Together in Exile: Robert Frank and The Rolling Stones

Few album covers resonate like The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. It’s one of those 12″ gatefold artworks that inspires a double-take — something like that vague feeling of wanting to reread a line of a poem. That’s a feeling that I typically don’t get when looking at tiny digital prints on the Internet. And there’s a lot of them now with Exile‘s reissue.

I remember first seeing Exile‘s front cover, that now iconic circus show photo collage, in a Los Angeles swap meet. It’s as if the record was made to age: the gritty and loose style fit for rediscovery 30 years later in a dusty record bin thrown among random assortments of parking lot junk. Similar collages on the back cover and inside the gatefold show the Stones in the streets of downtown LA and NY. As such, they aligned themselves with not only the misfit circus entertainers but both the poor and the outsiders of America’s neglected inner cities.

Only later did I discover that those photos were Super 8 Camera stills shot by Robert Frank — a Jewish-Swiss immigrant whose photo book The Americans caused critical uproar in the late 50s. There’s another strange twist. A surfer and artist from Palos Verdes, John Van Hamersveld, who you may be already familiar with from his sun drenched Endless Summer poster, designed and conceptualized the cover art for Exile. But the original inspiration might trace back even further to an unnamed and mysterious source. The circus show on Exile‘s front cover is actually a photo Frank took of a tattered collage posted on a tattoo parlor wall, somewhere on Route 66, during the same road trips that brought about The Americans. Of the 27,000 photos Frank took on the road in the mid 50s, he used 83 for the book. How many more exiles are there?

Maybe his documentary “Cocksucker Blues“ chronicling The Rolling Stones during their Exile tour across America in ’72? There’s some excellent footage of what you’d expect from the Stones — who had fled Britain to escape tax debts — at the top of their career: sexual debauchery, heavy indulgence in drugs, thoroughly saturated egos and a generally favorable attitude to loafing around. In essence, it’s what we’ve come to mythicize of the rockstar.

Apparently Mick Jagger found the finished product so offensive that he brought on legal action to block the film’s release. When Jagger asked Frank why he filmed much better scenes of Keith Richards, Frank responded bluntly: he’s more interesting. After all, Robert Frank was known for his unsentimental honesty. Lucky for us, we live in the age of Youtube where censored, obscure and bootlegged videos rise from the muck and spread like bacteria across the Web. Although it’s a video that has been known to disappear from virtual presence before, so be forewarned if you don’t watch it right now!