Rolling Stones, "Exile on Main St."

EONS celebrates our 100th pitch

CJ’s Pitch/Response:

Deana plunks the picture frame in the middle of my kitchen table like she’s throwing down a gauntlet.

Bill and Rob shake their heads and laugh.

Mira flashes her Cheshire grin.

Laura, never one to hold back, shouts, “Get that shit outta here!”

And me, I bound across the room and give Deana an emphatic high five.

The six of us are refugees from the Needham High School Class of 1987 who are now living and raising our families in the town where we grew up. Every few months, we get together to drink and laugh and tell the same stories we’ve told for years like we were acting out Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” in real time.

In between the jokes and the charcuterie and the questionable alcohol choices, we have a running argument:

Beatles vs. Stones.

Bill, Rob and Laura are firmly in the Beatles camp.

Deana and I roll with the Stones.

Only Mira refuses to pick a side, instead insisting that she sees the merits of both bands.

On this particular night, Deana (bless her) has taken her framed Rolling Stones lips and tongue logo and made it the literal and figurative centerpiece of our evening. Immediately, the fight begins anew.

The Beatles contingent leans heavily on the “Most Important/Influential Band Ever” argument.

Deana and I counter that the Fab Four bore us silly and that the Stones were the true saviors of rock ‘n’ roll.

Mira shrugs noncommittally.

The argument pops up in text chains as well. When Rob texted a link to a Beatles vs. Stones poll that declared the Beatles the undisputed winner, I shot back:

The poll is meaningless. Beatles fans are the original Bee Hive (a la Beyoncé). They’re over sensitive and overprotective anytime somebody dares to criticize their band. Of course they’d be all over an online poll! Stones fans, on the other hand, can't be bothered with something as trivial as a poll. If you’d rather spend an hour dragging through the White Album instead of Astro-planing through Exile, that’s your problem.

Deana followed that up with an ad for Paul McCartney at Fenway Park, which she captioned “No thanks!”

In response, Mira suggested a few possible dates for our next gathering.

I love arguing about music with this group because we can be passionate without getting angry. It’s the reason Mitch, Ken and I started Exile on Newbury St. Everything online in the fall of 2020 was full of vitriol and hatred. It wasn’t about making your point. It was making someone else feel bad about theirs. And that sucked. It still does.

So, we decided to fight about music. Three amigos with wildly different tastes who were secure enough in their friendship to bust each other’s chops without hurting each other’s feelings. It was a grand social experiment and, judging from your comments, it was received exactly as we intended.

Thank you to everyone who read, commented and questioned our choices over the past two years. We hope that, like Exile on Main St., there was something for everyone here.

And now we turn the page to a new chapter starting next week. Same name, different format, even more fun.

Stay tuned.

• Pitch Successful (Pick a side, Mira!)

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Ken’s Pitch/Response:

Here at EONS, I’m the Walter White of the group; not in the singular genius/drug kingpin way.  It’s nothing as sexy or dangerous as that, I simply came up with the name, much like Bryan Cranston’s character was accused of by Gretchen and Elliott Schwartz in season 6 of Breaking Bad.  But what’s in a name?  We wanted something that honored both the music we love, as well as the city we call home.  And it needed to be at least a little funny.  So after a few days (in fall 2020) of going back and forth and rejecting so many terrible yet funny possibilities, we settled on Exile on Newbury St.

Newbury St. is one of the most famous streets in Boston, with its high-end shopping and ultra-luxury brownstones, so that seemed like a pretty safe homage to our beloved city.  My big concern was whether or not alluding to the Stones album, Exile on Main St. was going to pigeon-hole us into classic rock, Boomer culture.

As it turns out, we’ve had a ton of fun here over the last two years, and listening to Exile this week was a huge affirmation of everything we’ve done.  It’s the album smack dab in the center of our collective Venn Diagram of musical tastes.  It’s got a couple of lovely folk-rock ballads, it’s got straight up rock n roll, and it’s got some harder rock tunes.  It may not be the best album ever made, but it’s the perfect album for EONS, and after two years and 100 newsletters borrowing its title, it’s the perfect album to add to the shelves of the Newbury St. Collection.

While the 100th album seems like a fitting place to transition away from the album pitches and responses, we are so excited to bring you the next chapter of EONS.  We’ll see you next week with some different.

• Pitch Successful (I’m “Happy”)

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Mitch’s Pitch/Response:

Like CJ said, the debate was always The Beatles versus the Rolling Stones.

But it wasn’t really a debate. The answer was always The Beatles, unless you were crazy or a contrarian. The Beatles were the most important band in rock and roll history. They made Sgt. Peppers. The Stones were a good band with great singles, who played second sitar to The Beatles in the ‘60s and second theremin to Led Zeppelin in the ‘70s.

I loved The Beatles. They were the soundtrack to countless Cub Scout meetings and afternoons at the local pool. They sung about strawberries, octopuses, and submarines. They were great. But they represented childhood. The past.

The Stones, on the other hand, were still a going concern. In 1981, they released Tattoo You, which was, and still is, an incredible album. 

That’s why I always preferred The Stones to The Beatles - not because they were better (music isn’t a competition even if this newsletter pretends it is), but because they were making new music - good new music - when it mattered most to me.

Of course, years later I would learn that the songs on Tattoo You actually dated back to the golden era of the Stones. The Mick Taylor era. The Sticky Fingers era. The Exile on Main St era. 

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The debate was always between Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St. 

Sticky Fingers is tighter, more polished, and features some of their best songs like “Brown Sugar” and “Bitch”, and definitely their best performance in "Can’t You Hear Me Knocking”. 

But Exile on Main St. has it all. It’s magical. Pure alchemy. The right people, the right songs, recorded in the right place, at the right time. It’s the perfect blend of Jagger’s professionalism and Richards’ hedonism (echoes of Gram Parsons and The Flying Burrito Brothers) with Mick Taylor’s lead guitar putting it over the top.

Exile is loose and sloppy, meanders from genre to genre, and threatens to overstay its welcome. And yet, the band is so good, and the vibe is so strong, that even the filler tunes are excellent. You can skip “Turd on the Run” or “Ventilator Blues” if you must, but there’s really no need. They’re still solid tunes.

I love the whole album, but “Loving Cup”, “Sweet Virginia”, and “Let It Loose” are all special.

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It was never a debate after all.

I knew that EONS wouldn’t change CJ’s magnetic attraction to metal or Ken’s affection for lovelorn singer-songwriters. We just wanted to share some of our favorite albums and talk about why they were special to us. We hope that you discovered some new tunes and had a few laughs along the way. We sure did.

• Pitch Successful (See you next week)

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The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. has always been in the Newbury St. Collection. Now it’s official.

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You can’t always get what you want, but for one last time let’s spend the night together in the comments section, and let us know if Exile gives you satisfaction or belongs with the dead flowers. It’s only rock ‘n’ roll, after all.

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Please join us next week as everything changes…and yet stays the same at EONS. From now on, people can pitch whatever they want - not just albums - for inclusion in the Newbury St. Collection. Best of all, we’ll also be inviting friends and guests to make their best pitches, so fire up those hot takes and strong opinions and reply to this newsletter with your best pitch idea!