Exile on Revisionist History Street

What a disappointment. What poor handling of a band’s legacy.

The more I hear about the forthcoming remaster/reissue of the Rolling Stones’ seminal Exile On Main Street album, the more my enthusiasm gets tempered. On Record Store Day, I was thankfully able to score one of the limited edition 45s of “Plundered My Soul,” the first of the unreleased Exile cuts that make up a bonus disc in that set to make its way out. Watch the official video here & give it a listen yourself:

Not too shabby, right? At first glance it’s a shot of the classic, southern-fried, soulful rock that makes Exile so remarkable, but I was troubled by what I heard: something was off. Having never heard the song in unreleased/bootleg format, I had nothing with which to compare it, but parts of it sounded too clean, too polished to really be an outtake from that era, especially when lined up against bootlegs of a similar vintage. It also sounded sluggish to me — something about the pacing is off.

I did some poking around and found this listing of recording credits for the song:

Personnel:
Mick Jagger: Vocals, Guitar & Percussion
Keith Richards: Guitar
Charlie Watts: Drums
Bill Wyman: Bass
Nicky Hopkins: Piano
Mick Taylor: Guitar
Bobby Keys: Sax
Lisa Fisher: Background Vocals
Cindy Mizelle: Background Vocals

Okay, Mick, Keith, Charlie, Bill & Mick Taylor are all accounted for. Nicky Hopkins and Bobby Keys, too — they both were involved in the Exile sessions. Wait, Lisa Fisher? One of their current background singers? She has a hell of a voice, yes, but she was about 13 when the album was recorded, and I doubt a pre-teen would have been in the basement of Keith Richards’ house in southern France to record backing vocals for anything (actually, I’m pretty sure that Keith Richards’ basement is the absolute last place a pre-teen girl should have been in the early 70’s).

I’d heard that Don Was had been put in charge of assembling the added disc of outtakes & bonus tracks, and Rolling Stone (whose attractive new website won’t cough up the story/link) had reported, much to my dismay, that fresh instrumental overdubs had been added to some tracks, while another song, which only existed as an instrumental, had completely new lyrics written and vocals recorded for it by Jagger. This is an absolutely horrible bit of revisionist history — I just can’t see any need whatsoever to tinker with something like that. I’d rather hear the sounds of a band working through ideas, finding their way towards the greatness of songs like “Tumbling Dice” and “Loving Cup” than to hear something that’s neither here nor there. There were reasons why songs like “Pass The Wine” didn’t make the initial cut — let me find out why (maybe with better sound quality than on available bootlegs) on my own rather than trying to recapture the essence of a nearly 40-year old sound which, as the weird vibe all over “Plunder My Soul” proves, absolutely does not work.

I’m still in for purchasing the expanded reissue of Exile — I’m an Exile completist, and am surprised to only have a handful of the unreleased songs on bootlegs — but I wish they’d just let the unreleased stuff speak for itself instead of trying to re-interpret it. Thinking about this has driven me to begin putting together a Reissue Done Right for Exile, along the lines of what I put together for Sticky Fingers a few months back — you’ll see it before this “Exile” set hits, I promise.