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Exile On Main St. in depth

There's always a lot of talk about the murky mix and the low production values of Exile On Main St. But the quintessential thing about the record is its tight focus on the basic components of The Stones' down-and-dirty blues-based rock 'n' roll songs and style. 

How they got turned into a record is one thing. But how the band wrote them and played them is another, and as a collection of rock-country-blues songs, Exile is a masterpiece. There are few moments that can be faulted on this album: it's a massively powerful, almost devastating experience. It is also one of the most discussed. 

Exile On Main Street takes up where Sticky Fingers left off, with the Stones wiping out one set of solutions - heading into exile to escape the cops and the robbers of Her Majesty's Inland Revenue - only to be confronted with another pile of problems, largely (according to popular myth) in the form of sex and drugs.

Naturally, the only way to confront these powerful demons is with the third part of the Holy Trinity: rock 'n' roll.

??You'd sort of jam an acoustic guitar into the corner of one of these cubicles and just start playing and you'd hear it back you'd think, that doesn't sound anything like what I was playing, but it sounds great. So you started to play around with the basement itself, aiming your amplifier up at the ceiling instead of like normal.?

Keith Richards, 2001