1494 - Rolling Stones Rocks Off 1972

"Exile on Main St." has become generally regarded as the Rolling Stones' finest album. Part of the reason why the record was initially greeted with hesitant reviews is that it takes a while to assimilate. A sprawling, weary double album encompassing rock & roll, blues, soul, and country, "Exile" doesn't try anything new on the surface, but the substance is new. Taking the bleakness that underpinned "Let It Bleed" and "Sticky Fingers" to an extreme, "Exile" is a weary record, and not just lyrically. Jagger's vocals are buried in the mix, and the music is a series of dark, dense jams, with Keith Richards and Mick Taylor spinning off incredible riffs and solos. "Rocks Off" is the opening track. Written and recorded at Villa Nellcôte, a house Keith Richards rented in the south of France during the summer and autumn of 1971. Overdubs and final mixing for the song were later done at Sunset Sound studios in Los Angeles, California between December 1971 and March 1972. The lyrics to the song are wide-ranging, harsh and brutally frank at times; as in Richards obviously referring to an injection of heroin: “I'm zipping through the days at lightning speed. Plug in, flush out and fire the fuckin' feed. Heading for the overload, Splattered on the dirty road, Kick me like you've kicked before, I can't even feel the pain no more". ” The song features a sudden divergence near the two minute fifteen second mark into what has been called a psychedelic jam of sorts, with Jagger's vocals electronically distorted and the guitar chords stretched: “Feel so hypnotised, can't describe the scene. It's all mesmerised all that inside me”. Allmusic critic Jason Ankeny claims that the song "perfectly sets the mood for what's to follow -- murky, gritty, and menacingly raw, its strung-out incoherence captures the record's debauched brilliance with marble-mouthed eloquence."