody defiantly to boot.
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