"Sweet Virginia" does feel like one of the most off-the-cuff tracks on Exile on Main St. Certainly, the same murky atmosphere is present. As Keith starts his opening strum on the acoustic (left side of your stereo), someone bumps a microphone or the guitar within the first bar, only adding to the charm and spontaneous feel. This is a rough-shod production, even looser in feel than "Tumbling Dice." The mastering of the vinyl copy sounds like it might have been botched, because for all my years of listening it sounded as if a compressor or dynamic limiter kicked in too forcefully and quickly on the first chorus' "so come on, come on down ..." Even listening to it on CD, I still hear the dramatic volume downshift, like those skips and snaps from your original vinyl records that persist as phantoms in your head long after you have replaced the worn-out versions.
The arrangement builds perfectly, as if musicians are just wandering into the room, picking up an instrument, and joining in, clapping hands. The beginning echoes "Country Honk" from Let it Bleed. Mick Taylor is off to the right, doubling Jagger's harmonica melody with a fast-picked fake "mandolin" part, and picking seventh chords and major-scale and country-blues runs throughout. Charlie keeps it simple, with just a big double-headed kick (hollow sounding) and a snare drum, no cymbals or tom-toms. Bill Wyman is credited with bass, but it sounds suspiciously like a stand-up bass, which would most likely have been overdubbed by Bill Plummer in Los Angeles. If not, Wyman either plays a bass fiddle himself, or does a convincing job making his electric bass sound like one. And in fact, in outtake versions, the bass does sound like an electric, perhaps a hollow body, mimicking an upright. On Wyman's final take, he simplifies his part, and on both versions, he swings.
Ian Stewart joins in on the second verse with a rollicking boogie-woogie part straight out of the songbook of his primary influence, Albert Ammons. Impossibly behind the beat, Stewart effortlessly reels off inspired riffs, the sort for which he was best known. It is counterintuitive that Stu is on here to begin with; as the most "country" of the songs, "Sweet Virginia" would seem at first glance to beg for the Floyd Cramer style of "slip-note" country frills that Nicky Hopkins adopted. Yet it's just that tension of the straight-up country elements coupled with the boogie-woogie texture that makes the song so compelling. The rhythmic movement of Stu's piano part propels the song. Bobby Keys adds a few sax licks off in the background, waiting his turn to solo, wrenching the song from the Chicago boogie-woogie pull of Stu down toward the New Orleans or East Texas juke-joint R&B of someone like Professor Longhair or King Curtis.
Meanwhile, Jagger does his best to bring us to a country church somewhere in the deep South, in a performance that begins with him sounding like he's picking up where he left off on "Tumbling Dice," or even a bit wearier, and ends in an incredibly spirited call-and-response with the backing vocalists. One of the best moments seems to be an inspired bit of spontaneity as one of the female backing singers (uncredited, of course) suddenly takes the lead part, while Jagger recedes and wilfully joins the chorus (heard at around 3:46). His vocal part sounds almost mush-mouthed, as if he is out of breath from his harmonica part, a bit drunk, his voice cracking on the words "winter" and "friend."
The title likely comes—perhaps unconsciously— from Mamie Smith's 1926 "Sweet Virginia Blues," but Jagger's lyric appears to be inspired by a variety of sources. In some lines, it sounds like he's expressing concern for a friend. The first verse of "Sweet Virginia" is more of a sympathy bit, with sentiments that would be heard again on such songs as "Winter" and "Coming Down Again" on the next album, Goats Head Soup. "Sweet Virginia" begins:
Wading through the waste, stormy winter
And there's not a friend to help you through
Trying to stop the waves behind your eyeballs
Drop your reds, drop your greens and blues
The next verse gets really interesting. Jagger seems to take direct inspiration from honky-tonk legend Faron Young's "Wine Me Up," which has the verse:
I’d like to thank the men that raise the grapes way out in California
And I’m hoping this will be their biggest year
'Cause scarlet water's all that's left to keep me hanging on
From Shreveport, Louisiana, Faron Young had been a Grand Ole Opry star since the 1950s. But "Wine Me Up" was a comeback hit single on the country charts in 1969, and the Stones might have heard it while they were recording at Muscle Shoals in Alabama. Mick sings:
Thank you for your wine, California
Thank you for your sweet and bitter fruits
Yes, I’ve got the desert in my toenail
And I hid the speed inside my shoe
Still mired in the fallout of Altamont, California would indeed have been a bitter taste in Jagger's mouth.
The desert he sings of might be an allusion to the desert-like Altamont—located just outside Livermore, California, which was known for its wine-producing vineyards until the prominence of Napa Valley overshadowed it. And most accounts of the Stones' show at Altamont feature people sharing big jugs of wine. The allusion to Altamont resonates throughout the song, with Jagger continuing the Exile on Main St. theme of moving on, leaving those bad tastes from the 60s behind. The fistfuls of colour-coded pills he sings about also reference the lifestyle in the Stones' orbit circa 1971. The lyric is one of wilful alienation, the continued outsider perspective; drugs taking you out of one shared reality for another, trying to "help you through." Jagger yearns for salvation of some kind here, whether the "Virginia" he beckons is a woman, a friend, a place, a state of mind, or all of the above.
That state of mind was almost certainly inspired in part by the ever-present Gram Parsons, a man closely and forever identified with the Joshua Tree area of the Mojave desert, though he himself may or may not be on the track. Mick Taylor claimed, "I know it's rumoured that he sang backing vocals on 'Sweet Virginia' but that is me singing, not him." And I asked Al Perkins, a friend and collaborator of Gram's, and the pedal steel guitarist who plays on "Torn and Frayed," if he recalls Gram being anywhere on Exile and he gave me an unequivocal "no," mentioning that Gram was not even at the session in Los Angeles during which Perkins recorded his part. Of course, Perkins was not present in France, so who knows for sure? Bill Wyman lists Parsons as "additional personnel" in his Rolling with the Stones. All of this just adds to the "mystery" of Exile on Main St.
Since I was a child, my favourite records have always had moments that make me wish I had been part of the action when the recording went down, like I missed out on the party. This is one reason I wanted to become a musician and a member in a band. "Sweet Virginia" might be the best example of this sort of song. The lyrics knowingly nudge the listener, drawing you in with the sense that you're in on the sentiment, if not the actual party; in lieu of a "friend to help you through," you've got your sympathetic friends in the Stones to do so. Mick might not be the same sort of "bridge over troubled water" that Simon and Garfunkel offered, but he's there to hear you and perhaps provide some medicinal support with "reds . . . greens and blues." The sing-along makes you want to be a part of the group. And the three-chord structure of the song made it an easy one to play at parties from junior high school to college and beyond. If it's possible to pinpoint specific moments in my path toward becoming a rock & roller, hearing "Sweet Virginia" is chief among them. I would play this song over and over again when I first got Exile on Main St. It's a song that begs for continued spins, and the famous DJ Wolfman Jack went out on a limb and heavily promoted this non-single album track on his radio show on kday in Los Angeles.
Torn and Frayed
An autumnal, melancholy song, "Torn and Frayed" has, like "Sweet Virginia," been called "country," though it seems this is just for lack of a better term. But with its strong rock & roll backbeat, the song is closer to the "southern rock" of the Allman Brothers ("Sweet Melissa") than the country rock of Parsons, the Eagles, and others. Bill Wyman is clearly not playing bass, as only a guitar player—scratch that, only a lead guitar player— would pl
ay a part as busy as the bass maelstrom Mick Taylor works up by the second verse of the song.
Again, we have a predominantly three-chord structure that has as many roots in gospel as it does in country, with more similarities to the southern soul of Memphis and Muscle Shoals than to Nashville country. The main difference lies in Mick's vocals, slurring notes like an R&B singer rather than a straight country singer. Such singers as Ray Charles, on one side, and George Jones, on the other, could also blur the distinctions between soul and country. Country, after all, has been defined as white man's blues. Jagger is another who successfully melds the two approaches.
Though driven by Keith's acoustic guitar, there is a deep layered sound that builds from this gentle strumming to a provocative mix of steel guitar, wheezing organ, piano, country-clean electric Telecaster guitar picking, and densely-packed lead and backing vocals. The most spirit-lifting of all these sounds is the chiming combination of Jim Price's organ and Al Perkins' pedal steel.
Trumpet player Price was apparently just listening to the band as they did the basic tracks and started to fool around on the organ, not realizing he was being heard and recorded. "All the different instruments were set up in different rooms," he recalls in Appleford's book. "I went into that room, picked up the headphones and started listening and just started playing the organ. It was just for fun. They did a bunch of takes on it, and I never knew that they had used it until I saw it on the record."
Perkins was brought in at the Los Angeles sessions at Sunset Sound with Mick, Keith, and Anita Pallenberg. He told me he had just gotten a new pedal steel guitar, "from an eight-string Fender to an eleven-string ZB Custom of Tom Brumley's, with loads of levers and pedals." I asked him if he did many takes, perhaps still getting used to the quirks of the new instrument. "Not very many," he replied. "But Mick sang and did his stage action each time to give me some live feeling." Noting that the sound of the steel blends so well with the organ, I asked him if recalled playing off of Price's part in particular. "Frankly, I think it was presented a bit sparse, if memory serves me correctly, but I also think it would have been one of the last overdubs."
The character of the song's protagonist seems to blend elements of Keith and Gram Parsons, though it could be any one of a number of characters familiar to Jagger, including many of the parasitic hangers-on in Keith's orbit: "Just a dead beat right off the street / bound to follow you down." It is a picture of a ragged, vagabond guitar player named Joe, who we follow from "smelly bordellos" though "dressing rooms filled with parasites." As Robert Greenfield, who followed the Stones on their 1971 tour of England, noted in Rolling Stone, the Stones were no strangers to less-than-luxurious dressing rooms, even as late as that very tour, as the world's most successful rock & roll band: "In Glasgow, one of life's cheap plastic dramas. Green's Playhouse. Paint peeling off the walls. Six inches of soot in the air vents. Bare bulbs backstage and fluorescent tubes for house lights. The third balcony is closed 'to keep the raytes doon.'"
Jagger keeps spinning the yarn of ragged glory with an ease of language, words rolling off his tongue like the lyrics of Chuck Berry and Hank Williams—the sound and rhythm as important as the words themselves:
Joe's got a cough, sounds kind of rough Yeah, and the codeine to fix it Doctor prescribes, drugstore supplies Who's going to help him to kick it?
I used to hear that last verse line as "who's gonna help in the kitchen?" which to me was symbolic of the whole myth of Exile on Main St. as a bunch of friends living communally in the torn and frayed Nellcote mansion, recording and fixing meals all in the same kitchen, a myth that holds a certain degree of truth, as it turns out. Who needs lyric sheets?
Jagger is sympathetic to the character of Joe, who probably reflects Gram Parsons more than Keith Richards. Stanley Booth details a few jaunts the Stones' entourage took out to seedy Los Angeles-area clubs to see Gram and the Flying Burrito Brothers play, with Gram stealing their hearts away. Al Perkins points out that, while other groups in the late 1960s might have been consciously going back to the roots of rock & roll for newfound inspiration and rejuvenation, guys like Parsons were really just playing what was most natural for them. "I also believe people like Chris Hillman, Gram, and even Ricky Nelson were at last able to perform, their way, a style of music they'd grown up with," he observed.
Gram, a trust-fund kid, was as restless a searcher and wanderer as Keith, one also interested in the mythology/ reality dichotomy of America. Stanley Booth, a Georgian who felt an attachment to Parsons, recalls a 1969 conversation he had with Gram high in a hotel tower on Sunset Boulevard while waiting for the Stones to commence their American tour:
"Look at it, man," he said, as if he had read my thoughts. "They call it America, and they call it civilization, and they call it television, and they believe in it and salute it and sing songs to it and eat and sleep and die still believing in it, and—and—I don't know," he said, taking another drag, "then sometimes the Mets come along and win the World Series."
Sweet Black Angel
Three little Injuns out in a canoe,
One tumbled overboard and then there were two.
Two little Injuns foolin' with a gun,
One shot t'other and then there was one;
One little Injuns livin ' all alone,
He got married and then there were none
Ten Little Indians —Septimus Winner, 1868
Seven little nigger boys chopping up sticks;
One chopped himself in half and then there were six.
Six little nigger boys playing with a hive;
A bumble-bee stung one, and then there were five.
Five little nigger boys going in for law;
One got in chancery, and then there were four.
Ten Little Niggers —Frank Green, 1869
Mick Jagger is certain to have been familiar with some variation of "Ten Little Niggers," Frank Green's English music-hall adaptation of Septimus Winner's "Ten Little Indians." Winner wrote many "comic" songs for the American minstrel circuit and was once jailed for treason for penning "Give Us Back Our Old Commander," a song critical of President Abraham Lincoln. On "Sweet Black Angel," Jagger, in a sort of blackface of his own, takes his inspiration from the travails of Angela Davis, an African-American UCLA professor who some parties also accused of treason—a piece of symmetry that was likely coincidental.
In 1969, Governor Ronald Reagan had exerted pressure on the California Regents Board to dismiss Davis from her teaching post, due to her Marxist views and membership in the communist party. After a judge ruled that this was not legal grounds for such a dismissal, "the Regents again voted to remove her, this time for 'inflammatory' speeches she had made that were critical of University policy," according to a New York Times report at the time.
In August of 1970, Davis was arrested and went to trial for conspiracy in the murder of four people, including a judge, at a Marin County courthouse. The crimes occurred during a botched escape attempt by self-proclaimed revolutionary prisoners the "Soledad Brothers." (Davis had championed the cause of one of them.) The weapons used during the crimes were allegedly registered in her name. She evaded capture until October of that same year and was finally arrested in a motel in New York. Her trial began in the summer of 1972; Davis was ultimately acquitted of all charges by an all-white jury. In the meantime, hers became a cause celebre. Her image became iconic: a strikingly beautiful woman with a large natural afro, saluting black power with her fist held high. In a June 1971 New York Times article, Sol Stern wrote:
At the hearings, she walks in briskly, trailing her matrons behind her, and turns, very tall and regal, to give spectators the clenched-fist salute. She wears bright mini-dresses, and in the soft lights reflecting off the hand-rubbed walnut furniture (made by state prison inmates), she glows with a tawny, imperious beauty. At her table she sits upright and attentive, conferring animatedly with her lawyers, her dignity hardly bruised by six months in jail.
Dignity is an essential
undercurrent of Exile. There is a nagging suggestion underpinning the album's lyrics that perhaps the guys in the Stones are getting too old for all the ridiculousness that surrounds them. But equally as important, there is another prong suggesting that their generation got a lot of things right, and Davis was symbolic of the legitimate struggle against the status quo and the old guard. And they likely identified with her as another lightning rod for controversy, as someone who had experienced steady pressure from the authorities. "I think we put the picture of her up on the wall after the song, but Angela was all over that album," recalled Keith Richards. "She was on T-shirts. She was real big at the time." Mick Taylor noted, "I think Mick (Jagger) wrote the song first, then thought it could be about Angela Davis afterwards. Everybody was fairly politicized because in 1972 the Vietnam War was coming to an end. We didn't have a TV at Nellcote so we never saw the news, we used to read the English papers."
The song began its recorded life in 1970 as the instrumental "Bent Green Needles," up at Stargroves. Jagger started adding the topical lyrics as the tenor of the times crept in to Nellcote. The intent is one of clear support for Davis, referenced specifically in lines like "she's a sweet back angel, not a gun-toting teacher." Mick is daringly ironic in his lyric, adopting a voice in full minstrel mode, unflinchingly quoting the highly charged word "nigger" from the politically incorrect early Frank Green song, which he had probably heard at least in the nursery rhyme version (which was also taken as a title for an Agatha Christie novel and subsequent play and film adaptations). In placing the trial of Davis within that context, via a Caribbean-flavoured folk song, Jagger celebrates Davis as a full-fledged folk hero and legend.
Ten little niggers sitting on the wall Her brothers been falling, falling one by one For a judge's murder in a judge's court Now the judge he going to judge her for all that he's worth
Jagger cleverly twists the old racist song into a metaphor for the trial and the militant arm of the civil rights movement of the late 1960s, rightly positing it as a life-and-death struggle. In less capable hands, the lyric might come off as minstrelsy of the worst sort: mockery for the sake of entertainment. But Mick co-opts the lines in support of a cause that neither Winner nor Green would likely have anticipated. In doing so, he aims to diffuse the sting of that original bigotry, and turns it in on itself, making it look ridiculous. Moreover, the alliterative words sound simply great within the rhythm and melody of the song. And Mick never breaks out of that character/narrator, singing lines like, "not a Red-loving school marm," which smoothly fit a current subject into the framework and language of an old Jamaican sort of folk song. The Stones bring that same air of authenticity and timelessness to the song that the Band and Dylan captured back in the late 1960s.
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