Exile on Main Street (14) is the 10th British and 12th American studio album by the English band the Rolling Stones, released in May 1972. Recording began in 1969 in England during sessions for Sticky Fingers and continued in mid-1971 at a rented villa in the South of France named Nellcote while the band lived abroad as tax exiles. A collage of various images, the album’s artwork, according to frontman Mick Jagger, reflects the Rolling Stones as “runaway outlaws using the blues as its weapon against the world”, showcasing “feeling of joyful isolation, grinning in the face of a scary and unknown future”.
Working with a mobile recording studio, the loose and unorganised Nellcôte sessions went on for hours into the night, with personnel varying greatly from day to day. The recording was completed with overdub sessions at Los Angeles’s Sunset Sound and included additional musicians such as pianist Nicky Hopkins, saxophonist Bobby Keys, drummer Jimmy Miller and horn player Jim Price. The resulting music was rooted in blues, rock and roll, swing, country and gospel, while the lyrics explored themes related to hedonism, sex and time. These newly recorded tracks were combined with some tracks recorded at earlier sessions from 1969–1971, resulting in the Stones’ first double album.
Although Exile is often thought to reflect Richards’ vision for a raw, rootsy rock sound, Jagger was already expressing his boredom with rock and roll in several interviews at the time of the album’s release. Jagger’s stance on Exile‘s rock and roll sound at the time is interpreted by the music academic Barry J. Faulk to seemingly “signal the end of the Stones’ conscious attempt to revive American-style roots rock”. With Richards’ effectiveness seriously undermined by his dependence on heroin, the group’s subsequent 1970s releases – directed largely by Jagger – would experiment to varying degrees with other musical genres, moving away from the rootsy influences of Exile on Main St.
Exile on Main St. contains frequently performed concert staples and was a number one charting album in six countries, including the UK, US, and Canada. It spawned the hit songs “Happy”, which featured a rare lead vocal from Keith Richards, country music ballad “Sweet Virginia”, and worldwide top-ten hit “Tumbling Dice”. A remastered and expanded version of the album was released in 2010 featuring a bonus disc with 10 new tracks. Unusual for a re-release, it also charted highly at the time of its release, reaching number one in the UK and number two in the US.
The album was originally met with mixed reviews before a positive critical reassessment during the 1970s. It has since been viewed by many critics as the Rolling Stones’ best work and a culmination of a string of the band’s highly critically successful albums, following the releases of Beggar’s Banquet (1968), Let It Bleed (1969) and Sticky Fingers (1971). Rolling Stone magazine has ranked Exile on Main St. number 14 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in the 2020 edition, the highest Rolling Stones album ranked on the list. In 2012, the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, the band’s fourth album to be inducted.
