Exile on Main St. by The Rolling Stones

A Love Supreme

John Coltrane

Spiritual jazz’s founding document.

Recorded on December 9, 1964, A Love Supreme raised the bar in terms of what jazz could strive to express. It is devotional in intent, with a long religious poem printed on the sleeve, plus a liner note in which John Coltrane alludes to his overcoming addiction and pinpoints his “spiritual awakening” in 1957.

As such, there’s an aura of solemnity here, clear from the opening notes of “Acknowledgement.” Coltrane weaves incantational tenor sax phrases until bassist Jimmy Garrison takes up the main four-note “A Love Supreme” motif, and drummer Elvin Jones drops a driving, multilayered beat with the subtlest Afro-Latin tinge. That group sound—that moment—became etched into jazz history like scripture on a stone tablet.

“My guys at the time weren’t really listening to Coltrane, but I was like, ‘This is what it is. This is where I am.’”

Common

It’s astonishing to think of what Coltrane achieved in 10 years, between his debut as a leader in 1957 and his death in 1967 at age 40. A Love Supreme remains the watershed—concise yet thoroughly immersive, a founding document in the genre that would become known as spiritual jazz.

Exile on Main St.

The Rolling Stones

The Stones’ shambolic, decadent mystique in its ultimate form.

More than songs or performances, Exile on Main St. was about mood. Can you hear the young gods sweating it out in the basement of a French mansion overlooking the Mediterranean, surrounded by junkies and hangers-on, eating lobster in the afternoon and working all night? Never had the band managed to translate their myth so faithfully into sound. But Exile was also the closest The Rolling Stones ever got to something truly avant-garde, an album whose perceived mistakes—the muddy mix, the dislocated performances—conjured a feeling that something more correct would have wiped away.

“Exile on Main St. is the greatest rock ’n’ roll record of all time. It’s not just the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the South of France, in a mansion, being unimaginably beautiful and decadent. But it’s what’s going on in there that you can’t hear.”

Chris Robinson

The Black Crowes

For every “Tumbling Dice” or “Torn and Frayed”—two of the album’s more coherent moments—there was an “I Just Want to See His Face” or “Let It Loose,” tracks that functioned less as finished thoughts than open-ended suggestions. And the blues that had once served as the band’s shorthand for earthly hardships and desires now sounded mysterious and arcane. They now embodied the confusion they had once merely described.

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A Love Supreme

Exile on Main St.