Whether Exile On Main Street is the best rock ’n’ roll album of all time is open to debate, but its status as the greatest rock ’n’ roll rock ’n’ roll album ever made should forever go unchallenged. Famously recorded by The Rolling Stones and whoever else was hanging out in the basement of Keith Richards’ 16-room mansion in southern France over the course of a sweltering summer in 1971, Exile was created amid a never-ending drug-and-booze-addled house party that somehow enhanced rather than diminished the band’s creative process. Even more incredibly, the most focused and lucid Stone at the time was none other than Richards, who piloted the sessions and made his obsession with gritty American roots music the record’s dominant aesthetic. When Richards slipped into a muse-crushing heroin haze soon afterward, Mick Jagger’s indefatigable sense of professionalism and craven adherence to the latest pop trends clicked in. Just one year after Exile was released, the Stones were playing string-drenched ballads and dressing like a glam band.
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