Exile on Main St. by The Rolling Stones – The Complete Story

It is the spring of 1971 and the biggest rock band on the planet are running for their lives. Not from the police, not from a riot, but from the British taxman. The Rolling Stones, having discovered that their manager Allen Klein had spent years arranging their finances in ways that left them owing the Inland Revenue more than they could possibly pay, pack their families, their drugs and their guitars into a fleet of cars and head for the South of France. Within twelve months that flight will produce Exile on Main St., a sprawling, slurring, swaggering double album recorded mostly in the basement of a rented villa above Villefranche-sur-Mer. It will baffle critics on release, top charts on both sides of the Atlantic, and slowly, over the next fifty years, climb to the top of nearly every credible list of the greatest rock and roll records ever made.

Released on 12 May 1972, Exile on Main St. by The Rolling Stones is the band at the peak of their powers and the edge of their endurance. It is sometimes ramshackle, occasionally indecipherable and almost wilfully resistant to the idea of a "hit", yet it has come to be regarded as the most complete distillation of what rock and roll is capable of when a great band stops trying to please anyone and starts trying to survive. This is the full story of how Exile on Main St. came to exist, what is actually on it, and why it matters more than it ever should.

Album Facts

Field	Detail
Artist	The Rolling Stones
Album	Exile on Main St.
Release Date	12 May 1972
Label	Rolling Stones Records (distributed by Atlantic in most territories)
Producer(s)	Jimmy Miller
Studio(s)	Olympic Studios, London; Stargroves, East Woodhay (with the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio); Nellcôte, Villefranche-sur-Mer (Rolling Stones Mobile); Sunset Sound Recorders, Los Angeles
Genre / Subgenre	Rock and roll, blues, country rock, gospel, soul, with detours into swing and Delta blues
Track Count	18 (original double LP)
Total Runtime	67:07
Billboard 200 Peak	Number 1 (returned to Number 2 on 2010 reissue)
UK Albums Chart Peak	Number 1 (also Number 1 on the 2010 reissue, nearly 38 years to the week later)
Other Notable Chart Peaks	Number 1 in Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden; Number 2 in Australia and Germany; Top 10 in Japan and Finland
Certifications	RIAA Platinum (United States), BPI Platinum (United Kingdom, on the 2010 reissue), Platinum (Australia, 2010), Gold (Italy, New Zealand)
Estimated Sales	Reports vary, but figures around 1 million in the United States alone (based on RIAA certification) and several million more worldwide are commonly cited; the album has been a perennial catalogue seller since the late 1970s
Key Singles	"Tumbling Dice" (released 14 April 1972, UK Number 5, US Number 7); "Happy" (US-only single, June 1972, US Number 22)

Cultural Context: Where Rock Stood in May 1972

Rock and roll was a different creature in 1972 from what it had been three years earlier. The optimistic communalism of the late 1960s had curdled. Altamont, where a fan named Meredith Hunter had been killed by Hells Angels security at a free Rolling Stones concert in December 1969, had become shorthand for the end of the dream. The Beatles had split in April 1970. Jimi Hendrix had died in September that year, Janis Joplin a month later, Jim Morrison in July 1971. The figureheads of the previous half decade were either dead, retired or, in the case of Bob Dylan, in self-imposed semi-retirement.

Into that vacuum stepped a generation of more professional, more bookish rock bands. Led Zeppelin had released the untitled fourth album five months before Exile on Main St., complete with Stairway to Heaven. Pink Floyd were touring the material that would become The Dark Side of the Moon. David Bowie released The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust just five weeks after Exile, on 16 June 1972. Glam was breaking on Top of the Pops while progressive rock was filling football stadiums. T. Rex had Electric Warrior in the charts. Roxy Music's eponymous debut would arrive in June.

The Stones, who had spent most of the 1960s being the dangerous opposite to the Beatles, were now the old guard. They had no makeup, no concept, no androgyny, no synthesisers. They had a tongue logo, two recently dead friends (Brian Jones, drowned in his swimming pool in July 1969, and the looming spectre of Hunter at Altamont), and an instinct that the only honest response to the moment was to retreat to first principles. Blues, gospel, country, rock and roll. Records made by the people who invented those forms, played back through amplifiers and tape machines in a basement in France.

That instinct is the engine that drives Exile on Main St. Where the rest of the rock establishment was busy reaching forward into concept, costume and conservatoire, the Stones were reaching back. The album that resulted feels older than it is precisely because it sounds like 1957 and 1962 and 1972 happening at the same time.

The Rolling Stones Heading Into Exile

By the time the band sat down to think about what would become Exile on Main St., they had been a working unit for nearly a decade. Formed in London in 1962 around Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ian Stewart, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, they had spent the second half of the 1960s competing directly with The Beatles for the top of every chart that mattered. By 1969 Jones, the founder, was out of the band and dead within a month, replaced on guitar by a precocious twenty year old from John Mayall's Bluesbreakers called Mick Taylor.

Taylor's arrival had transformed the Stones from a great singles band into a great album band. The four records they made with him in the lineup, namely Let It Bleed (1969), Sticky Fingers (1971), Exile on Main St. (1972) and Goats Head Soup (1973), are widely regarded as the band's golden run. Sticky Fingers, released in April 1971, had given them Brown Sugar, Wild Horses, Can't You Hear Me Knocking and Moonlight Mile. It had also been the first release on their own brand new vanity label, Rolling Stones Records, complete with the now iconic tongue and lips logo designed by John Pasche.

What looked, from the outside, like a perfectly stable empire was financially close to collapse. The Stones had finally fired Allen Klein in 1970 after years of disputes over publishing and accounting, but the price of escaping him was steep. Klein retained the rights to their pre-1971 catalogue, including everything from Satisfaction to Honky Tonk Women, and would later release several compilation records to capitalise on it. Worse, the band discovered they owed the British government more in back taxes than they had in liquid assets. Their new financial adviser, the aristocratic Prince Rupert Loewenstein, recommended an immediate move out of the country before the Inland Revenue could move first.

In April 1971 the band became tax exiles. Jagger relocated to Paris with his new bride Bianca De Macias. Watts and Wyman settled in different parts of Provence. Richards rented a vast nineteenth century villa called Nellcôte, perched in the hills above Villefranche-sur-Mer between Nice and Monaco. It had a sweeping view of the Mediterranean, sixteen bedrooms, formal gardens and, as it turned out, exactly the cellar acoustics the Stones would need.

Creating Exile on Main St.: A Villa, a Truck and a Basement

Some of what would end up on Exile on Main St. had been recorded long before the band ever set foot in France. Tracks like Shine a Light, Loving Cup, Sweet Virginia, Stop Breaking Down and All Down the Line had been started during the Sticky Fingers sessions at Olympic Studios in London and at Jagger's Hampshire country house Stargroves between 1969 and 1971. The decision to hold them back, rather than feed them to Klein's company by including them on the records they were contractually obliged to deliver, meant that by 1971 the band were sitting on a stockpile of half finished material that would not be released until they were free of him.

The plan in the south of France was to find a proper studio nearby and finish the new record there. They could not. The local options were inadequate, the band were spread out across the coast and Richards, by his own later admission, was sliding ever deeper into a daily heroin habit that made it hard for him to leave his own house, let alone drive to a studio. The pragmatic answer was to bring the studio to him. The Rolling Stones Mobile Studio, the converted lorry that had been used the previous year to record Led Zeppelin's IV at Headley Grange, was driven across the Channel and parked in the gravel courtyard at Nellcôte. Cables were run through the kitchen and down into the cellar.

The Nellcôte basement was nobody's idea of a recording studio. It was hot, airless, smelled of damp, and was lit by a single bare bulb. Charlie Watts later remembered the band setting up in separate rooms because there was not enough space for them all in one. Bill Wyman, in his memoir Stone Alone, recalled that there was a single fan in a corner window which barely worked, an aesthetic detail that later inspired the track Ventilator Blues. The villa above was a chaotic, drug saturated salon where William S. Burroughs, Gram Parsons, John Lennon, Terry Southern and the Chess Records heir Marshall Chess all came and went. Heroin moved through the building in alarming quantities. Parsons, the country rock pioneer with whom Richards had become close, was asked to leave the villa in early July 1971, in part because his own drug use had become a liability with the French police circling.

Sessions began in earnest in June 1971 and continued through to November. Wyman remembered them as nightly endurance tests, with the band working from around eight in the evening until three or four in the morning, when those who had bothered to turn up could no longer stand. Personnel varied wildly from night to night. Jagger, who had a new wife and a baby on the way, was often elsewhere. Wyman, who lived twenty minutes down the coast and disliked the atmosphere at Nellcôte, frequently sat sessions out. Watts came and went. The constants were Richards, when conscious, saxophonist Bobby Keys, guitarist Mick Taylor, pianist Nicky Hopkins, and producer Jimmy Miller.

Miller, who had produced every Stones album since Beggars Banquet in 1968, was crucial. He understood that you do not "produce" the Rolling Stones in any conventional sense. You catch them. When Richards or Wyman or Watts was missing, Miller would pick up a bass or sit behind the drum kit himself. He plays drums on Tumbling Dice (the outro), Happy and Shine a Light, and percussion on at least four other tracks. His own habit was deepening through the sessions, in ways that would later derail his career, but in 1971 he was still the steadiest hand in the building.

The engineer was Andy Johns, a young Englishman whose older brother Glyn had been a fixture of the British studio scene since the early 1960s. Andy had engineered Sticky Fingers and would go on to engineer huge swathes of 1970s hard rock. He spent the Nellcôte summer chasing power outages, fighting the temperature, and trying to get usable performances out of musicians who were sometimes asleep on their feet. Joe Zagarino (often misspelled "Zaganno" on the original credits) and Jeremy Gee assisted. Glyn Johns had handled some of the earlier 1969 sessions back at Olympic.

By November 1971 the French authorities were openly investigating Richards for drug offences and the band were running out of time. Tapes were boxed up and flown to Los Angeles, where Jagger, finally engaged, took over for the overdub and mixing sessions at Sunset Sound Recorders. Working through December 1971 and on into March 1972, Jagger brought in keyboard players Billy Preston and Dr. John, pedal steel player Al Perkins, double bassist Bill Plummer (who plays on at least four tracks where Wyman is absent), and a battery of Los Angeles backing vocalists led by Venetta Fields, Clydie King, Joe Greene, Shirley Goodman and Tami Lynn. He also took the band, Preston and Watts to a Los Angeles evangelical church where Aretha Franklin happened to be recording Amazing Grace, an experience that fed directly into the gospel-inflected arrangements of Tumbling Dice, Loving Cup, Let It Loose and Shine a Light.

The result is the sound that has been argued over for half a century. The Pitchfork critic Rob Mitchum, reviewing the 2010 reissue, called it "the hybrid product of two sessions, two bands really: the Keith Richards-led material from Nellcôte shotgun-wed to the Los Angeles gospel dabbling of Jagger and co-conspirator, keyboardist and former Beatles collaborator Billy Preston." It is precisely that tension, between Richards's basement and Jagger's church, that makes Exile on Main St. what it is.

Album Artwork and Packaging

The packaging is a record in itself. Jagger wanted a sleeve that captured what he later described as "feeling of joyful isolation, grinning in the face of a scary and unknown future". To get there, the band hired three of the most interesting visual artists in Los Angeles. The layout was handled by John Van Hamersveld, a Californian designer best known for the Endless Summer poster and the Magical Mystery Tour album cover, working with the photographer Norman Seeff. Documentary photographer Robert Frank, whose 1958 photobook The Americans had reframed how the United States was seen by itself, was brought in for additional cover photography.

The famous front cover image is not, in fact, a new Stones photograph. It is "Tattoo Parlor", an outtake from Frank's work on The Americans, a collage of sideshow circus performers including the contortionist Joe "The Human Corkscrew" Allen, Hezekiah Trambles ("The Congo Jungle Freak") and the sword-and-balls swallowing "Three Ball Charlie" from Humboldt, Nebraska. It is a deliberately disorienting image, refusing to put the band's faces on the cover of their own album. The same day Seeff photographed the Stones at their rented Bel Air mansion, Frank drove Jagger down to the 500 block of Main Street in downtown Los Angeles and photographed him outside a pawnshop, a shoeshine business and a pornographic cinema called the Galway Theatre.

The original gatefold sleeve unfolds into a Van Hamersveld collage of Frank's Stones photographs and further The Americans outtakes. Inside the sleeve, twelve perforated postcards, lifted from Seeff's Bel Air shoot, were included for fans to tear out. The whole package reads as a deliberate, half-private scrapbook of being in the world's biggest rock band while in voluntary exile. There is no band shot on the front. There is no song listing on the front. There is just a wall of strange faces.

The Songs of Exile on Main St.

Across four sides of vinyl, Exile is structured almost as a journey from a smoky bar at midnight, through a heatwave country morning, to a Sunday gospel hangover. It does not have the obvious peaks of Sticky Fingers. It has, instead, a single sprawling mood that engulfs the listener. Below is the full tracklist as released on 12 May 1972, with songwriting credits, lengths and notes on which songs became singles. All tracks are credited to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards unless otherwise noted.

#	Title	Writer(s)	Length	Single?	Notes
Side One
1	Rocks Off	Jagger, Richards	4:31	No	The opener; Richards reportedly fell asleep mid-overdub, then demanded engineer Andy Johns return at 5am so he could add another track
2	Rip This Joint	Jagger, Richards	2:22	No	Bill Plummer on upright bass; Bobby Keys on both tenor and baritone sax; one of six Exile tracks regularly played on the 1972 American Tour
3	Shake Your Hips	James "Slim Harpo" Moore	2:59	No	Cover of Slim Harpo's 1966 single; sung by Jagger, with Ian Stewart on piano
4	Casino Boogie	Jagger, Richards	3:33	No	Lyrics reportedly assembled from random phrases on cut-up cards; Nicky Hopkins on piano
5	Tumbling Dice	Jagger, Richards	3:45	Yes (lead single, 14 April 1972)	Originally titled "Good Time Woman", begun during Sticky Fingers sessions; Charlie Watts struggled with the drum breakdown, so Jimmy Miller was edited in to play it
Side Two
6	Sweet Virginia	Jagger, Richards	4:27	No	Country waltz heavily influenced by Gram Parsons; Bobby Keys on tenor sax
7	Torn and Frayed	Jagger, Richards	4:17	No	Al Perkins on pedal steel; Jim Price on organ; lyrics about a "ballroom band" possibly written about Parsons or Richards himself
8	Sweet Black Angel	Jagger, Richards	2:54	B-side of "Tumbling Dice"	Jagger's tribute to the imprisoned activist Angela Davis, who was acquitted during the 1972 tour; Richard "Didymus" Washington on marimba; cut at Stargroves
9	Loving Cup	Jagger, Richards	4:25	No	Olympic Studios original, played at the band's Hyde Park concert on 5 July 1969, the day Mick Taylor was unveiled as a Stone and Brian Jones was eulogised
Side Three
10	Happy	Jagger, Richards	3:04	Yes (US-only, June 1972)	Richards lead vocal; cut as an afternoon jam at Nellcôte by Richards on guitar and bass, Bobby Keys on baritone sax and Jimmy Miller on drums; later inspired by Anita Pallenberg's pregnancy
11	Turd on the Run	Jagger, Richards	2:36	No	Bill Plummer on bass; Jagger on harmonica; a flat-out blues stomp
12	Ventilator Blues	Jagger, Richards, Mick Taylor	3:24	No	The only Exile track to give Taylor a songwriting credit; named after the single broken fan in the Nellcôte basement window
13	I Just Want to See His Face	Jagger, Richards	2:52	No	Dr. John uncredited on piano; Richards on organ; Taylor on electric bass; Jagger reportedly invented the lyrics in real time during the take
14	Let It Loose	Jagger, Richards	5:16	No	Olympic original; gospel choir of Joe Greene, Tami Lynn, Shirley Goodman, Mac Rebennack (Dr. John) and others; one of Jagger's most undervalued vocals
Side Four
15	All Down the Line	Jagger, Richards	3:49	B-side of "Happy" (US)	Jagger's first choice for a single; Kathi McDonald on backing vocals
16	Stop Breaking Down	Robert Johnson; arr. Jagger, Richards, Taylor, Wyman, Watts	4:34	No	Reworking of a 1937 Robert Johnson Delta blues; Ian Stewart on boogie woogie piano; Taylor on slide guitar
17	Shine a Light	Jagger, Richards	4:14	No	The oldest song on the record, with roots back to 1968-69; Billy Preston on organ and piano; Mick Taylor on bass; Jimmy Miller on drums; later borrowed as the title of the Martin Scorsese concert film
18	Soul Survivor	Jagger, Richards	3:49	No	Richards on bass; lyric that reads like a love-hate confession about the Nellcôte sessions: "I wish I'd never brought you, it's gonna be the death of me"

Rocks Off opens the record with what is essentially a mission statement. Keys's saxophone screams in over the top of an off-kilter Richards riff, Jagger sings about feeling nothing at all, and Taylor's lead guitar curls around the back of the mix like cigarette smoke. The dreamy bridge, when Jagger's vocal is suddenly processed and pulled into the middle distance, was an Andy Johns mixing flourish that has been copied a thousand times since.

Rip This Joint follows at sprinter pace, Charlie Watts's hi-hat clattering like dropped cutlery. Shake Your Hips slows the heart rate, with Jagger singing the Slim Harpo blues in a sly imitation of the original. Critics at the time accused the vocal of being an affectation; with hindsight it sounds entirely respectful.

Tumbling Dice is the centrepiece of side one and the album's best known song. It had begun two years earlier in London under the working title Good Time Woman, before Jagger rewrote the words around a gambler's tossed off shrug. The famous swing of the back half, where the song falls apart into a Venetta Fields and Clydie King backing chorus, was a Jagger-led Los Angeles overdub. The single was released on 14 April 1972, four weeks before the album, and reached Number 5 in the UK and Number 7 in the US.

Side two heads for the country. Sweet Virginia is a barroom waltz that owes almost everything to Gram Parsons, who had spent that summer at Nellcôte teaching Richards how to play George Jones records. The line "got to scrape the shit right off your shoes" is the moment Jagger most openly nods to his Bakersfield homework. Torn and Frayed opens with Al Perkins's pedal steel like a Sunday morning headache. Sweet Black Angel, recorded earlier at Stargroves, is Jagger writing what he called "a love song" to the imprisoned communist academic Angela Davis, who had been arrested in 1970 in connection with a courthouse shooting in Marin County, California, and was acquitted on 4 June 1972, the day after the band's 1972 American Tour opened. Loving Cup closes the side with one of Nicky Hopkins's most beautiful piano performances and a Jagger vocal that is half drunk, half preacher.

Side three is where the album becomes itself. Happy is Keith Richards's signature lead vocal, and his account of how it came to be is one of the great Nellcôte stories. He arrived early one afternoon, found Bobby Keys and Jimmy Miller already in the basement, and the three of them recorded the basic track inside an hour, with Richards on guitar and bass, Keys on baritone sax and Miller behind the drum kit. By the time the rest of the band arrived, the song existed. Released as the second single in the United States in June 1972 to capitalise on the upcoming tour, it reached Number 22 on the Billboard Hot 100. It has been a fixture of Stones live sets ever since.

Turd on the Run is a two and a half minute Delta blues that sounds genuinely panicked. Ventilator Blues is the only song on the album with a Mick Taylor co-writing credit; the band later admitted Taylor had been more involved in writing than he was credited with elsewhere on the record, which is one of the reasons he eventually walked out in late 1974. I Just Want to See His Face is a swampy, half-improvised gospel chant with Dr. John (uncredited) playing piano and Jagger reportedly making up the words at the microphone. Let It Loose closes the side with a five minute build that owes its existence to the gospel choir Jagger had assembled in Los Angeles. The Bill Janovitz 33⅓ monograph on Exile argues persuasively that Let It Loose is the album's true emotional climax.

Side four is Sunday morning. All Down the Line was Jagger's preferred lead single; Andy Johns could not hear it on radio and persuaded him to go with Tumbling Dice instead. Stop Breaking Down, a Robert Johnson cover from 1937, is the album's most direct nod to the source material. Shine a Light is the oldest song on the record, originally cut at Olympic Studios in the late 1960s with Billy Preston on organ and piano, and is the song that Martin Scorsese would borrow as the title of his 2008 Rolling Stones concert film. Soul Survivor closes the album with what reads, in retrospect, like a Jagger letter to Richards: "you ain't giving me no quarter, I'd rather drink seawater, I wish I'd never brought you, it's gonna be the death of me".

Release, Reception and Reappraisal

Exile on Main St. was released on 12 May 1972 as a gatefold double LP on Rolling Stones Records, distributed in most territories by Atlantic. The Tumbling Dice single had already softened the ground a month earlier, and the record entered the charts at the top in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden. It made Number 2 in Germany and Australia, and the top ten in Japan and Finland. It was a commercial triumph from the moment it landed.

Critics were not so sure. The contemporary reviews divided sharply between those who heard a masterpiece and those who heard a mess. Lenny Kaye in Rolling Stone in July 1972 found the record uneven and ended his piece with the famously hedged sentence that "the great Stones album of their mature period is yet to come". Other reviewers, including Richard Williams in Melody Maker, Geoffrey Cannon in The Guardian and Roy Carr in NME, were enthusiastic from the off, with Williams calling it the band's best album and predicting it would "take its place in history". Robert Christgau, writing his end-of-year list in Newsday, called it "a fagged-out masterpiece" and his record of 1972.

Within three or four years the consensus had shifted entirely. Richards later remembered that "when Exile came out it didn't sell particularly well at the beginning, and it was also pretty much universally panned. But within a few years the people who had written the reviews saying it was a piece of crap were extolling it as the best frigging album in the world." He is exaggerating slightly, but the broad arc is correct. By the time Rolling Stone published its Best 100 Albums of the Last 20 Years feature in August 1987, Exile was at Number 3. Entertainment Weekly named it the greatest CD of all time in 1993. Q ranked it third on its 100 Greatest British Albums Ever list in 2000. Pitchfork put it at Number 11 in its Top 100 Albums of the 1970s in 2003 and gave the 2010 reissue a 10 out of 10.

Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time has been the longest-running barometer. Exile debuted at Number 7 on the 2003 list, held the same position on the 2012 revision, and dropped only modestly to Number 14 on the heavily revised 2020 and 2023 editions. In every edition it has been the highest ranked Rolling Stones album. The 2010 reissue, with a bonus disc of ten previously unreleased or reworked tracks, holds an aggregate score of 100 on Metacritic, a perfect score it shares with a tiny handful of other archival releases including the London Calling reissue.

Jagger, characteristically, has remained unconvinced. In a 2003 interview included in According to the Rolling Stones, he said "Exile is not one of my favourite albums" and that the record "has some of the worst mixes I've ever heard". Richards, equally characteristically, has defended it as the truest snapshot of the band ever committed to tape. Both men, of course, are right. Exile on Main St. is murky, scrappy, sometimes incoherent, and it is exactly that quality that has aged so well.

Singles and Promotional Releases

Only two songs were released as singles in 1972, both of them substantial hits in their own right.

"Tumbling Dice" was released as the lead single on 14 April 1972, four weeks ahead of the album, with "Sweet Black Angel" on the B-side in the United Kingdom. It became the album's biggest commercial moment, peaking at Number 5 in the UK Singles Chart and Number 7 on the US Billboard Hot 100. There was no proper music video in the modern sense; the band's promotional materials for the song were limited to a handful of television performances and the audio-only single sleeve.

"Happy" was issued as a US-only single in June 1972, with "All Down the Line" on the flip. Conceived as a way to extend airplay during the 1972 American Tour, it climbed to Number 22 on the Billboard Hot 100 in August. As Keith Richards's first lead vocal on a major Rolling Stones single, it became a permanent fixture of the band's live setlist and was the cue, for the next half century, for him to step to the front of the stage on every tour.

No other tracks were lifted as singles at the time. The 2010 reissue spawned a single in the form of "Plundered My Soul", a previously unreleased Nellcôte-era track substantially overdubbed in 2009, which received a token vinyl release on Record Store Day.

Touring and Live: The Stones Touring Party of 1972

To support the album, the Rolling Stones embarked on their first tour of the United States since the disaster at Altamont in December 1969. The American Tour 1972, more widely known by its self-mocking nickname S.T.P. (the Stones Touring Party, a phrase derived from the laminated passes they handed out to crew and friends), opened at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver on 3 June 1972 and closed three night-stand at New York's Madison Square Garden on 26 July 1972, Jagger's 29th birthday. Across the eight weeks the band played 48 shows in cities including Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Denver, Chicago, Houston, Mobile, Washington DC, Detroit, Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh's hometown crowd in the Civic Arena.

The opening act on every date was Stevie Wonder, then promoting his groundbreaking Music of My Mind. Wonder would frequently join the Stones onstage for an encore medley of his 1966 hit Uptight (Everything's Alright) and Satisfaction. The placement, in front of fifteen thousand white rock fans every night, did much to widen Wonder's audience just ahead of Talking Book and Superstition that autumn.

The setlist relied heavily on the new album. Rocks Off, Happy, Tumbling Dice, Sweet Virginia, All Down the Line and Rip This Joint were played most nights, with occasional appearances by Loving Cup, Ventilator Blues, Torn and Frayed and Sweet Black Angel. Older material included Brown Sugar, Bitch, Gimme Shelter, Midnight Rambler, Jumpin' Jack Flash and Street Fighting Man. Notably absent was Sympathy for the Devil, which the band had effectively retired from US setlists after Altamont and would not perform there again for most of the decade.

The tour was as much a piece of theatre off the stage as on it. Truman Capote was commissioned to write a travelogue for Rolling Stone and failed to deliver, abandoning the tour in New Orleans before resurfacing for the final shows in New York. Robert Frank, the same photographer whose work decorated the album sleeve, was on the road shooting the cinéma vérité tour documentary Cocksucker Blues, which captured so much drug use, backstage chaos and groupie behaviour that the band themselves later obtained a court order forbidding its general release. Truman Capote's unfinished essay was eventually replaced by Andy Warhol's 1973 interview with him about the tour. Robert Greenfield, who covered the tour for Rolling Stone, expanded his reporting into the book S.T.P.: A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones (1974), which remains the definitive eyewitness account.

The trouble was constant. Thirty one Vancouver policemen were injured by ticketless fans on opening night; sixty arrests and fifteen injuries followed at the 13 June San Diego show; the Tucson police used tear gas on 14 June; on the night of the Denver concert, Stephen Stills and Keith Richards reportedly drew knives on each other in a hotel suite; a bomb went off in the band's equipment van outside the Montreal Forum on 17 July; on 18 July Jagger and Richards were arrested in Rhode Island following an altercation with a photographer named Andy Dickerman, and Boston Mayor Kevin White personally intervened to bail them out so that night's Boston Garden show could go ahead. The final show at Madison Square Garden ended with balloons, cake and a pie fight, followed by an Ahmet Ertegun party at the St. Regis with Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Woody Allen and Zsa Zsa Gabor in attendance. The tour grossed an unprecedented four million US dollars, although Jagger was reportedly furious to discover that Led Zeppelin's manager Peter Grant had simultaneously secured the band a 90-10 split of gross receipts on the contemporaneous Led Zeppelin 1972 North American tour.

The concert film Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones, drawn from the Fort Worth and Houston shows of 24 and 25 June 1972, was released theatrically in 1974 and remains the cleanest official document of the band on this tour.

Exile on Main St. in TV, Film and Media

Sync placements have been one of the album's enduring afterlives. Martin Scorsese, a long term Stones obsessive, has reached repeatedly into Exile. His 2006 film The Departed uses Let It Loose during a key plot turn in which the Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio characters' fates collide; the same film features an Exile jewel case being used to deliver an incriminating recording. Scorsese also borrowed the album's eighth song on side four, Shine a Light, as the title and de facto theme of his 2008 Stones concert documentary.

Showtime's Californication titled the opening episode of its fourth season "Exile on Main St." in 2011, and revisited Shine a Light in its sixth season. The CW's Supernatural opened its sixth season with an episode called "Exile on Main Street". The British acid house band Alabama 3 nodded to the album with the title of their 1997 debut Exile on Coldharbour Lane. The most fully realised tribute remains Liz Phair's 1993 album Exile in Guyville, conceived as a song-by-song response to the original. Matchbox Twenty, who covered Push on every American radio station for two years in the late 1990s, titled their 2007 retrospective Exile on Mainstream.

Pussy Galore, the New York noise-rock band led by Jon Spencer, released their own cassette-only cover of the entire album in 1986. Phish performed the album in full as their Halloween "musical costume" set at Indio, California, on 31 October 2009. Tom Waits, asked by The Guardian in 2005 to name his favourite records, picked Exile and called it "a tree of life. This record is the watering hole. Keith Richards plays his ass off."

Legacy and Influence

The story of the Rolling Stones after Exile on Main St. is the story of a band that never again had everything aligned in the same way. Goats Head Soup arrived in August 1973, sounding more polished and more uncertain. By the end of 1974 Mick Taylor was gone, citing both his lack of songwriting credits and Richards's drug use as factors. Ronnie Wood, formerly of the Faces, joined in 1975 and remains in the band today. The Rolling Stones would go on to release dozens more albums, including Some Girls (1978), Tattoo You (1981) and 2023's Grammy-winning Hackney Diamonds, but the four-album run of Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main St. and Goats Head Soup is universally regarded as their high water mark.

The album's influence is harder to quantify because almost every guitar band that came after it has, at some point, tried to make their own Exile. The Replacements built a career on the principle that smudged, half-drunk performances often beat clean ones. The Black Crowes' debut Shake Your Money Maker is essentially a homage. Primal Scream's Give Out But Don't Give Up was overtly modelled on Nellcôte. Ryan Adams's Heartbreaker, Kings of Leon's Aha Shake Heartbreak, and most of the British "Cool Britannia" generation owe Exile a direct debt. Even The Strokes and The Hold Steady, working in entirely different traditions, have cited it.

For the Stones themselves, the legacy of Nellcôte has been more complicated. Keith Richards eventually beat his heroin habit at the turn of the 1980s and has spoken openly about how close Exile came to being his last record. Producer Jimmy Miller's own addictions worsened after the album, and his career as the Stones' producer ended with Goats Head Soup. Mick Taylor has spent the half century since talking publicly about feeling underpaid and uncredited for his contribution. Bill Wyman left the band in 1993 to pursue a quieter life. Charlie Watts kept playing the drums in his perfect, unshowy way until his death in August 2021. The Rolling Stones, with replacement drummer Steve Jordan, continued as if continuity itself was the point.

The 2010 reissue, supervised by Don Was and the Glimmer Twins (the Jagger-Richards joint production alias) and mixed by Bob Clearmountain, gave the album a fresh remaster and a bonus disc that featured ten tracks, including the Nellcôte-era outtake Plundered My Soul, an early version of Tumbling Dice called Good Time Women, and an alternative Soul Survivor with Richards on lead vocal. The reissue debuted at Number 1 on the UK Albums Chart in May 2010, almost exactly 38 years after the original, and Number 2 in the United States.

Things You Might Not Know About Exile on Main St.

#	Fact
1	The album cover photograph "Tattoo Parlor" is not a Stones image at all. It is an outtake from Robert Frank's 1958 photobook The Americans, a collage of sideshow circus performers including the contortionist Joe "The Human Corkscrew" Allen and the sword-balancing "Three Ball Charlie" from Humboldt, Nebraska.
2	Mick Taylor is credited as a co-writer on only one Exile song, Ventilator Blues. Taylor has spent the last fifty years quietly insisting that he contributed substantial unacknowledged writing to many more, and his departure from the band in late 1974 was partly about credit and royalties.
3	Jimmy Miller, the album's producer, plays drums on three tracks: the outro of Tumbling Dice (when Charlie Watts struggled with the breakdown groove), Happy and Shine a Light.
4	Loving Cup, despite being entirely an Olympic Studios recording from 1969, was first played live at the Stones' free Hyde Park concert on 5 July 1969, the show that was Mick Taylor's official debut as a Stone and that opened with Jagger reading a Shelley poem in memory of Brian Jones, who had drowned in his swimming pool two days earlier.
5	Allen Klein, the band's former manager whom they had spent years escaping, successfully sued the band after the album's release on the grounds that five songs on it (Sweet Virginia, Loving Cup, All Down the Line, Shine a Light and the Robert Johnson reworking Stop Breaking Down) had been composed during his tenure. His company ABKCO acquired publishing rights to the five and used them to compile the 1972 retrospective More Hot Rocks (Big Hits and Fazed Cookies).
6	Dr. John plays piano on I Just Want to See His Face but is not credited on the original LP sleeve. The same track features Mick Taylor on electric bass, Bill Plummer on string bass, and Jimmy Miller on percussion, with no Bill Wyman, no Charlie Watts and no Nicky Hopkins.
7	The famous gospel-inflected backing vocal arrangements on Tumbling Dice, Loving Cup, Let It Loose and Shine a Light were inspired by Jagger, Watts and Billy Preston visiting a Los Angeles evangelical church where Aretha Franklin happened to be recording the live sessions that became her 1972 album Amazing Grace.
8	Sweet Black Angel is Mick Jagger's tribute to Angela Davis, the Marxist academic then on trial in California for kidnapping and murder. Davis was acquitted on 4 June 1972, the day after the band opened the American Tour 1972 in Vancouver.
9	The lyrics to Casino Boogie were reportedly assembled from random phrases written on cut-up cards, a technique Mick Jagger had picked up from William S. Burroughs (who was a guest at Nellcôte during the sessions).
10	The 2010 reissue's bonus track Plundered My Soul features new lead vocals by Mick Jagger and additional guitar parts recorded in 2009 by Keith Richards and Mick Taylor. The latter contribution is Taylor's first official Rolling Stones recording session since 1974.
11	Bill Wyman is credited as the bass player on only eight of the album's eighteen tracks. The other bass parts were played by Mick Taylor, Keith Richards or session double bassist Bill Plummer. Wyman has insisted in subsequent interviews that the credits are wrong and that he played on more.
12	The album is widely regarded as the highest-ranked Rolling Stones record on every credible "greatest of all time" list, including Rolling Stone's 500 (Number 7 in 2003 and 2012, Number 14 in the 2020 and 2023 revisions). No other Stones album has ever placed higher than 14 on that list.

Listen to the Riffology Podcast on Exile on Main St.

On the Riffology podcast, Neil and Chris put the needle back on the rock and roll records that mattered. The Exile on Main St. episode digs into the Nellcôte basement, the Allen Klein tax mess, the Mick Taylor songwriting argument, the gospel detour in Los Angeles, the 1972 tour bombings and pie fights, and the question of whether anyone who was actually there can be trusted to remember what really happened. If this article is the long read, the episode is the conversation. New episodes drop every week and are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast and wherever else you get your podcasts.