The Rolling Stones—Gathering No Moss

The music world is mired in reviews of the newly released remastered version of the Rolling Stones' 1972 album Exile on Main Street. There's lots of talk about this flawed masterpiece and the fact that for a double album it spawned only two hits: "Tumbling Dice" and "Happy."

Commercially, the album was a success: it reached No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200 Pop Albums chart. Critically, well, we're still singing its praises 38 years after its release.

Murky? Sure, after all, the band (or at least songwriter and guitarist Keith Richard) was deep into a heroin habit. If you've ever done smack, you have to marvel that he could function at this high artistic level at all.

But drugs don't tell the story—smack is just a small part of the tale.

The title Exile on Main Street refers both the fact that the band was sequestered in  French chateau while escaping the taxman and to the band's self-imposed exile following the 1969 fiasco at Altamont Speedway, where members of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, hired as security, bludgeoned a fan to death right in front of the stage and threatened to beat members of the Jefferson Airplane shortly before a guy pointed a loaded revolver at Mick Jagger who was performing just a few feet away. That sobering scene, and the singer's horrified look as he reviewed the film's rushes, are captured on the Maysles brothers' disturbing 1970 film documentary Gimme Shelter.

After Altamont, which is widely regarded as the end of '60s innocence, the Stones stopped touring, though they were at the height of their careers. Sticky Fingers was released in 1971, but Exile—recorded between 1969 and 1972—marked their real return.

Allegorically, Exile served as the perfect soundtrack for an exhausted generation struggling with the disillusionment of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the breakup of the Beatles and drug use that had gone far beyond the recreational stage.

Exile on Main Street is the first real '70s album, and it reads like a collective sigh—for the Stones, a chance to scrape the shit right off their shoes (to paraphrase "Sweet Virginia"). It includes an exorcism (the voodoo beat of "I Just Want to See His Face," also a clever commentary on the nascent Jesus movement) as well as a frantic effort to escape the past ("Ventilator Blues") and a slew of high-octane blues-based rock songs intended to reconnect with the band's roots through a filter of cocaine and creeping cynicism ("Rocks Off," "Rip This Joint," "Turd on the Run").

The real meaning of Exile lies between the lines of "Sweet Virginia," the autobiographical "Torn and Frayed," "Let It Loose" and "Loving Cup," songs that are routinely dismissed these days because they are seen as poor candidates for some critics desert-island picks.

But the significance of Exile is summed up in the album's closing track: "Soul Survivor."

The band—and its fans—had been through hell, a little worse for the wear, but still capable of bringin' the noise.

Exile still evokes the power of rock 'n' roll to serve as a sonic salve for our collective soul.

—Greg Cahill