January 20, 2021:
I responded to the release of Exile on Main Street with enormous enthusiasm.
I took our little Sears portable stereo into my room, turned it up as loud as I was allowed, sitting on my tiny single bed not much bigger than a cot, rocking out to "Rocks Off", again and again and again.
But it was puzzling.
In part because it had that sound.
I loved it. But I recognized immediately that it wasn't full of the kinds of FM-friendly hits the previous three albums had featured. It was rootsy like its predecessors, but it had an air of sadness, even despair, where songs like "Let it Loose" seemed to be about impotence, and there was a palpable feeling of endings, whether of impending death from overdose, or arrest, or some intangible other.
And it was thick with gospel, the only positive references to Jesus in the Stones' catalog. "I need a shot of salvation", "I need a sanctified mind", "I just want to see his face", "May the Good Lord shine a light on you". This was no longer "Sympathy For the Devil" and these songs were not about revolt. They were about exhaustion, and you could feel it.
The Stones had always been dangerous. This was a new flavor. It felt like life or death, in an immediate, visceral sense. This might be what the '90s heroin bands responded to so powerfully.
It's always interested me that it took such a long time for that record to find its legend. Twenty years. I knew it was a masterpiece the minute I first dropped the needle.