[troutman]

Stones - Rocks Off

http://allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg...3:gifexqtdldse

The opening track off the Stones' classic Exile on Main Street, "Rocks Off" 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. Jimmy Miller's idiot-savant production is almost impenetrably dense, chaotic and cohesive at the same time — it's as though in his efforts to keep the song from falling completely apart, he simply mashed all the vocals and instruments together, with a total disregard for spatial dynamics. Mick Jagger bleeds in and out of the mix, and for every lyric that cracks the consciousness, there's another rendered utterly incomprehensible (often further obscured by Keith Richards' seemingly random backing vocals); Jagger may as well be making up the words as he goes along, and for all we know, he could be. As Richards' cat-scratch guitar riff and Charlie Watts' snare drum also fly in and out of the radar, ironically enough it becomes the sidemen — pianist Nicky Hopkins and horn players Bobby Keys and Jim Price — who take center stage, rising up from the muck in a flourish of juke-joint majesty. Stripped of every last pretense, "Rocks Off" revels in its primitivism like a goddamn pig in slop.