Exile on main street -a trip to memory motel

As I type this, the Rolling Stones are playing in my room- their latest- A Bigger Bang ...Jagger launches into a blues song…”I can read it like the back of my haaand…” Patent Stones blues…and sometimes one listens to the Stones for the sheer joy of hearing them play.

And I started wondering…if there ever was one band -just one band that is me....it is the Stones

I discovered them quite late…but they have stayed on

Surprisingly, The Stones, I guess, were never a big thing in India.

I never met a Rolling Stones fan while in college or even later (and my college was brimming with rock fans who knowingly discussed why RUSH just did not sound like a three piece band and how Deep Purple Mach 1 was the father of prog rock... these were highly knowledgeable people who awed little college uncools with their rock and roll snobbery).

Rock and roll was during my times at engineering college the ultimate expression of intellectual rebelliousness (I Am sure it still is somewhere or the other).

Still...no one was a Stones fan... The Stones were considered wierd rebellious good for nothings who roamed around in leather jackets, had sex all the time and were the corrupting influence on ‘good music’.

I was one of them for a long time. I avoided the Stones for most of my early rock years trying so hard to belong to this and that-my tastes and opinions swaying with every album I heard and every review I read

Then one day after some three years of this rock and roll apprenticeship- I picked up this cassette with an odd cover- scrawling on an yellow dirt wall -scrawling I really couldn’t read cause the picture was too small on the cassette cover- Beggar's Banquet said the graffiti on the wall.

Let’s give this band that no one listens to a chance...So enter cassette into my music system. The room door closes for a ‘listening session’. Volume turned high enough to get the “nuances”.

“Pleaaaased to meet you hope you get myyyyyyy name” threatens this quaint voice with a really weird accent as the band goes ‘woooowooooo” endlessly in the background and a guitar that sounds as weird as the singer churns out some ominous sounding sounds…

Haunting harmonica at the end of one dirty number asking a parachute woman to land on the weird voiced gent…bursting into a mix of sitar, twanging guitars and vague percussion aimed at a street fighting man…and people don’t like this band???

I start hunting for Stones albums. An 'American 'cousin gets me Exile on Main Street. An 18-song album with a collage of strange black and white photographs on its cover -The album sounds like some one very drunk had recorded it. You couldn’t hear anything right. The whole thing's a confused mess of the weird sounding voice and guitars and trumpets and saxophones. Everyone around me hated it. I LOVED it.

“Stop breaking down, mama, please, stop breaking down!!!” ... those guitars and the 'feel' of two very drunk guys screaming old blues lyrics …

Well after that it was a journey...my musical tastes expanded and changed and changed back ...The Stones remained while many bands fell off as adolescent indulgences.

The Stones just stayed on.

They can be world-weary and lecherous, misogynist and drunk, wise and raucous, incoherent and brilliant-all at the same time and could rock you like nobody else could or can...this was a band that played MY music-that appealed to ME . And what with so many people around me still remaining Stones-averse they soon became My Band.

That tired voice that sings the blues and filth with equal ease, that guitar that shimmers and moans , that golden age when Taylor was around, that trumpets and the saxophones that blare every time a brown girl gets whipped,that Jazz obsessed drummer, that dead band member whose genius no one refutes and whose departure no one mourns, that one band that makes you believe in them- that they don't play to make a hit but because they are what they are...and you listen to them for the sheer joy of hearing them play...

The CD has come to an end-time to press repeat...