Exile On Main St

In early 1971, the British government announced a 93% income tax rate on top earners. The Rolling Stones had a choice: hand over nearly everything they had made, or leave England. They left. Keith Richards rented a 16-room Belle Époque mansion called Villa Nellcôte on the French Riviera, a building that had served as a Gestapo headquarters during World War II, and turned its basement into a recording studio. The musicians were jammed into an ad hoc setup described as a cross between a steam-bath and an opium den, powered by electricity hijacked from the French railway system, surrounded by a constant rotation of hangers-on and drug dealers. Mick Jagger spent much of the time in Paris with his pregnant wife. Nobody was entirely sure who was in charge.

What they produced in those conditions is widely regarded as the greatest rock and roll album ever made. The loose, disorganized sessions and Richards' deep involvement in the proceedings created a raw, unpolished sound that no amount of deliberate studio craft could have manufactured. Eighteen tracks of barbed soul, mutant gospel, tombstone blues, and shambolic country, all bleeding into each other at the edges. "Tumbling Dice," "Rocks Off," "Shine a Light," "Sweet Virginia" — the range across a single record is staggering.

Critics were lukewarm when it came out. Within a decade it had been reassessed as the Stones' masterpiece and one of the definitive documents of rock and roll at its most human and most chaotic. Keith Richards has said it showed the band at their best, not just the music, but the way they dug in and refused to be broken. He was right.