The reissue of Exile on Main Street has me revisiting the Stones and their great four album run from 1968-1972. Beggar's Banquet, the first of the quartet, might just be the best, and is certainly the most important. Is it too much to say that, coming fast on the heels of the Beatles White Album, it reinvented rock and roll? Nothing before ever sounded remotely like "Sympathy for the Devil," which succeeded in transporting Robert Johnson's spirit to the rock idiom. "No Expectations," which came next, is stylistically different, but texturally identical. That texture, a vocal and instrumental rawness, cut like the real world. The Stones could never match Dylan for blind genius or the Beatles for shear beauty and variety--no one could--but with this album and the three that followed, Mick, Keith, and Co. paved the road for all the lesser immortals who followed. RIP Brian Jones.
