Voodoo Chile in Wonderland wrote on May 14^th, 2010 at 8:29pm:


Now it's also available at the official website http://www.rollingstones.com/video/following-river

can one of you lucky bastards who have it already mp3 us a pass the wine? much obliged
IMHO, following the river sounds like pretty much any of jagger's solo work except for nicky's lovely part, charlie's too

Not out in the UK until Monday, but my 2-CD set arrived today. Makes for a more enjoyable weekend.

Gazza wrote on May 15^th, 2010 at 8:41am:


FYG  

I'm gonna wait 'til the 26th to have the Japanese sending my package and then wait an additional week (maybe less as I paid Express Mail Service) to have it at my PO Box and then pick it up

So once more

FYG    

BTW there are only 12 copy available of the super-super-deluxe edition (92-page book and bonus track) so it was not a good idea to pay for it almost a month ago



Anyway sooner or later I'll have it

Deluxe http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/detailview.html?KEY=UICY-1478
Super Deluxe http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/detailview.html?KEY=UICY-91557&ref=myp (only 12 available)

Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. re-release electrifying

It may be a mess but it’s also ‘electrifying, insinuating, addictive and bloodstream-level propulsive’

Published On Fri May 14 2010
By Geoff Pevere Entertainment Columnist






“I think Exile lacked a bit of definition. I’m being supercritical, I know, but the record lacks a little focus.”

(Mick Jagger, 1987)

This is true. Exile on Main St., the double album released in May 1972 by The Rolling Stones—to be re-released next week in several variously-priced “deluxe” editions—and which has since become enshrined as one of the key rock albums ever recorded, is a bit of a mess.

It sounds murky. It veers in tone and influence from pre-punk assault to gospel-sanctified glory. There are traces of blues, country, R&B and jukebox-era rock ’n’ roll. At times you wonder if you’re listening to jams caught by an unattended microphone. It doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be.

But it’s electrifying. Insinuating, addictive and bloodstream-level propulsive. Possibly the best evidence that the Stones’ self-designated “world’s greatest rock and roll band” brand is a simple statement of hard fact, and an album so good it begs forgiveness of everything else this maddeningly inconsistent, incomparably arrogant and at times, insufferably past-prime boomer institution has ever done, or not done since.

There is no record I’ve owned in more formats – two vinyl versions, one cassette, and two (soon to be three) CD incarnations — and there’s nothing I’ve listened to more often or with more undiminishing, inexhaustible pleasure. It’s the one I’d take to that desert island equipped with a sound system, and the one that seems to live up to every ideal of what rock music was, is, or ought to be. A perfect album, that is, touched by some mystical alchemy of grace, grit and sheer cosmic fluke. Sorry, Mick.

In Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell With The Rolling Stones, his book-length account of the madness attending to the album’s production — a tale involving Corsican drug traffickers, assaults with deadly weapons, multiple vehicular misadventure, Caligulan sexual promiscuity and enough narcotic ingestion to send even the reader into rehab — Robert Greenfield suggests that no single factor accounts for the singular accidental greatness of The Rolling Stones’ only four-sided studio album than the fact that it was recorded in Keith Richards’ basement.

Here’s how that happened. By 1971, The Rolling Stones had entered a tax bracket that made it fiscally unfeasible for them to remain in Great Britain. Following the release of Sticky Fingers in 1971, they were at both their commercial and creative peak, but a series of legal, managerial and personnel imbroglios had left the band, not unaccustomed to the lush life, strapped for cash. After establishing their own record label and freeing themselves from the allegedly sticky-fingered management practices of Allen Klein, the Stones needed to get out and do what they not only did best, but more lucratively than any other act on the planet: tour. But to tour they needed an album, and to record an album they needed a place to record. What can a poor boy do? Especially a freshly-exiled group of poor boys not famous for their adherence to schedules, structure or game-plan teamwork?

Keith Richards, as unlikely a solution-man as humankind has ever evolved, nevertheless offered one. The Rolling Stones’ guitarist and notoriously determined oblivion-seeker had —while tightroping between heroin dependencies—found a tax haven not only in the South of France, but in an isolated 19th century villa (once, as it was subsequently determined commandeered by Nazis during the Second World War) called Nellcote. After a certain scouring of the region had turned up nothing suitable for recording purposes, Richards made the suggestion: The villa was built over a labyrinth of (no doubt Gestapo-ideal) basements, so why not make the record there? Writes Greenfield in you-are-there present-tense: “Since Keith has already proven there is no knowing when, or if, he will ever arrive at any session on time, and getting him from one place to another, most especially when he has other things on his mind, can be a nightmare of major proportions, how better to solve this problem than by making his home into the Stones’ new recording studio?”

Sure. Why not. Sounds reasonable. But so apparently did the idea to have the Hells Angels provide some ‘security’ at the free concert a couple of years earlier at Altamont, California, and most remember how that turned out. (A reminder: four people died, one of whom was stabbed to death by a Hells Angel on camera and just feet from the stage.) Mick Taylor, the 23-year-old guitarist who replaced Brian Jones after the original Stone was found dead, floating in his London swimming pool, and who would leave the band bearing evidence of lingering psychic trauma acquired at least partly at Nellcote — once explained the formulating theory: “All (Keith) had to do was fall out of his bed, roll downstairs, and voilà, he was at work.”

That sound you hear is the devil’s laughter.

For an exhaustive accounting of the devilment that descended upon Nellcote, I suggest you consult Greenfield’s fine book. There is simply too much to fit comfortably here, but suffice to say it included birth, death, marriage, marital infidelity, stupefying delays and untold amounts of drug-related debauchery. Exile was born of chaos, but that chaos somehow adhered into something vital, urgent and lasting. On-the-ground stories abound of how Keith would disappear for hours under cover of putting his son to bed, only to return to the basement with something so desperately in need of recording engineers had to be summoned from their distant bunks to rush back to Nellcote and get it on tape. And do it before Keith ascended to oblivion once again.

If ever an album’s cover portended what it packaged, it was Robert Frank’s for Exile. A ragged black-and-white collage of photos found on a tattoo parlour wall in the 1950s, when the Swiss-born photographer was compiling shots for the Beat-era volume that would come to be called The Americans, the cover captures a seedy hurly-burly of after-hours urban street life, which Frank supplemented with captured super-8 frames of the band in the studio and on the street in Los Angeles. The overall effect is of placing the Stones beneath a kind of claustrophobic sewer-grate of collected, trickle-down Americana, a perfect corollary of the music’s sonic stew of blues, country, gospel, R&B and rock ’n’ roll. Like the music itself, the cover is at first puzzling, out of focus and impenetrable. But then, over time, it coheres, and what you see is what you hear: a veritable history of American music forms percolating up from under, the sound of the underground roots of the Stones bubbling up from that basement.

Not everyone heard it, at least certainly not at first and lastly Mick Jagger. (He was still slagging Exile as “overrated” a few years into the 21st Century.) But some did. I’m not saying my 14-year-old self was among them, but I certainly heard something, and something like I’d never heard before and only very rarely since. The record wouldn’t let me go. That my first copy skipped, and that the line “just as long as the guitar plays…” still gets stuck in my psyche every time I hear “Torn and Frayed” now seems cosmically foreordained.

Lester Bangs, the late, great rock critic and phrasemaker, also heard something, but what he heard was a hint of how Exile would play in the future. Here’s what he wrote about the album in the January, 1973 issue of Creem: “The Stones still have the strength to make you feel that both we and they are hemmed in and torn by similar walls, frustrations, and tragedies. Exile is dense enough to be compulsive: hard to hear, at first, the precision and fury behind the murk ensure that you’ll come back, hearing more with each playing. What you hear sooner or later is two things: an intuition for non-stop get down perhaps unmatched since The Rolling Stones, Now!, and a strange kind of humility and love emerging from a dazed frenzy.”

On vinyl, the Stones would never be as good again. While there would be moments when the old demons would surge productively, they would be isolated and increasingly few and far between. But it tells us something about both the band, and the music that inspired them, that never again would the Stones leave themselves so vulnerable to chance. Accident would irreversibly give way to calculation, and the Stones would begin their long, steel-wheeled roll into perpetual self-impersonation. There wouldn’t be any room for chaos in the equation, which meant no more miracles coming out of the basement. More than anything, Exile on Main St. is a testament to how the best rock music has always defied any logic but its own need to be heard.

The Toronto Star

Found a sweet video of the making of the deluxe set. Don't know if it's been posted yet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqp7nXumzw&playnext_from=TL&videos=6t1WQ3vrrEs&f...

LadyJane wrote on May 14^th, 2010 at 9:39pm:



yep... could think of alot of other tracks, they finished up, that could've been on the bonus disc instead of this... or at least with it... it's just another Jagger balald from this century... it's good, for when you need a ballad fix...

Lookit what's # 1 @ Amazon...

Re-issue of Stones album spawns Cannes docu

'Stones in Exile' to screen in Directors Fortnight

Posted: Sat., May 15, 2010
By STEVE CHAGOLLAN




The intoxicating blend of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll never spoils, particularly if it's of an early '70s vintage. And it never hurts to use film and TV to sell it, particularly if the film makes its debut at Cannes.

"Exile on Main Street," the Rolling Stones' down-and-dirty double album that was reviled upon its 1972 release -- then later hailed as a masterpiece -- appears to grow ever more complex with age. Event-scaled activity is swirling around the album's digitally remastered reissue May 18, which includes 10 freshly unearthed tracks from the period.

The Universal Music Group has spared no expense to create three lavish packages: from the original 18-track release to a "super deluxe" edition that includes vinyl, a 30-minute DVD and a 64-page collector's book. In addition, UMG has enlisted its merchandising company, Bravado, to create an extensive line of "Exile"-inspired products -- t-shirts, caps, leather jackets and the like, all outfitted with the Stones' iconic tongue-wagging logo.

Also as part of the festivities:

An entire week of NBC's "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" devoted to the "Exile" re-release;

Stones frontman Mick Jagger is scheduled to participate in a rare interview about his career and "Exile" on CNN's "Larry King Live" May 18; and a 60-minute documentary, "Stones in Exile," will unspool at Cannes on May 19 -- perhaps the first time a film commissioned as a promotional tool will be screened as part of the fest's Directors Fortnight (with Mick Jagger and director Stephen Kijak expected to attend).

At the time "Exile" first came out, double LPs represented outsized ambition, hubris or an artist's creative peak. For the Stones, "Exile" qualified as all-of-the-above, and its place in the rock firmament is secure, not only for it's raunchy mix of party-hearty rock classics and Delta blues-inspired ballads, but also for the chaotic circumstances under which it was made.

Recalls then-president of Rolling Stones Records, Marshall Chess, in "Stones in Exile": "I was coming from (the approach that) you had to make three sides in three hours. These guys were taking two weeks to get one track down." Or, as saxophone player Bobby Keys describes it, "It was about as unrehearsed as a hiccup."

The group had chosen Nellcote more out of convenience than necessity. Instruments were placed in various basement nooks and crannies -- a kitchen, a hallway -- to achieve some semblance of separation and desired acoustics.

"The place was atrocious," reveals recording engineer Andy Johns in Kijak's film. "It was so humid, and the guitars would go in and out of tune all the time and the gear wasn't working properly and the lights would go on and off and there were fires. It was just insane."

The situation wasn't helped by the fact that band members were spread out all over the countryside, and as far away as Paris, where Jagger attended to his newlywed wife Bianca, who cast a wary eye on his band mates and their motley crew of groupies and hangers on.

Personality differences also took their toll. "I never plan anything, which is probably the difference between Mick and myself," says Richards in "Stones in Exile." "Mick needs to know what we're going to do tomorrow and I'm just happy to wake up and see who's hanging around."

The film's footage is mostly culled from outtakes from Robert Frank's infamous doc, "Cocksucker Blues," which chronicled the Stones' 1972 American tour (Frank also shot the "Exile" cover art using a Super 8 camera), and a treasure trove of images from the French photographer Dominique Tarle, who spent six months with Richards, his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg and the band during the making of the album at Nellcote.

"We worked really hard to get people to feel like they were in the basement," says Kijak (pronounced "kayak"), best known for the acclaimed music documentary, "Scott Walker: 30 Century Man." "Between Dominique's photos and Robert's footage, we just tried to let those two things steer us."

While Kijak managed to piece together a compelling story that is brutally frank, he does admit some concessions were made as a director for hire, such as interviews with Sheryl Crow and Benicio Del Toro that bookend the film. "Celebrity talking heads can sometimes be a concession to higher powers," Kijak says. "But everyone was handpicked to have some kind of connection with the Stones. And in a way, we wanted to use them as a kind of stand-in for fans."

One of those fans, who also happens to be a celebrity, is Fallon, who wasn't even born when "Exile" was released. The 35-year-old comedian/talkshow host, who does a spot-on imitation of Jagger, first got to know the Stones' frontman when they both appeared on "Saturday Night Live." The two recently reunited at a charity event where Fallon offered to help promote the new "Exile" release. Jagger suggested Fallon premiere the "Stones in Exile" doc on "Late Night," and the concept turned into a weeklong celebration, with the likes of Green Day, Keith Urban and Phish performing versions of their favorite "Exile" tunes.

"Once we announced Phish," says Fallon, "all the other bands came in immediately that day. Keith Urban was the first to call, and said, 'I want to do 'Tumblin' Dice'; that's my song.' I love it when everyone gets juiced up and excited. (These artists) bring a new audience to the Rolling Stones."

Of Kijak's film, 40 minutes of which was shown on "Late Night's" May 14 broadcast (the DVD will be released June 22 in the U.S.), Fallon says "(The Stones) are in a filthy basement. They're in the south of France. You see how debauched it was. The story is rock 'n' roll."

As Kijak's pic documents, "Exile" was largely conceived in the basement of Keith Richards' rented mansion, Villa Nellcote, in the South of France, after the group was forced to flee England owing taxes that would have left them on the verge of bankruptcy. The record was made in fits and starts by a band suffering from the malaise of displacement. Less-than-ideal recording equipment, stifling summer temperatures, Richards' heroin addiction and a retinue of 24-hour party people only complicated matters.

Other key gets were a BBC interview with the late Jimmy Miller, who produced a string of Stones masterpieces that culminated with "Exile," including "Beggar's Banquet," "Let It Bleed" and "Sticky Fingers"; and the actor Jake Weber (CBS' "Medium"), who, as an 8 1/2-year guest at Richards' house at the time, provided a unique, unvarnished perspective of things. "If you're living a decadent life, there's darkness there," Weber recalls in the film. "And this was decadent. Nothing was hidden; everything was out in the open."  

Variety

The Mexican version was released today, 2CD set with a very nice booklet, I couldn't resist and I bought it since my Japanese version will be released until the 26th

I'm still confused, what is the DVD in the Deluxe package, some kind of condensed version of "Kijak's film" that will be shown in Cannes ?