100 Songs: "Torn and Frayed" (The Rolling Stones)

In his 1969 rock history book Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, Nik Cohn wrote, "The best thing about the Stones, the most important, was their sense of independence, uncompromised." Reading this now, nearly forty years later, it's hard not to smirk at this.  I mean, it's hard to reconcile this vision of the Stones with the band that more or less introduced corporate sponsorship to rock music,  the band that sold out one of their most (inexplicably) popular songs to become the Windows 95 theme.  These are the guys who sold the rights to their signature song (and a song that mocks the man who comes on the tv to tell him how white his shirt can be) to a candy bar for four million dollars.  In many ways, there is not a single legendary rock act more willing to compromise than the Rolling Stones.  

But in a way, none of this is important, and when you listen to the Stones' best work none of the other shit really matters.  You realize that the devil pleading for sympathy is at the same time unable to resist temptation in most any form, and it's just possible that this is part of why the Stones are so important.  The Beatles' greatness lies in part in their discipline, in the absolutely immaculate nature of their songs.  The Stones just went the other way, a chaotic whirlwind of overindulgence and bored hedonism.  The Beatles' internal struggles were exacerbated by the fact that three of the guys didn't like John's wife.  Keith Richards once refused to play guitar on a track because he was pissed off that Mick Jagger basically fucked his girlfriend on camera during the filming of the movie Performance.  You can see a dichotomy there.  

Exile On Main Street, the Stones' 1972 album that represents the end of one of the most remarkable stretches of albums that any act ever put out (Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out, and Sticky Fingers preceded Exile.  Tim Riley described this run as being "all loaded chambers") is one of those albums that people love intensely but doesn't have any of the artists hits on it, kind of like Blood on the Tracks or Nebraska.  It's referenced and celebrated, but never played on classic rock stations.  In fact, the first few times I listened to the album (this would be in late 2000 or early 2001, I believe I bought it at Schoolkids after reading about it at amazon) I decided that I would never get what other people got out of it.  I take a little bit of comfort in knowing that Lester Bangs had a similar experience with the album.  It probably wasn't until 2004 that I began really listening to the album earnestly, and soon I was hooked.  It usurped Let It Bleed's place as my favorite Stones album, and "Torn and Frayed" became one of my favorite songs. 

You maybe have to understand where I was at when I fell in love with the song to understand just why I fell so hard for the song.  I was in a period when my appetite for music was positively ravenous- I was buying everything from underground hip hop to Elvis' Sun Sessions to the Blues, I was going out with a girl that I mainly liked because she shared a name with a Velvet Underground song ("Stephanie Says", for those keeping score at home.  I've always been a sucker for a girl who shares a name with a song I already love), I was taking too many pills and I was reading and re-reading Greil Marcus' book Mystery Train with the kind of zeal normally associated only with holy texts.  So I spent hours contemplating the chorus, seeing layers of metaphor and meaning there in a way that a normally functioning brain shouldn't be capable of.  "And his coat is torn and frayed/It's seen much better days./Just as long as the guitar plays/Let it steal your heart away."  These four lines were clearly filled with more importance than most novels.  The coat obviously represented rock music itself, first of.  Secondly, it represented the band, (one line from the first verse flat out says "on stage the band has got problems", and when the band recorded Exile they were burned out, more or less hiding out in France to avoid paying taxes in England, and had already gone through Brian Jones' death and Altamont).  Clearly the coat also represented the spirit of the 60s (I was younger then, and still believed in this kind of bullshit that I now find ridiculous) and it represented where I was calling from at the time.  This was serious shit, every bit as potent as the meaning that Marcus saw in "Mystery Train" and "Stones In My Passway".  

Four years later, I don't believe most of that, and my passion for the song is decidedly less mystical.  At the time I didn't consider the relationship between the song and, say, Gram Parsons, who spent time with the Stones in France during the recording of the album.  The song has a decidedly southern feel, with its steel guitar and bluesy bass part played not by Bill Wyman but by Mick Taylor, and the character Joe, with his torn and frayed jacket and his codeine to fix his cough seems like a decent enough stand-in for Parsons (or for Keith Richards, for that matter).  

I'm enthralled by the fact that the organ part of the song was essentially an accident- "Trumpet player (Jim) Price was apparently just listening to the band as they did the basic tracks and started to fool around on the organ, not realizing he was being heard and recorded.", according to Bill Janovitz's book about the album for the 33 1/3 series.  I'm especially tickled because of the similarity between this story and the story of Al Kooper more or less sneaking his way into playing organ on "Like A Rolling Stone", and the fact that Kooper also played on "You Can't Always Get What You Want".  It's a well known "fact" (read: element of myth) that this kind of synchronicity is necessary for a truly great song.  

I love the irony that the song "Torn and Frayed", whose title is so emblematic of the themes of Exile on Main Street, is one of the easiest songs on the album to listen to.  The vocals on this track aren't as upfront as one would expect on a major rock album, but by the murky standards of Exile, their positively clear and bell-like.  

Mostly, though, I come back to the simple idea from the chorus that enchanted me so much four years ago- that as long as that guitar plays, it will steal my heart away.  At the time, I was sure that if I ever got the chance to write my own version of Mystery Train, "Torn and Frayed"'s chorus would be the book's epigraph.  It's one of the few things from that summer that I feel like I got right.