The greatest rock album ever made was released *. I know there is no consensus here, and many will disagree, but you are all wrong 😉
what’s your favourite track? Here’s mine.
* Not just a rock album but a rock, blues, country, soul, gospel etc one.
50 years Ago Today …
by 93 Comments
The best rock’n’roll album in the world!
Loving Cup
Shine A Light
Tumblin’ Dice
Casino Boogie
Torn And Frayed
Rocks Off
Sweet Black Angel
Hip Shake Boogie
Happy
Just Want To See His Face
Let It Loose
Hell, all of them
I agree. It’s best as a complete experience. I particularly like I Just Wanna See His Face, how it emerges spookily from Ventilator Blues. A kind of impressionistic gospel. Turd On The Run is joyous how it breaks out into r’n’b frenzy. All the other instruments add so much. The album seems timeless. It’s them but it’s also all their influences on show.
On the right day I’d agree with you. So many great tracks, but I’d pick Torn and Frayed.
Terrific record. If not their very best then in the top four or five.
Anyone remember the NME flexi single with the actual
Exile on Main Street song on it?
Wonder how many people hung on to copies and what they’re worth.
I’d imagine there can’t be that many….
Just checked and there’s one seller asking AUS$61.70 on eBay Australia
I still have mine…!
I love this clip – the whole thing just keeps teetering on the edge of collapse but they manage to keep it just about together
It is really excellent. Along with Sticky Fingers, in many ways its polar opposite, the two (well my two) favourite Stones albums.
I was briefly in a covers band which played a lot of Stones material. Modus operandum was to avoid the the old pub band regulars and do some different tunes – so we used Exile…as a major source.
This was one of my favourites to play, also one of my favourites on the LP.
El Mocambo is a must-listen.
It takes a bit to get going, but, boy, it’s good.
Yes it does, and yes it is!
They were just something else in this era, their purple patch. Clearly the best Stones LP and easily one of the best rock double LPs with Blonde on Blonde and.. some others, (it’s early).
Side 1 rocks as hard as anything the band did and throws down the gauntlet to all other pretenders to the throne.
I also liked the reissue with the (recently added) Mick vocal of Plundered my Soul & Aladdin Story. The latter of which was “plundered” itself by Death In Vegas on their 1999 cd Contino Sessions.
I haven’t listened to it for a long, long time but might dig it out today for old times’ sake.
It’s one of those albums that is greater than the sum of its parts, a real experience that demands to be listened to as a whole.
My favourite track is probably Sweet Virginia. I think it was the guy who wrote the Exile book in the ’33 and a 3rd’ series that said it’s a great party song: sounds like someone just jamming on an acoustic guitar then gradually each band member arrives at the party until it builds to this great raucous sound. It must have taken a lot of effort to sound that effortless!
That guy who wrote the 331/3 book is Bill Janowitz, leader of great 90s band Buffalo Tom.
Good book…
Slightly off target, but I randomly listened to “Let it Bleed” yesterday (I listen to iTunes on album shuffle, so I get surprise albums and hear them in the sequence the artist created, so it’s the best of new and old approaches). That’s all bangers, too.
Yes, indeed – in amongst the rock ‘n’ blues, I have a sneaking fondness for the title track…
Included, fairly randomly, on the excellent More Hot Rocks.
Great Johnny Winter version!
My no. 2
Except for Midnight Rambler stinking the place out 😉
Let it Bleed is the one I rate toppermost in their catalogue.
By pure coincidence i happened to listen to it the day before yesterday for the first time in ages. For a long time I didn’t really like its messiness, its sprawl, its muddy sound. But eventually it won through. Lots of great songs – Sweet Virginia, Tumbling Dice and Sweet Black Angel for me – but really its about the totality of the thing rather than individual songs.
It’s brilliant, it’s their best, and they would still be legendary if they had no other records. Like a lot of artists’ career highpoints it feels like everything they did before was leading up to to it and everything they’ve done since has been leading away from it. (I know this is literally true…. stop being obtuse)
Went down like a sack of ‘oss shit at the time of course.
Did it? I didn’t know that. Was it not popular when it came out? Was Sticky Fingers the same or was that well received?
Critical reception was fairly muted considering its subsequent canonisation.
Consider my ‘oss shit moderated.
Of course it didn’t really produce any hits compared to the previous albums.
Trouble with “iTumbling dice’ is you can’t make out the words properly, which is a shame. That track has some of Keith’s best ever chord riffing, especially on the extended coda.
Tumbling Dice made no. 5, Happy was a minor hit too. It’s an album though that takes a while to reveal it’s charms, I bought it around 1980, was initially unimpressed, after about 6 months it suddenly clicked and I have loved it ever since
Is it their best? Yes, I think it is. As a complete package it all just works in its raggeddy sprawlingness.
For an album birthed in tax exile, not all the band present at all times, Drug use, it is a truly magnificent thing.
From Rocks Off to Soul Survivor, what’s not to like.
Is it my favourite RS album? No
Oho! What’s your favourite, then?
*fingers crossed for Dirty Work*
Score Draw between Beggars Banquet and Sticky Fingers.
Exile is in 3rd though
(note: I highly rate Steel Wheels, so make of that what you will)
Your first “new” Stones album, by any chance?
Not the first Stones album I owned (that was Rolled Gold), but yes, the first “new” Stones album I bought
(off the back of the 25×5: the Continuing Adventures of the Rolling Stones documentary after it screened on BBC2 – Christmas 1990? so a SW was 6 months old by then. Does that still count as “new”?)
Edith: 18 months old – who knows where the time goes
(did they ever cover that one?)
I remember that documentary! I was getting into the Stones about the same time, or not long before.
There was also a Channel Four thing at the time, a kind of sacred cows type hatchet job on the band, arguing that they were only a shadow of the band they once were in the sixties. Does anyone remember that one? I can’t remember what it was called. I think there was a series at the time on Channel Four, a kind of debunking of various cultural icons.
Without walls: J’Accuse. Tony Parsons did his Deram-tastic Pop Is Dead thing in that strand.
Given the critical mauling that the Stones got throughout the 80s, the idea that they were sacred cows in 1990ish is a bit much. I remember reading the 8/10 review of Steel Wheels in the NME in total astonishment. It felt like the first decent review they’d had in my lifetime.
I remember they had “Rock and a Hard Place” as single of the week (“I can’t believe I’m saying this but..”). Good song, which gets a bit forgotten. Steel Wheels is a good album and yes, it was my first “new” Stones record too. I think they secured a new generation of fans around 1989, a fresh-faced generation that grew up with The Young Ones, stonewashed jeans and the ZX Spectrum. You know, the ones that grew up to be the younger members of this site.
ZX Spectrum? Acorn Electron followed by BBC B for me.
We may not have had Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, but we did have Elite.
Me!
There was definitely something in the air around 1990, when Stones. Beatles, Hendrix and Dylan suddenly became if not hip then certainly not derided any more.
Re: “…Stones. Beatles, Hendrix and Dylan suddenly became if not hip then certainly not derided any more”.
Well, I certainly remember the Stones, Dylan and maybe the Beatles being derided.
But Hendrix? Nah. Never derided.
Yes for The Stones it was the idea that they’d betrayed their legacy when at that time what you do now matters most, despite the classic period. Now of course the classic period is all that matters. It’s all heritage. There was no endless development, getting better and better. That was just a dream. There was a golden era. Hendrix expired without soiling his brilliant career. He remained sainted.
The Russians didn’t even know that Hendrix was dead – Brezhnev never told them.
Brezhnev never let them know he even existed
Now suddenly we think more favourably of Brezhnev despite him being derided back then. Can’t think why.
Was it this one?
https://www2.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/4ce2b80d68e48
Don’t think I’ve seen it, but the 10 minutes on YouTube does look like a hatchet job – “The Stones today are about as dangerous as Perry Como”
J’Accuse the Rolling Stones! Yes, that was the one.
I think I remembered it because it chimed with my own view at the time. Discovering the band for the first time, and looking forward to exploring 25 years of great music, I was sorely disappointed to find there was a real drop in quality after Exile! It was my first real experience of the old truth that few bands can the quality up for over 5 or 10 years at the very most.
Ha, I also got into the Stones around that time thanks to 25 x 5 which I taped and watched on many happy post pub nights with friends, everyone had their favourite moments, usually involving Charlie’s lugubrious comments.
And that J’Accuse! The affronted outrage! I think it was Sean O’Hagan who presented it, sat on a moody set, riffling through LP sleeves and gazing at a computer screen. Lots of contributions from the petulant profiteer of 60s pop himself, Philip Norman, bitterly describing how the Stones took corporate sponsorship, looked a bit silly wiggling around singing about sympathy for the devil in their 40s (!) etc
The London Years Singles 3CD box came out as 80s turned to 90s, didn’t it? It was out of my undergrad budget, but I borrowed it from the library for about six months.
It was released in ’89 and, for me, it remains the best collections of their early stuff.
This morning Exile is currently playing through from 1 to 18 and will probably do so for much of the day. I love the messy, murky, maelstrom of it. Fewer hits, more depth and probably their best imho. Then, I only have 25 Stones albums, so clearly am ill equipped to pass judgement.
“messy, murky, maelstrom” – oooh, nice description, I like that.
The London Years, I remember seeing that in the shops, a big fancy box, in the days when it was something like £70 for a three CD set! I keep meaning to buy it – you see the jewel case edition kicking around second hand now for about a tenner or so I’m sure.
I got it in Arcade Records in Nottingham for just under thirty quid in nineteen hundred and ninety-two. Lovely thing it is, LP sized and with two unintentionally funny essays – one by some old Rolling Stone guy giving it the full Time Life “spokesemen for a generation” schtick and the other by Loog which is gobbledegook.
The jewel box version appeared a few years later.
It’s worth remembering that the first UK CD issue of Hot Rocks was doing well in the charts in 1989-90.
Yes, Hot Rocks was my gateway to the Stones. I bought it early 1990. I remember there was quite a big deal made about the CD reissue at that point, ie mentioned in mainstream newspapers etc.
@Arthur-Cowslip
Hot Rocks was a magnificent comp. What made it all the better is that for many years you could only get hold of it on import so you could lord it over all your mates
American Hot Rocks is (in my opinion ) inferior to the British version Rolled Gold. This was my introduction to the band ca 1978. Hot Rocks wasn’t really missed in the UK as we had RG.
Anyway all that content precedes Exile so not relevant to this love-in.
No sane person would prefer Hot Rocks to Rolled Gold, but RG didn’t get a CD release until the noughties.
More Hot Rocks is wonderfully random, a great kind of “alternative best of” which seems to be have been compiled by a chimp. Cool sleeve too (a BTB outtake in negative). Here’s Not Fade Away, The Last Time, All over Now, and of course Fortune Teller…..wait, what??
Ooh, I had heard of Rolled Gold but never actually checked the tracklist against Hot Rocks to see how it compared… Let me do so now… (google google)….
– Not Fade Away – one of their best singles and not on Hot Rocks
– Both have the big, big hitters: Satisfaction, Get Off My Cloud, 19th Nervous Breakdown, etc: nothing really between them there
– Lady Jane and Out of Time – another two excellent ones missed off Hot Rocks
– Likewise We Love You and She’s A Rainbow!
– Oh, hang on though: Rolled Gold is missing the big three songs which top off the end of Hot Rocks: You Can’t Always Get…, Brown Sugar and Wild Horses.
Verdict: Rolled Gold is better for the early singles phase, Hot Rocks is better for the ’69-’71 imperial phase. I think I still prefer Hot Rocks.
OK. I think RG was aimed at people who started buying the albums at BB and needed a good summary of what preceded it. The 2007 CD reverses this miscarriage of justice and is therefore arguably the best 2CD best of any artist ever.
Read this tracklist ye mighty and despair!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolled_Gold:_The_Very_Best_of_the_Rolling_Stones#Revised_track_listing
The finest Stones compilation, by far, is Big Hits (High Tide And Green Grass) (UK version). So there.
Any Stones compilation without Beast Of Burden or Emotional Rescue is not worth buying is my opinion. You’re welcome.
I think Brown Sugar and Wild Horses was a contractual thing, Abcko had to have 2 songs that were recorded for Sticky Fingers as they were under contract to them when recorded. Possibly didn’t apply in the UK. I think sides 1 and 2 of Rolled Gold are absolutely peerless, generally pretty much no weak tracks on it and the whole thing is more than 10 minutes longer so has to be better …
Rolled Gold was one of the first albums I bought around the time it came out. Nice quality sleeve and thickish vinyl. Sleeve notes by Roy Carr. Stunning contents. It was all downhill from there really. One was bound to be somewhat disappointed thereafter.
Of course, there might be other reasons why a Hullensian might enjoy “Rolled Gold by the Rolling Stones”, especially if it retails at £9.99….
Always a great covers band, the Stones sounded particularly good on ‘Hipshake’ and ‘Stop breaking down’.
A great ability during their imperial phase of capturing themselves on record in top form, seemingly spontaneous and right on it, time after time.
I remember it coming out – I still have the NME promo flexidisk with Jagger singing the blues at a piano and a thrilling montage of what was to come.
That will be worth a pretty penny now!
Mmm not sure. eBay calls….
See earlier post up the top of the page.
Price being asked is less than i thought
Oh I missed that – great minds!
Just listened to it again, loud. What a great album. It’s one of those albums that’s so obvious and ubiquitous you kind of forget it’s there. I don’t think I’ve played it in 20 years to be honest, but I knew every note and every transition between each song (as you do with great albums you have played to death).
One thing that struck me is I know it as a CD album (first bought it in 1990), so I know it as a single block of songs rather than four sides of music. That probably affects my perception of it as “sprawling” I suppose? I’ve heard there is a bit of a rough theme to each side of the album, but it all blends into one big whole for me. Same with Blonde on Blonde actually, a single CD of music.
This thread calls for a list! My ten best Stones albums:
The Rolling Stones (England’s newest hitmakers)
12 x 5
Beggars Banquet
Let it Bleed
Get yer Ya yas Out
Sticky fingers
Exile on Main Street
Some Girls
Tattoo You
Blue and Lonesome
I’m sure everyone would endorse the bulge in quality around late 60s, early 760s albums. Singles, however, are a different story, with most of their best being in the 60s, I would say.
You’ve got the big four in there (you know which four I mean!) so can’t argue with that. I feel sorry for Her Satanic Majesties Request though, as it always seems to get overlooked. It’s a fine little album.
I do like Blue and Lonesome. It was surprisingly good.
You mean Their. You’ve inadvertently named one of my favourite films there. It’s not very well known, er….
Definitely their best, IMHO.
Obviously, it is nowhere near as good as The Goat. 😉 However, side four is easily the greatest side four in rock & pop and Shine A Light is my favourite too.
No it is the G.O.A.T.
I’m glad we agree on the magnificence of Goats Head Soup.
😘
As I stated before, their worst of the 70s possibly, but I do seem to own 6 different versions of it 😉
I have had the pleasure of hearing these Exile tracks live, some more than others:
Rocks Off, Tumbling Dice, Sweet Virginia, Loving Cup, Happy, Shine a Light.
I’ve seen The Stones a grand total of three times, each over forty years ago. I couldn’t tell you a single song they played.
If it was any point after 1981 you were probably half a mile away, so you can’t be blamed.
I have a spreadsheet 😉
setlist.fm is your friend
And I have been front row or thereabouts on many occasions since my first show in 1982
And @Tiggerlion they probably played Satisfaction at your shows
One was Knebworth and another Maine Road. The third would have been some other big stadium. Always near the back.
Given that the yobbos always sit at the back in the classroom and on the bus, what kind of yobbos must sit at the back of a Stones gig?
You must have been scared.
You were at Knebworth @tiggerlion? I never knew. Maybe we queued for the horrific loos together.
Every outdoor venue had horrible loos. When I sent to see Bowie at Milton Keynes, I trained my young, healthy bladder in advance and drank nothing on the day. It was baking hot. I burnt in the sun and nearly suffered heat-stroke.
Better to piss in a Party Seven can and throw it at the people standing up in front of you.
Could you remember who you were 40 years ago? I sometimes struggled.
We were pretty much all in Club Tropicana. Drinks were free, so no wonder we don’t remember
Just heard an excellent analysis/discussion of the album on Dave Fanning on RTE2. Well worth a listen.
Excellent piece by Pat Carty, formerly of this parish – https://www.hotpress.com/opinion/as-long-as-the-guitar-plays-the-rolling-stones-and-exile-on-main-st-22905339 . My favourite track (RIGHT NOW) is Loving Cup. I bought the half-speed remaster a few years ago and it sounds amazing – you can hear the room.
It is a wonderful, deep album, a great collection of songs from a ragged band
It’s great, of course, and it is amazing how its stock has risen over the years. Personally, I prefer Beggar’s Banquet and Sticky Fingers, but it is a close run thing.
I love Stop Breaking Down, but there isn’t a bad track on it.