The original Exile On Main Street was rock ‘n’ roll’s Overlook Hotel, a malodorous place mysteried with secret passages, locked rooms, echoing ballrooms, funky basements. Nobody breakfasted until late afternoon, at which point the guests roused themselves enough to lurch through insouciant jooks like ‘Rocks Off’ or ‘Hipshake’, or Robert Johnson’s malevolent ‘Stop Breakin’ Down’, or the lovely lolling country blues of ‘Sweet Virginia’ and ‘Torn And Frayed’.
But at night, children, ghosts came out to play, and if you peeked inside room 217 you might’ve glimpsed a ruined beauty having opened her veins in the bathtub while ‘I Just Want To See His Face’ throbbed through the walls, or some Nudie-suited little Lord Byron collapsed into a brass bed, OD’d on brown bombers and red wine as ‘Let It Loose’ played its own version of Hunter’s lament for the break of the wave in Fear and Loathing.
When Exile’s doors first opened to the public in 1972, the hoi polloi smelled rats and goblins, but within a few years the place had become a dark monument venerated by suggestible lads with feather cuts in floppy shirts who gathered at twilight to peer through its chain-locked gates hoping to cop a whiff of the elegant, decadent, magical airs interned within.
Now, almost 40 years after the fact, the place has been restored to its original splendour (a rather wonderful remastering job which retains all the murk but adds body and depth) and extended to the tune of some ten extra tracks. These unreleased numbers, refurbished with help of Don Was (original producer Jimmy Miller died in 1994), might not strictly date from the legendary Nellcôte sessions, but in terms of atmosphere and sound they’re close enough for blues: louche sambas like ‘Pass the Wine (Sophia Loren’), or loping gospel tunes like ‘Plundering My Soul’, or big band slide swingers like ‘I’m Not Signifying’. There’s also an early incarnation of ‘Tumbling Dice’ entitled ‘Good Time Women’ and a spare version of ‘Soul Survivor’ with Keith Richards on lead vocals.
Not everything justifies inclusion. The best thing about ‘Following The River’, a rather hammy slowie, is Nicky Hopkins’s piano. But there’s no doubt these musicians were playing out of their skins. Check out the alternate take of ‘Lovin’ Cup’, whose lumbering, muscular groove makes a case for the Stones as the most gifted of all white suburban interpreters of rural black music.
Welcome back, Mr Torrence. You can check out any time you like. But you can never leave.