Well, time to look at some of these Exile on Main Street songs in a little bit more detail. So we've got four of them for you in this video, Rocks Off, Casino Boogie, Tumbling Dice, and Loving Cup. First off is the song Rocks Off, which which kicks off the album. One of my, one of my favorite tracks. It's got a, fantastic guitar hook, like so many of these Rolling Stones songs. And this particular guitar hook reminds me an awful lot of Brown Sugar, having come before, the song Rocks Off, and Start Me Up which is one, that comes after Rocks Off. So, those sort of points of continuity. What I said in the previous visi, video about this is that it's a rocker with a cool bridge effect. With sexual lyrics that deal with sexual Issues, drugs, dissatisfaction, and mentioned it had horns. So let's get into that in a little bit more detail. The tune itself uses a compound AABA form. Now by compound AABA form, I mean in the AABA form, each of the A sections, in this case, is made up by verse chorus combinations. So as you see, the song begins with an introduction. Then you get two verses and a chorus. The chorus, in each case, is really kind of based on the material at the end of the verse. So you get verse verse chorus. Then, verse, chorus, so that's two versions of the A section there. And then you get this bridge in the middle where I talk about the cool bridge effect, and then, a re, that, so that would be like the B section. And then a return to the verse, and the chorus, and the chorus repeated, and faded at the end. That's the return of the final A section. So it's called compound because you've got verses and choruses Inside. Nested inside each of the A sections. So you've got verse, verse, chorus. Verse, chorus. Bridge. Verse, chorus, chorus. Right? But the overall layout is a kind of AABA design. Very typical for 70s rock. In fact, the deeper into the 70s you get, the more you find this compound AABA form happening over and over again in rock music. The lyrics seem to portray a person who is so trapped inside a fast moving world that the only pleasure comes from sleeping and dreaming. Maybe this person is numbed by drugs but maybe it's more the never ending stimulation of life in the fast lane that burns you out. So, if you can imagine somebody being so overstimulated in such a continuous way over a long period of time that there's really nothing left in the world around them that can still inspire them and give them pleasure. The only place they can find inspiration and pleasure is in sleep. Or in dreaming. It may be somewhat autobiographical, in the sense that the stones were definitely living a life in the fast lane. Or it might have been a way of describing what was happening in that world, the fast lane, with people around them, who seemed to be seeking pleasure so desperately. In, in there waking hours and not finding it. And, and imagine that the only place they could find, the only pleasure, the only buzz left was a buzz that one could get in their imagination while sleeping and dreaming. I already mentioned the fantastic guitar hook that is characteristic of this. But I also want to talk about this song as being a good example of the around the clock recording process that went on at Keith's place in France when this album was being put together. Andy Johns, the engineer, tells a story of sitting with Keith in the basement of that studio and Keith playing the main lick to this over and over and over again. Were talking about what Andy Johnson is like hours. If you can imagine what it would be like to be sitting there being recording engineer while a guy plays a lick over and over and over again. In fact, he kept playing it until he seemed to fall asleep at the guitar. [LAUGH] You could imagine this. I mean, we all fall asleep watching television. But imagine in the recording studio, and you're playing this lick over and over again, and before long it's like [NOISE]. Andy Jo, and it's getting really late. You know, middle of the night. And Andy Johns thinks, finally, I can go home. So tip-toes out of the room, drives all the way back to where he's staying, about a half-hour drive away from Keith's house. He opens the door, as he opens the door, the phone is ringing. He picks up the phone, it's Keith Richards saying Saying, Where are you? Andy Johnson says It should be obvious where I am, I'm at home. You're calling me. Well, get back here I want to finish this track. And so, you know, he calls Andy back to the studio, and Andy has to do it. And this is kind of typical of the, the sort of unscheduled and, you know, impromptu nature of the way a lot of these tracks came together. Obviously this track came together with an awful lot of labor. We sometimes think these easy sounding lyric, these easy sounding licks Just must have, just come instantly. And, sometimes they do. But, sometimes they're very, very much manufactured and labored. They just sound spontaneous. But, they're the result of hours and hours and hours of work. So, this is a good indication of that. We move on to the next song in our, in our song close up now and that's Casino Boogie. And as I said before this is kind of an R&B Shuffle with chance or what we call in the classical music business aleatoric lyrics. It's just another way of saying chance. Alea coming from a word for, a Latin word for dice. Anyway the, the idea of chance lyrics being the lyrics don't particularly try to tell a story and that they're a, they're arrived by some kind of chance procedure. We'll talk about how that works in just a minute. The form of the song It's not very complicated. It's a simple verse form, after intro you get a verse, a verse, a verse, by the time you get to the fourth verse, that's a sax solo. Then a return to a sung verse again and then a coda. It's kind of based on the, on the groove from the verse. It's got a guitar solo. It's got an extended jammed out ending. So in many ways very much like a traditional blues tune in its use of simple verse form. But here's the thing about the lyrics. Following the writer William Burroughs, Mick and Keith wrote out phrases on slips of paper, and then com, then combined them In ways that seemed pleasing. So imagine that you would take a bunch of pieces of paper or maybe take a sheet of paper and write down various kinds of lines, none of them meaning anything in particular. And then tear the paper up so that they would just be on sl, slits of paper, throw them up in the air, let them fall where they will. And then play a little game of kind of trying to put them together into verses and seeing what you can do. A little bit like people do with refrigerator magnets or something, refrigerator poetry. You just put these things together in random kinds of ways, and you delight in the fact that something that wasn't intended to mean anything can actually be interpreted as meaning something. It's kind of a fun game with words. That's exactly what's going on in this song Casino Boogie. So I guess the casino part of this, the gamble has to do with the idea of just leaving the way the lyrics turn out, kind of to chance and seeing how it how it all works out for you. We should probably point out that this, what's happening Casino Boogie reminds us of a couple of other kinds of things that we've seen in popular music up to this point. The chance element is reminus, reminiscent of a text that's used in a lot of contemporary music Stockhausen and from the 1960s composers like that who, who really sort of classical composers avant garde composers who traded on this chance element. But it's also something that we find happening in a tune like for example, Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite. Where in Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite, they didn't have, the Beatles for Sgt Pepper, didn't have a steam organ so they took a re, a, a, a recording of a steam organ they had in the BBC tape archive. They recorded that onto tape. They cut the little bits of tape up into little pieces, threw them up into the air and then taped them back together to create a kind of background wash for the tune that sounded kind of like a crazy sort of psych, psychedelic calliope organ or something. Well, so there's a kind of a chance technique and you see this happening in some of the Beatles music. You also see this wordplay kind of thing happening kind of a lot in John Lennon's songs and I Dig a Pony would be a particularly good example of wordplay. Well, talking about chance, the next song in our line up is Tumbling Dice. And this is a song that really does sort of directly engage the idea of gambling, at least as a metaphor. I talked about it before as being a, a, a god, a gospel influenced mid temp rocker with honkey, Honkey Tonk Woman esque guitars, and horns. It was released as a single as we mentioned before in April of 1972, with Sweet Black Angel on, on the b side. It was released a month before the al, weeks before the actual album itself go at number seven in the US and number five in the UK. It's a modified simple verse form. It starts with the intro with the guitar lick and you hear some Gospel vocals. And then you get a verse, a verse, and a verse with a refrain. And then you get a verse and verse with a refrain and then a verse with a guitar solo and a verse with a refrain. So it's like a simple verse form that lays out in three chunks that involve verses terminating with a verse with refrain and the verse with refrain is where the, the title of the song occurs. So it's like a simple verse, but maybe a little bit more organized. Than we saw, for example, in Casino Boogie. You get an ending there, a coda which is extended and includes the gospel vocals while, while Mick kind of sings over top of that. Now I would say that when we listen to the guitar hook of this one, the guitar hook is much more like the guitar hook in Honky Tonk Women. And that's interesting to me because, the lyrics actually seem to, return to the topic of Honky Tonk Women, and let me tell you how I think that's the case. As in Honky Tonk Woman, women, Mick is once again the victim of love. He's now playing the victim of some, he, in other words, it's the women who are victimizing him as we talked about in Honky Tonk Women. This time, the women are like gamblers who lie and cheat, and they use him in the same way they use dice as a means to an end. Right, so he's no, he's, he's useful to them, but only toward another end, and whatever that end is in the case of him is maybe sexual satisfaction. Maybe he's implying that they get from being with him. Just like the dice, people don't throw a dice because they care about dice. They care about winning the money that goes with with with what the dice represent in the game. But, as the story goes on, you see, that's okay with him, because he can't be held down anyway. Girl, I gotta ramble. And so, this is the, kind of the way the story sort of, sort of plays. And You gotta wonder whether, to a certain extent, we've seen the Rolling Stones return [LAUGH] to tunes and not exactly recompose the same tune, but this one seems, Tumbling Dice, you know, they're looking for a single. This one really seems to revisit Honky Tonk Woman in, in a couple of interesting kinds of ways. And it makes you wonder if like, Hey You, Get Off of my Cloud, was kind of a recomposing of Satisfaction, in a certain, in a broad certain kind of way. Whether or not that might be happening, with Tumbling Dice, here. There's a story that goes with it. Maybe the least interesting part of the story is that Mick Taylor actually ends up playing bass on this tune. Charlie Bill Wyman had, had done some of the sessions for it, and then he came to the studio one night, and Mick Taylor was already playing bass and Bill Wyman sat around till the middle of the night watching Mick Taylor play bass without anybody offering for him to play bass, and so, Mick Taylor ended up on the record playing bass. But, Mick, Mick Jagger apparently got background for these lyrics by talking to a housekeeper who was really into dice games and explained the whole thing to him and gambling and all that kind of thing. And so the songs not really about dice games as much as it is understanding the mentality behind a dice game as a way of creating a metaphor for love or romantic or sexual relationships. So that's, that's really what the tune I think does. Let's deal with just one more before we move on and that's the song Loving Cup. I mentioned before that that's kind of a country-tinged, mid-tempo ballad. Features horns, and the lyrics celebrate simple life, simple, rural life. Well, let's look at the form of what we in this tune. It's an AABA and each section has four phrasens, four phrases, or subsections and a refrain. So, as you look down the form that I'm, that I'm giving you there, there's an intro, and then the verse is a relatively long-ish kind of verse but it ends with the refrain that involves love, involves the title Loving Cup. Then that entire structure is repeated again, verse with refrain. And then, there's a contrasting middle section and here, this bridge, I would ask you to note the contrast created by the focus on the brass here. Which, when they first come in on a bridge, sound a little bit classical, but then as it unfolds, they start to become much more, sort of soul-oriented kind of bla, brass. But, whatever it is, it creates a very, very strong contrast in that middle bridge section. And then it's back to a repeat of the same structures we saw before the, the verses, the verse with refrain kind of structure. Which, interestingly here, grows out of the end of the bridge. So, as you're listening to the bridge, you can't really hear the transition into the verse until you've realized you're in the middle of it. And, that's a very clever and interesting kind of thing to do with the form, to kind of or paper over that sectional division with this kind of continuity there. That's a, that's a real kind of master stroke with regard to the form. The kind of thing that theory types, musicology types like me, really get, excited about. And there's a coda with what I call the faux funk horns. Kind of funk horns but kind of not really, funk horns. Courtesy of Bobby Keys and and and, and, and company. So AABA section, the lyrics celebrate the simple country life, adopting an old time country or folk style, the singer portrays himself as a simple man, with simple ways who just wants the love of his woman. And so the tune is really kind of a celebration of what one expects must have been in the minds of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, a kind of rural Southern existence of, you know, pickup trucks and regular guys who work the field, work the earth with their hands kind of thing. And what they really want is the love of a, of a good women. Instrumentation this is a great one for Nicky Hopkins, he really gets featured in this track. And I want to say that in many ways this song is reminiscent of Dead Flowers in it's overt use of country music styles. And we'll get to this in a later video this week. Dead Flowers, however, is maybe a little bit more Nashville country, while Loving Cup is maybe a little bit more old-time country, not unlike something The Band might do. And we often call this, and have called this Americana. Well anyways, that gives us a pretty close look at four of the songs from the first two sides of Exile on Main Street. Let's now take a break in the next video and have a look at the 1970 tour, 1972 US tour and an overview of some other things that are going on with the Rolling Stones
