The Rolling Stones

Though Exile on Main St. eventually sprawls out stylistically over the course of its four vinyl sides, it begins with a mean one-two punch. We barely have any time to recover from the lead-off track before we’re hit with the blistering assault of “Rip This Joint.” With the boys springing from the musty basement as if with mouthfuls of trucker speed, riding shotgun in this punk-paced song that almost serves as an overture for the whole runaway train of a record – announcing stops in “Alabam’,” Santa Fe, Dallas, Texas, New Orleans, even Washington, stopping to see “Dick and Pat down in old D.C.” – t he song takes off at a breakneck pace and never looks back. Keith Richards claimed it “was the fastest song (tempo) we ever cut.”

If the sound of suburban hardcore punk 10-15 years later had not gotten so rhythmically rigid and straight (and straight–edge) as to all but abandon the swinging roots of rock & roll, it might have sounded something like “Rip This Joint.” The Stones achieve a pre-punk energy, coupled with a sexy 1950s groove, years before punk-informed neo-rockabilly artists had any baby curls to grease down with Royal Crown. The song has the early, regional underground rockabilly flare of 1950s West Virginia wildman Hasil Adkins, who Cub Koda called “a true rock & roll primitive.” And it is this sort of spirit, ripped from the raw, minimalist source, that the Stones channel explosively on “Rip This Joint.”

Jagger’s amphetamine rush of words is most obviously an homage to early rock & roll travelogue numbers like “Route 66” and Chuck Berry’s “Back in the U.S.A.” and “Sweet Little 16,” though updated with the jet-set cheekiness that would later be on full display in “Respectable.” Over the walking bass line (actually, it doesn’t walk, it runs) of upright bassist Bill Plummer in place of Bill Wyman (oddly, since Wyman loves this rock & roll-purist sort of number), Richards’ relentless hammering guitar, and the pounding drumming of Charlie Watts, Jagger starts off the song with “Momma says ‘yes,’ poppa says ‘no’/Make up your mind ‘cause I gotta go/Gonna raise hell at the Union Hall/Drive myself right over the wall.” After a couple of throaty rebel yells, his more urbane and audacious self returns, with “Dick and Pat in old D.C./Well, they’re gonna hold some shit for me.” Jagger has the cheek to insert this latter insolent aside after a couple of lines in which he sarcastically humbles himself, the artist in exile, to ask “Mister President, Mister immigration man/Let me in, sweetie, to your fair land.”

Such lines should have made “Rip This Joint” the perfect opening song on the 1972 Stones Touring Party tour and/or the films documenting it. Jagger gives calls out to New Orleans, with “Dixie Dean” and “Dallas, Texas, with the Butter Queen,” while warning “Little Rock, and I’m fit to pop,” and “Alabam’ don’t give a damn.” Dixie Dean sounds like a New Orleans figure and that was probably the reason he slipped into the lyrics, but it’s most likely a reference to the legendary 1920s English footballer. Barbara, the Butter Queen was apparently the same sort of creative groupie as Cynthia Plaster Caster, for, according to Keith (who recalls more than one Butter Queen) “they did loads of wonderful things with butter, apparently. I used to see them around all the time, but they never buttered me up. I used to avoid them like the plague. Anything that smacked of professionalism.” In notes for the Gimme Shelter DVD, Stones assistant Jo Bergman recalled answering a motel door in Texas during the 1969 tour, when “a blonde with straggly hair announced ‘I’ve got a pound of butter in my purse. Where’s Mick?’ She was the Dallas Butter Queen. Groupies had titles then.”

Little Richard is the primary influence on “Rip This Joint.” The song more or less quotes Richard’s “Rip It Up,” and not just the title. In the song, written by Robert A. Blackwell and John S. Marascaico, Richard sings “I've got me a date and I won't be late
Pick her up in my 88/Trek on down to the union hall/When the joint starts jumpin' I'll have a ball.” Charlie Watts says, “Richard, for me, is a very underrated person in that he really is a wonderful singer and piano player. He's fabulous. But because he's entertaining, which is what people loved about him, his playing is overshadowed by all that.” Indeed, the Stones’ generation might have been the last to understand the significance of Little Richard’s contributions to the foundation of rock & roll – and even then, it was only the musicians who cared enough to be aware. Little Richard was in and out of retirement (to the Cloth) at this point, and in subsequent years, he slipped further into caricature and self-parody.

While “Rip This Joint” swings like the boogie-woogie piano-driven music of Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, the Stones amp up the Chuck Berry-ish guitar and piano boogie to hard-rock level. Continuing the Chuck Berry influence, Charlie Watts tosses off efficient tom-tom rolls like Berry drummers Ebby Hardy and Odie Payne, and Nicky Hopkins channels Johnny Johnson in his piano figures. Additionally, they quote one of the lesser known Berry titles “Let it Rock.” Jagger seems to be pushed by the band and also to be goading them on. It would be hard to picture the musicians swirling up such a storm without the vocal encouragement of Jagger, most likely in a guide vocal. His final take sounds unrestrained, as if he’s whooping it up between swigs of a bottle of Wild Turkey. His singing here is like Little Richard at his most raw.

Everyone in the octet plays their heart out, trying to keep up with each other. In a caption for a picture of a wiped-out Richards lying on a mattress, Dominique Tarlé noted “Keith played it all night long, for days. He was exhausted. It was very difficult to keep the perfect rhythm, and Jimmy Miller wanted it to be spot on. Keith gave it everything he had,” trying nail down the rapid-fire guitar part.Bobby Keys plays baritone and tenor sax, with a couple of squealing solos on the tenor, while Jim Price, on the trumpet and trombone, punctuates lines along with Keys. Mick Taylor slips in some slide parts. Plummer, a jazz player brought in by Jim Keltner, overdubbed his parts in Los Angeles during the final overdubbing and mixing sessions and his slapping-style upright adds an authentic 1950s flavor. Nicky Hopkins plays the sort of boogie-woogie part normally reserved for Stones stalwart traditionalist Ian Stewart. And Hopkins is a force to be reckoned with, playing almost exclusively the high octaves in seventh chord triplets. The song is over, as if in a blur, in a little over two minutes.

Mirroring many of the subjects in Robert Frank’s The Americans, Exile on Main St. often betrays a sense of weariness. This was, after all, a band that had been through an awful lot in the years leading up to Exile: births, deaths, arrests, marriages, break-ups, drug abuse, financial turmoil, and the constant pressures of maintaining a successful band and business. And America was beaten down by the end of the 1960s as well. But as with Frank’s book, there are glimmers of not just optimism, but the sort of outright exuberance that led Kerouac to describe Frank’s work as akin to "that crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and the music comes out of a jukebox or a funeral." If we were in New Orleans – mythical New Orleans – it would not matter if it was one or the other; it is party time nevertheless. Like Frank, Tarlé captures the weariness and joy, as well as all the emotional shades of gray in between, of the Exile sessions.

Criticism of Exile as overly sprawling misses the point. Certainly the album is ambitious in its attempt to capture the breadth and scope of American music, at least the strains that appealed to the band. Though the Rolling Stones most likely did not sit down and preconceive it as such, the record seems to set out to cover nothing less than the wide-open spaces and shadowy corners of America itself via the nation's music — from urban soul to down-home country to New Orleans jazz: a musical accompaniment for Frank’s photos. "Rip This Joint" sets the tone for this journey, as a modern-day "Route 66" travelogue from Birmingham to San Diego. It’s as if the band had reached a tipping point, where the collective intake of influences – via the eyes and ears of all the individual members – gushed forth in a torrent, laying out a roadmap of where American popular music had been, and also where it was going: all captured on two pieces of vinyl.