One of my original copies of “Exile” and one of the most iconic album covers of all-time, using both images shot by photographer Robert Frank for his landmark book, “The Americans,” as well as new pictures of the band shot by Frank on location in California and New York). This is a very early and possible first pressing that came in a distinct uni-pak style jacket (both LPs slid into the inside of the opened front jacket flap) and also included 12 attached/perforated postcards of the band horsing around in costume (bassist Bill Wyman didn’t make the photo shoot, so someone took his place). Later pressings did not include the postcards and had standard double-LP gatefold sleeves.

This is my Jagger-designed silk tour jacket specially given out only to the band and road crew/tour members during the 1972 tour in support of “Exile On Main St.” The striking black and white color combo was picked so the members of the Stones Touring Party could be easily spotted in any arena or venue. Of course, this stuff (and the attendant merchandising) is routine now, but this jacket was a predecessor for the major rock tour gear of the 1970s and beyond. Not available to the public, and one of the gems of my Stones collection. It was there, even if I was not.

Coinciding with the deluxe reissue a few years back of the Rolling Stones’ “Exile On Main St.”, I pitched a piece to The Boston Globe on what that blearily beautiful sprawling double album meant to me growing up amid corporate FM radio of the late 1970s and early ’80s, and how it (and the Stones) helped not only shape my perspective of rock music — and music, period — but restored my faith in what great, meaningful rock & roll could, and should, be. I wrote most of this essay by hand in a notebook during a four-hour train ride from Boston to New York City, while listening to “Exile” a few times. Since a few kind folks have periodically asked for copies of this piece since its publication in The Globe in May 2010, I thought I would post my slightly longer “director’s cut” version here to mark both today’s anniversary of this iconic album’s release on May 12, 1972, as well as the subsequent U.S. “STP” (Stones Touring Party) jaunt that began in June and wrapped its lips and lapped its tongue  around America for a surprisingly short (by today’s standards) two months. (See my related review essay post concerning a new “unofficial” release documenting the ’72 tour). The Stones finished up with  a three-night stand at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, culminating in a final show July 26, which happened to be Mick Jagger’s 29th birthday (yes, there was cake on stage … and Bianca waiting in the wings). I’ve also included a few photos of my rare “Exile”-related memorabilia that didn’t make it into the paper. Maybe they would’ve worked better at the end of the piece, but that’s a lot of scrolling down. Ah, no matter. Chawlie’s good tonight, inn’it he? Paradiddle me in willya Mr. Watts? Thank you kindly.

HAVE YOU SEEN YOUR OTHER, BABY, STANDING IN THE SHADOWS? Keith and Mick jamming at Keith’s villa at Nellcote, 1971. Note the Jagger “Sticky Fingers” stand-up cardboard display and new lips-and-tongue logo on top of the fireplace mantle. Another great photo by Dominique Tarle.

“This is at once the worst studio album the Stones have ever made, and the most maddeningly inconsistent and strangely depressing release of their career.” – Lester Bangs, Creem magazine album review of “Exile On Main Street,” August 1972

“It’s a bit overrated, to be honest. I’m not saying it’s not good. Compared to ‘Let It Bleed’ and ‘Beggars Banquet,’ which I think are more of a piece, I don’t see it’s as thematic as the other two. It’s got a raw quality, but I don’t think all around it’s as good.” – Mick Jagger interview, Rolling Stone, Dec. 14, 1995

WATTS THE TUNE? Stones drummer Charlie Watts sweats to the beat in the basement at Nellcote, 1971.

Let’s get this out of the way: “Exile On Main Street” is not the Rolling Stones’ best album. But it may well be their most important. For cohesion and expertly executed songcraft, my vote would go to Jagger’s choices, or to my favorite, 1971’s “Sticky Fingers.” But “Exile” is easily the most talked-about, obsessed-over, mythologized work of the band’s nearly 50-year career.

There have been many Stones reissues to hit the market over the years, often shrewdly timed to a new tour or technology. But none in memory have matched the anticipation and nostalgia stoked by next Tuesday’s deluxe re-release treatment of “Exile,” which will include 10 previously unreleased tracks, as well as some reworked “Exile”-era songs. For several generations of fans and critics (most of whom have radically revised their initial assessments of the album), the Stones’ 1972 opus remains the band’s definitive, enduring statement.

Keith Richards plays a riff during the “Exile” recording sessions, Sunset Sound studio, spring ’72. Photo by — who else? — the great Jim Marshall.

But why “Exile?” Was it the band’s stew of R&B-marinated rock (“All Down The Line”), back porch country (“Sweet Virginia”), Saturday night blues (“Stop Breaking Down”), and Sunday morning gospel (“Just Wanna See His Face”)?  Was it photographer Robert Frank’s iconic black & white cover art depicting a melange of carnival freak-show images mixed in with grainy film stills of the Stones hanging out on the streets of L.A. and New York City? Was it the bleary, just-woke-up-or-never-went-to-bed quality of music that suggested a rolling, tumbling house party in sprawling slow motion? Or was it the toxic aura of decadent glamour that hung over the whole affair, one littered with hangovers and hangers-on? The debauched rock-star mystique, personified in a single inside-sleeve photograph of Mick and Keith leaning like blood brothers into one overhead microphone, singing as they clutch their liquid libations? It’s classic Stones iconography – a snapshot of inspiration from deep inside the woozy womb of what one imagines to be an endless bacchanalian bash.

Mick Jagger, Sunset Sound studio in California, early 1972. Photo taken by the great Jim Marshall, whose recent book, “The Rolling Stones 1972,” is a must for fans.

Yes, yes, and yes. Never mind that, upon its release in May of ‘72, “Exile” received mixed reviews, or that Jagger has long refuted it as the Stones’ masterpiece, or that the seedy basement where much of it was recorded was actually situated in Keith’s sumptuous villa in the south of France.  (A decent chunk of additional recording sessions were actually completed at Sunset Sound studios in Los Angeles). “Exile” is a sweeping distillation of the Stones’ sybaritic strengths and a consolidation of all of the band’s musical influences, aspirations, and debts. For the first time, instead of being young European outsiders earnestly paying tribute to the older blues musicians they had idolized, the band sounds fully immersed, totally *inside* of the music, a part of it rather than a pose. As a result, “Exile” is the most authentically American music the British-born Stones ever made. When people talk about that signature Stones “Sound,” this is the era and album they are referring to, trying to emulate (e.g., Wilco’s “Being There”) or even respond to (Liz Phair’s “Exile in Guyville”).

Here’s my four-song jukebox (remember those?) EP that was issued only for, um, full-size and those mini pizza restaurant jukeboxes. Not available for public sale in record stores. Very rare cover and EP from my personal collection.

The soon-to-be Glimmer Twins recording vocals at Sunset Sound studios, early 1972. Photograph by the great Jim Marshall. One of my favorite portraits of these two together and at work.

Charlie Watts, Stones drummer extraordinaire, in Keith Richards’s basement during the “Exile” recording sessions. Photograph by Dominique Tarle from his book, “Exile,” by Genesis Publications (I would love to have this marvelous book someday, if I win the lottery)

Like many others who were born in, rather than defined by, the decade that birthed the likes of the Stones, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Who, I fell under “Exile”’s spell many years after it was first released. It wasn’t my first Rolling Stones album, but to my teenage ears it felt and sounded like the most adventurous, inscrutable, grown-up music I had ever heard. Its gritty, world-weary disposition was, I imagined, the soundtrack to a life experience that was the polar opposite of my shy, sheltered existence growing up in a tiny rural town in Western Massachusetts. It was also a bracing tonic to the corporate claptrap clogging mainstream radio at the time – homogenous drivel like Styx and Asia and, the worst offenders, Loverboy – that to me were emotionally and musically soulless. Only later would I be initiated into the thriving punk and nascent alternative rock that was, also at the time, bubbling up from the underground.

Who ordered the tuna on white? Keith out and about around Nellcote, france, during the “Exile” recording sessions, 1971. Photo by Dominique Tarle.

From the moment I lowered the needle on my cheap Zenith Allegro stereo onto “Rocks Off,” the boisterous opening track, and sat down on my shag-carpeted bedroom floor, positioned squarely in front of those bulky speakers, “Exile” hit me like a locomotive. I threw myself headlong into the vinyl grooves and lived there for weeks. The four sides of that double-LP would eventually send me backtracking, scrambling to answer Mick’s query on “Hip Shake”: “Whaddya know ‘bout Slim Harpo?”

SHINE A LIGHT ON ME: Keith actually out in daylight at Nellcote, 1971

Decades later, I’m still discovering how long “Main Street”’s road runs, how deep into the country it goes, and how many twisting detours – peaks and valleys of rhythm and groove – there are along the way. Ultimately, that’s also the true, enigmatic power of “Exile”: Its emphasis on conjuring moods, riffs, and atmosphere, rather than dispensing radio-ready rock ‘n roll songs. Even the album’s first single, “Tumbling Dice,” sways more than it stings.

A detail of Robert Frank’s images of circus freaks and oddball Americana taken from the cover of the “Exile On Main St.” cover. Yeah, we know. The guy second from the left is sorta troubling on multiple levels.

Like Dylan’s “Blonde On Blonde,” another double album of some repute, “Exile On Main Street” is bedrock music that is at once a product of its special time and place, and a living, breathing work that transcends those specifics.

“What a beautiful buzz, what a beautiful buzz,” Jagger observes on “Loving Cup,” a line about fleeting contentment delivered with a measure of wonder and – for Jagger – rare sincerity. But there’s a sense of fretful urgency too, a doomed desire to capture and document the nocturnal moment before it vanishes with the dawn. Who could have predicted back then that the buzz, still beautiful, still potent, would still be with us?

KID ‘N’ PLAY: Mick works out an “Exile” tune while one of the children of the entourage observes from the best seat in the house, er, basement, 1971. Photo by Dominique Tarle.

Here’s a great video of the Stones and their surroundings compiled from Robert Frank’s Super 8 footage of his photo shoot of the Stones in L.A. and NY, synched to “Rocks Off”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lNP-x94-SE

Live rehearsal performance of “Tumbling Dice” for the ’72 U.S. Tour in support of “Exile On Main St.” Parts 2 & 3 also follow:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb-ltrimRG4

Here’s a terrific promo video clip made for the newly “unearthed” “Exile”-era track, “Plundered My Soul,” that was issued with the deluxe reissue of “Exile” in 2010. In fact, these are newly recorded Jagger vocals (and, I believe, new lyrics) set to some ’70-’71-era basic tracks (with some possible additional newly recorded Mick Taylor guitar). A so-so song that echoes “Tumbling Dice,” but a fantastic video idea. Check it out here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6ZnmXrRUIQ

Watch and listen to the Stones perform “Loving Cup” from “Exile” while being filmed rehearsing in Montreux for the ’72 STP (Stones Touring Party) jaunt across the U.S: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRDZdgnfmVo

Listen to the full album of “Exile” here while you re-read this! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug2_PIoheIU