The profile that I chose for this week is from the Times of London and can (hopefully) be found here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article7117242.ece
I chose this for a variety of reasons, though number one, is probably my great love for the Rolling Stones and for Exile on Main Street. The re-release and with actual tracks from the session from the session that have never been played before makes this 1971 album topical for today. Some of the descriptions for the songs struck me such as describing "Rocks Off" as 'hell-for-leather' which I thought was particularly incisive. I think the interviews with the three main band members were distributed throughout the piece quite well and helped to form a very coherent narrative.
The piece also did a good job utilizing parts of the interviews to poke holes in the Stones' established mythos such as Keith Richards always being on drugs, to the point where it affected his work and Charlie Watts not having any kind of drug problem. The piece also does a great job of establishing a sense of time and history. Through descriptions of the tax situation, you can begin to feel the period in the career of the Stones that this happened. The discussion of Allen Klein's theft of their money also manages to sound more timely and using their descriptions of the situation with him makes it sound more pressing than simply writing about it from a third-person standpoint would have. The writer could perhaps given Exile on Main Street a better sense of where it fits in the full career of the Stones but overall, I think it is a good piece and it shows a lot of the irreverent humor but also fine writing that I associate with British papers. The piece serves to re-introduce one to the Rolling Stones as simply musicians and Exile on Main Street as a still visceral album rather than a bunch of old dudes trotted out as "icons" and the album is some sort of canonical work. It made me want to buy the re-issue and I like to this that I am kind of a hard customer.
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I agree that I didn't get enough of a sense of how the album fits into the Stones' career. I was sort of confused by the article, probably because I don't know too much about the Stones, but I think also because I couldn't feel a clear sense of organization (I'm sure there was one, it just didn't feel logical to me). I think I wanted more of a connection between the album and that period. I wanted the focus to be more obvious, instead of, "well I went and interviewed the Stones and here's what they said."
ReplyDeleteI do, however, like what you said Joel about the different perspectives of the different band members playing off of each other nicely to give a complex portrait of the band and that period in their history.