Eighty years after an American named Jack Daniel started his Silver Cornet Band; a raggletaggle band of Englishmen called The Rolling Stones released what many have called their defining album, “Exile On Main St.” Celebrating the birthday of the man for whom the beverage was named , You Am I and a few friends are throwing a party, the perfect excuse a favourite album.
The Rolling Stones tenth studio album, Exile on Main St, a sprawling double LP released in May 1972, was recorded in a luxurious villa rented by Keith Richards in Villefranche-sur-Mer, outside Nice in the south of France. It was done there after the Stones had found themselves obliged to become tax exiles for a while, so they used their mobile recording studio bought over from England. The fact that attention has been refocused on the album with the release of a remastered and expanded edition and the acclaimed documentary on the making, Stones In Exile, earlier this year was probably part of the reason behind the choice for the people behind the unsigned band initiative the JD set basing the celebration, around the birthday of the man whose name graces the label of that particular alcoholic beverage, on Exile on Main St and inviting perhaps the most quintessential Australian rock n roll party band You Am I to perform it with a few friends.
“Well if you try hard enough for forty years, sometimes trying hard enough pays off,” You Am I frontman Tim Rogers laughs at the thought of channelling The Rolling Stones. “We got asked to go this and sat down for twenty minutes and to decide whether or not it’s a good thing and thought, right, we’ve got our own record coming out in a couple of weeks after this so check – good, we’re still viable and active and all that. Then, two, I think I know the record quite well – and I think Davey [Lane] might as well – and if you spend enough of your life walking and behaving like someone, well, you might as well go off and see if you can actually play the songs rather than just live the life. So that was check one, two and three and we felt there might have been a couple of drinks in it too. “Exile... was a hugely influential album for me. I think it was about the fifth Stones record I got – so probably the sixth record I ever got...I’d always take copies of it overseas when we were touring and always lose it, so I’ve got to think I have eight covers of the disc – I’ve got three of the records, moving house every three months – and I think I have a couple of cassette versions as well. Despite a lot of people saying it’s all just about grooves, there aren’t that many songs there – I think Sir Mick even says that – I think that there are a lot of wonderful songs there and great, really great unappreciated lyrics as well; a little more oblique than people would think, that’s its just about decadent living and pussycats and veiled drug references. I’ve always found it more exotic and not just sort of dirgey.”
Surprisingly only two singles were lifted off the album the year it was released, the one everybody remembers - Tumbling Dice – and the one does – Happy. This was unusual for the Stones, who had survived principally on their singles where a lot of their peers had managed to create coherent enough albums to be embraced as “album artists”. The critics at the time were certainly divided over the album’s overall quality and it’s only in retrospect that Exile... has been deemed on the great rock n roll albums of the 1970s. For Rogers though there is no question – Exile on Main St is their masterpiece.
“Now that I am getting to know what the words are [laughs], they are underrated and there is a lot more going on. So we’re here to get it back man! It surprises me when even Sir Mick says “There’s only really Tumbling Dice,” I think Rocks Off is the greatest single never released as a single; Shine A Light and Soul Survivor... I’m a big fan, six foot three of fan and I think whoever released it at the time couldn’t hear what some of the rest of us were hearing. I do like Stones singles but I much prefer the album tracks; I mean Can’t You Hear Me Knocking off Sticky Fingers and Moonlight Mile, things like that are grand, wonderful songs. So I’ve never really thought that way, much to the bane of the rest of my band I think.”
“I didn’t need any taking into playing Exile...” is You Am I’s other guitarist, Davey Lane’s take on it, laughing. “It’s been omnipresent wherever we are in the world. If we are driving in a van somewhere , Exile...’s never far from the compact disc player – it’s a record we all know and love.
“I was kind of fumbling around with the Stones as a fifteen, sixteen year old – had the best ofs – and because they were the newest records at the time, I had Voodoo Lounge and Bridges To Babylon and listening to them I didn’t think the Stones sounded too classic for me; didn’t sound like the Stones I had read so much about. It was actually the first time I met Tim and Russell – I’d been seventeen and they asked me if I like the Stones and I said yeah and they said I had to check out Exile... – a record that kind of passed me by. Being a double record there was a lot of information to compute. It’s such a fucking murky, mysterious –sounding record I’ve kind of been fascinated with it ever since.” Once You Am I accepted the brief and deciding that they were not going to try and reproduce the album but rather reinterpret in their own style, the option was there to invite a few friends along to join in the party. “We’ve got keyboards,” Rogers expands, “our friend Steve Heskett who is now touring with You Am I, a horn section, percussionists and Vanetta Fields , who sang on the record doing some backing-ups with us – we’ve got the whole thing man. On that little stage, I don’t know where we are all going to fit! It’s ridiculous that your teenage dreams come true at forty isn’t it?”
Also taking centre stage front and centre to sing a few songs are Roger’s regular partner in crime Tex Perkins, Jet’s Nic Cester, Magic Dirt’s Adalita, Megan Washington and perhaps the surprise in the bunch, Jae Laffer from The Panics. “Jae and I have been seeing each other a bit regularly and there’s just something about the timbre of his voice that works really well on some songs – he’s not an obvious choice, he’s not a leery a rocker as some of the rest of us but he’s just right into it.”
“Exile...’s not far off being one of the most influential records for me,” Laffer admits, “only because I grew up in a house where my Dad basically spent half his time imitating Mick Jagger and he’d kind of do the stupid dance and reply to my questions as a kid with Rolling Stones lyrics. It was really comical but that was his thing and we’ve always been this mad kind of Rolling Stones family, so I just remember growing up with a lot of those records. So when the idea came through for the gig, something in me goes – even though it’s one of the mos rock n roll albums of theirs and I’m not quite the screaming young man – but there’s something about the Stones that says to me, ‘Accept the gig,’ ‘cause there’s a lot of Stones in my blood.”
Adalita certainly had no qualms about accepting the invitation: “Can’t wait to sing with Tim and the gang. It seems like the perfect combo, You Am I and the Stones, a delectable blend of dark rum rock n roll goodness and a heap of love in the room at the end of the night.”
“I never grew up listening to rock n roll at all,” Washington in complete contrast to the rest of the crew, admits. “My boyfriend, who’s like a total rock head would put on all this music and I would say, ‘That’s great, what’s this?’ He’d go, ‘This is the Stones Meg,’ and I’d say ‘Wow, this is pretty good’. He’d be, ‘Yeah and 8 million other people think so too.’ They asked me to cover an AC/DC song at the APRA Awards, so now I think it’s really funny! Tim goes, ‘Come do a song’ and I’m like ‘Dude, are you sure?’ and he says ‘Yeah, you’ll be great’ so I said, “OK bring it”
WHEN & WHERE: Oxford Art Factory, 15th September 2010
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