Speaking about Exile on Main St., Jagger has said, "there's a lot of songs that are really, like, not songs at all. Like 'Casino Boogie.' They're really nicely played, but there's no hooks in them and there's no memorable lyrics." Jagger continues to show a befuddlement with why so many fans are taken by the record. It's as if he needs epigrammatic lyrics like "you can't always get what you want" and "I can't get no satisfaction" in order to consider a song "memorable." But such lines as "million dollar sad" and "judge and jury walk out hand in hand" are indeed memorable, as is the deft irony contained therein. No one is going to mistake "Casino Boogie" for a hit song, never mind give it a place among the classic Stones pantheon. But even with an ostensibly tossed-off number like this, they don't need to do much selling at all. Jagger sings the words with power, and Keith's backing harmony is sung with equal force, giving the song an undeniable authority that transcends any question of them being white-blues-band copyists. Compare it to something like the mediocre "Silver Train" or "Luxury" of their releases in the years immediately following Exile. "Casino Boogie" is authoritative and muscular. The recording sounds effortless.
Tumbling Dice
A lot of pop music is inherently nostalgic, but the Stones had been around long enough to tap into the specific wistfulness of their listeners—some having come of age during the Stones' arc into superstardom. The 1972 Melody Maker review of "Tumbling Dice" articulated the significance of the song's release, via the band itself, noting, "It is impossible to see their names on the label and not undergo inner convulsions in which joy, mirth, tears, nostalgia and deep emotion are inevitably interwoven."
And this is more or less my reaction to the whole record. But "Tumbling Dice" is a particularly bruised and aching anthem. If it's not the quintessential Stones song, it is at least the quintessential Exile song. It presents itself as a swaggering mid- or up-tempo rock & roll number, but seems satisfied to shuffle out with the setting sun, with one of the most mournful codas this side of "Layla." The effect is intensely melancholy, Jagger fading off as if with his tail between his legs, lonely despite all his "I don't need no jewels in my crown" bluster. His words say one thing, but his performance seems to cry, Fm taking my toys and going home.
The lyrics provide yet another twist on the "ramblin', gamblin' man" song of American popular music. "I don't really know what people like about it," Jagger has said of the song. "I don't think it's our best stuff. I don't think it has good lyrics. But people seem to really like it, so good for them." Well, again, maybe the lyrics are nothing special, but it barely matters because the performance of the song as a whole is so arresting. Jagger's underestimation of the song for the lyrics is missing the forest for the trees. "You're no good, heart-breaker, you're a liar and you're a cheat" doesn't seem like much if taken out of context (or worse, in the wrong hands musically) but in Aretha Franklin's "I Never Loved a Man the Way that I Love You," it might be one of pop music's all time greatest opening lines. Soul lyrics can often be trite when simply read on the page, but in the right arrangement, with a great band and a top singer, the lyrics barely matter. And Jagger is a top singer at the top of his game on "Tumbling Dice."
I talked to Graham Parker about his recollection as a fan upon the release of the single. He told me:
They had a competition, I reckon in the NME, to see who could get the lyrics for "Tumblin' Dice" right. Someone did, but some joker wrote something like: "Fibby flibby flabby, yibby yibby yabby, make me burna camel right down-wow wow wown," which I thought was a great crack, too . . .
I do recall there was a bit of controversy in the press at the time (at least in either the Melody Maker or the NME) about the vocal mix. There was an interview with Jagger in one of those rags and they commented on it. He said, rather vaguely, something like: "I don't think they put out the right mixes," which I thought was hilarious!
Soon after the release of the record, Jagger did indeed tell the Melody Maker, "I think they used the wrong mix on that one. I'm sure they did." Robert Greenfield of Rolling Stone was present during some of the final mixing sessions for Exile. He describes Jagger listening back to the mixes of "Tumbling Dice" and saying "They're both good, you know, Jimmy (Miller)." Greenfield notes that it more or less came down to a toss-up when Jimmy Miller noted one mix sounded slightly more "commercial."
The lyrics also barely matter because, as Parker noted, most of us have our own versions in our heads. Mine persist even years after being corrected and seeing the written lyrics, and I enjoy them more than the real ones. Jagger never liked printing lyrics. This is a lesson taken to heart by REM on their early records: write some enigmatic phrases that sound good musically, mix them low, and let the listeners bring their own perceptions to the table. It's a nice formula that produces great results in the right hands.
"We'll get the track when it's hot and write the verses later," Richards explained to Mojo. "I'm like, 'The beat goes like this, this is the chorus, um-um-um Tumbling Dice,' and Mick would take it away, because he knows what I'm talking about."
But though the lyrics might have been cobbled together, they put forth that same Exile weariness, coloured even more by Jagger's warmly worn voice. Even as he offers the variation on typical macho bluesman clichés like "women think I'm tasty," he follows it right up with the next lines: "they're always trying to waste me / make me burn the candlelight down," deflating his own macho arrogance. And we do get some lines key to the record, including "say now baby, I'm the rank outsider / you can be my partner in crime," fitting in with the theme of the exile and artist-outsider. We also see one of the first signs on the record that in songs ostensibly about women, Jagger's lyrics might actually be inspired by his relationship with Richards, who has been his "partner in crime" for longer than any woman in his life. ("He knows what I'm talking about," said Keith; a significant line.) It is just a small example, one that seems more apparent on such songs as "Let It Loose" and "Shine a Light."
Arguably the most effortless sounding, archetypal Rolling Stones song, "Tumbling Dice" was actually one of the hardest to capture. The song sounds so loose that countless other acts tried to capture the same loosey-goose feel, including Rod Stewart, who reportedly brought a tape into the studio for his Footloose and Fancy Free LP to try and steer his band in the right direction on "Hot Legs." Andy Johns recalls that the Stones "had a hundred reels of tape on the basic track. That was a good song, but it was really like pulling teeth. It just went on and on."
To hear a few samples of what Johns described as the worst-sounding band clicking into the best in the world, all one has to do is track down bootleg copies of the song's previous incarnations, including "Good Time Women," a throw-away right down to its working title. There have been a few recorded incarnations of the song in circulation. I am aware of a more straightforward blues version, and this "Good Time Women," which is in the "Jiving Sister Fanny" (from Metamorphosis) vein, though not as compelling. Certainly, it doesn't much resemble "Tumbling Dice." There is another version closer to the final one, with most of the words and musical characteristics, though it's even slower, lazier, and sloppier. Some collectors note versions stretching back as early as the spring of 1970, during the sessions for Sticky Fingers. Bill Wyman's book notes that "Tumbling Dice" was among seven tracks that had been started before the Stones got to France, either at Star-groves or Olympic Studios in London. But Keith recalls writing the riff at Villefranche: "I remember writing the riff upstairs in the very elegant front room, and we took it downstairs the same evening and we cut it. A lot of time when ideas come that quick, we don't put down lyrics, we do what we call vowel movement. You just bellow over the top of it, to get the right sounds for the track." But Johns claims that the particular track went on "for a couple of weeks at least, just the basic track."
The guitars chug along with that trademark Richards ease, right in the pocket. Jagger's battered voice is impossibly low in the mix, drawling, singing like a gospel singer, calling and responding to the background sin
gers, Clydie King and Venetta Field, who make their appearance prominently in third bar of the song and remain featured throughout. Keith's and Mick Taylor's guitars are also far up in the mix, and behind it all, like everywhere on the record, is Nicky Hopkins' piano, sounding like a slightly out-of-tune upright, teasing boogie-woogie triplets everywhere. His high-octave figures during the coda are particularly affecting. Bobby Keys and Jim Price are here as well, of course. Jagger stakes his claim, yet again, as one of the best white vamp singers around. As Lenny Kaye noted in his mixed Rolling Stone review at the time, "As the guitar figure slowly falls into Charlie's inevitable smack, the song builds to the kind of majesty the Stones at their best have always provided. Nothing is out of place here. Keith's simple guitar figure providing the nicest of bridges, the chorus touching the upper levels of heaven and spurring on Jagger, set up by an arrangement that is both unique and imaginative."
Jimmy Miller shares drum duty, most likely in the coda, where someone keeps the African-style tom-toms steady. As Joe "No Beatles, No Stones" Strummer pointed out, "it surges forward, but it's not a straightforward tempo. It's halfway between a slow and a straightforward rocker. It has a mystical beat." The singers King and Field might be joined by Merry Clayton, known to Stones fans for her chilling performance on "Gimme Shelter." But in one of many cases of failing to providing the proper credits on the record, the Stones failed to identify the singers correctly, even on the subsequent Virgin CD reissue of Exile on Main St., listing the singers as "clydie king, vanetta, plus friend." Bill Wyman's book Rolling with the Stones sets out to correct the oversight, but does not list Clayton. Mick Taylor is on the bass, as Wyman notes blankly: "On 3 August we worked on 'Good Time Woman' and when I arrived the following day I found Mick Taylor playing bass. I hung around until 3am, then left."
Under the black, white, and gray cover of Exile on Main St., we can hear the shades of gray, the in-betweens, the pain, the ennui, and the fallout. "Exile is about casualties, and partying in the face of them. The party is obvious. The casualties are inevitable," wrote Lester Bangs. "It is the search for alternatives, something to do (something worthwhile even) that unites us with the Stones, continuously." And this is how the band manages to click with listeners on Exile on Main St. and other records, even as they distance themselves in other ways. They are exiles in that respect as well, moving farther away from their public—a gulf which, in subsequent years, became unbridgeable and led to increasingly banal music with out-of-touch lyrics, in the opinions of many fans. But on Exile, maybe especially on Exile, the Stones still offered "a strange kind of humility and love emerging from a dazed frenzy."
Though not in the context of "Tumbling Dice" specifically, in The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, Stanley Booth also quotes Willie McTell's "The Dying Crapshooter's Blues."
Folks, don’t be standin ' around little Jesse cryin '
He wants everybody to do the Charleston whilst he's dyin
This "partying in the face of it" can be heard on "Tumbling Dice." It is funky and slinky, sexy, though not as convincing at the "partying" aspect as "Rip This Joint" or "All Down the Line." What we hear on "Tumbling Dice" is mostly the other half: "in the face of it." A drained and vulnerable Jagger spins a protagonist moving on, though he sounds like his years are starting to weigh on him, even as his words try to tell us "oh my, my, my, I'm the lone crap shooter / playing the field every night." Even here he is the "lone" gambler, perhaps under the McTell influence. And where Richards, Jagger's real "partner in crime," might have provided a beefy guitar riff and a torrid tempo as a counterpoint, the music is instead loose and easy going, relaxed, perhaps signalling the end of the party; uptempo, but certainly not offering the self-assured maelstrom of "Rip This Joint" or the raging musical counterpoint Keith provides to Jagger's expressed numbness in "Rocks Off."
"Tumbling Dice" was the perfect song for 1972; moving forward reluctantly, alone even, the party continuing even as the "casualties" fell. But Exile on Main St. would not finish before sounding off dire lament on such songs as "Soul Survivor," "Let It Loose," and "Shine a Light."
"I really loved 'Tumbling Dice,'" said Keith. "Beautifully played by everybody. When everybody hits it, that's those moments of triumph."
Sweet Virginia
"Mick and Keith liked a few of my songs and we gotta lotta kicks outta just sitting around playing together. All I did was sing and pick with the Stones."—Gram Parsons, Melody Maker, May 12, 1973
"Gram (Parsons) is on Exile in spirit, but playing? No, not that I can remember."—Keith Richards, Mojo magazine, January 2002
It has often been said that the four sides of Exile on Main St. represent four distinct records. "Tumbling Dice" closes side one of the original two-record vinyl set, ambling off in a melancholic reverie. How do the Stones answer this as side two begins?
"Sweet Virginia" is wholly different in feel, a simple acoustic campfire sing-along; a country ditty that combines the lyrical influence of honky-tonk man Faron Young, the reedy harmonica of Roy Acuff, and a brassy rock & roll sax; the perfect beginning to an acoustic-based, country and folk-tinged side of songs. The Stones were, for the moment, easy in the niche they carved out of country-rock, which was pervading the airwaves and the album collections of rock & roll fans.
If we want to mark 1968 as a beginning for what seemed to be the general return-to-roots movement in mainstream rock & roll, with albums like Music From Big Pink and Beggars Banquet as standing examples, then Exile on Main St. was recorded during the full bloom of the trend, and the Stones were at the vanguard. Since the establishment of the band, the Stones had been aficionados of not just blues, but also of country, rock, and soul. All of these elements were evident in even the earliest Stones recordings. Keith noted, "The first time I got on stage and played was with this C&W band."
But it took them until the late 60s to try more straight-up country songs—mainly due to a lack of confidence on Jagger's part. "I love country music, but I find it very hard to take it seriously," Jagger has said. "I also think a lot of country music is sung with the tongue in cheek, so I do it tongue in cheek. The harmonic thing is very different from the blues. It doesn't bend notes in the same way, so I suppose it's very English, really. Even though it's been very Americanized, it feels very close to me, to my roots, so to speak."
You wish Jagger would just keep his mask off. He can sing such music convincingly: witness "Wild Horses" and "Sweet Virginia." Still, Mick can't resist acknowledging the well-worn insult of country as "shit-kicking" music in the latter song. He sings these, and other ostensibly country songs, more or less as himself, with no fake accents aside from his usual, well-honed American twang. And the effect actually takes the songs away from the sound of English guys imitating country music; it becomes something else altogether: the Rolling Stones. We don't necessarily think "country music" when we hear "Wild Horses." We do when we hear "Far Away Eyes," as fun as it might be. And we don't let the awareness that the band is under the influence of country effect our reaction to the song.
The influences are evident on "Sweet Virginia." It starts out with the wheezing part Mick plays on the harmonica, bringing back that Jimmie Rodgers vibe and reminding fans of classic C&W of the country fiddle parts heard on numbers by such country legends as Roy Acuff and Faron Young. Those two artists, in particular, come to mind when I hear this song. As with a classic Acuff song like "Wreck on the Highway," or any number of Louvin Brothers tunes, "Sweet Virginia" is more of a country-gospel than a Jimmie Rodgers kind of country-blues in inspiration and form, especially in the chorus refrain device. But while the Louvins were often overtly religious in content, the Stones take the sacred inspiration and secularize the lyric. Meanwhile, they adapt the country-gospel framework and hang on it other influences.
"Sweet Virginia" apparently started at Jagger's Stargroves mansion in the summer of 1970, while songs were still being recorded for Sticky Fingers, and was finished at the final Los Angeles sessions. But Dominique
Tarle remembers them recording "Sweet Virginia" and "Sweet Black Angel" in the basement kitchen of Nellcote, a notion more agreeable to the myth of Exile. Nevertheless, it was a similar vibe at Stargroves, what with the big old house and the mobile unit.
"The house that we used, Stargroves, was ideally suited because it was a big mansion and a kind of grand hall with a gallery around with bedroom doors and a staircase," Andy Johns explained. "Big fireplace, big bay window—you could put Charlie in the bay window. And, off the main hall there were other rooms you could put people in. We did stuff like 'Bitch' there, and you can hear on 'Moonlight Mile' when Mick is singing with the acoustic, it sounds very live, because it was! 4 or 5 in the morning, with the sun about to come up, getting takes. It was all very heady stuff for a young chap!"
The band did not tour (aside from a few dates in England) between the two albums, further bonding the records in the minds of many, including Keith Richards.
"Some songs—'Sweet Virginia'—were held over from Sticky Fingers,'" he explained. "It was the same line-up and I've always felt those two albums kind of fold into each other . . . there was not much time between them and I think it was all flying out of the same kind of energy."
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