EastWest Review

An outlier record that seized the Stones by the scruff and dragged them, half-willing, through the muck and the euphoria of their own making, Exile on Main St. was an anomaly — not just their finest work, but a thing they shouldn’t have even been capable of. That it should exist at all, somehow defied reason. Each musician, left to his own devices, could never have conjured up such a raucous, unholy exorcism of a record. And yet, together, they had done it, as if Exile was brought into being by the era itself, demanding its own testimony, its own confirmation, its own gospel. Disco, funk, glam, prog have spent the rest of the decade trying to scrub away its grime, but it was a perfect stain that never washed out.

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We don’t hear it much on the radio now, and Spotify rarely brings it out of its algorithmic attic, but its ghost still lingers — on every record that dares to sound loose and lived-in, in every producer who knows that perfection is for cowards, and in the way sass isn’t just tolerated but expected from any track with ambitions above the bargain bin. It kicked a door open, and no matter how hard the gatekeepers tried, they never managed to shut it again.

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Gritty, half-feral, Exile caught the Stones unshackled from England, where the establishment hounded them for looking too androgynous, dressing too flamboyantly — too foreign — and playing music that was Black, unpolished, and far too dangerous. In the South of France, where Exile took shape, the air was freer. The utopian optimism of the Sixties may have already crumbled, but the corporate rock meat grinder had yet to fully clamp its iron jaws shut. This was the last gasp of real freedom — the last time the Stones didn’t care about marketability, the last time they took a raw look at where they’d come from, and the last time they looked at themselves in a mirror with full honesty. Exile wasn’t just an album. It was a reckoning, a lament (with “Shine a Light” standing over Brian Jones’ grave with its last rites), and a moment in history that transcended music itself.

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Exile took American roots music — blues, gospel, rock’n’roll, country — threw it in a blender, and gave us a sound that to this day crackles like an exposed wire. But what doesn’t get talked about enough is the streak of the conservatoire running through it, thanks to Nicky Hopkins — a genius pianist, classically trained, impossibly gifted from early childhood. His playing isn’t just a flair but the thing that makes Exile sing with elegance beneath all of its grit. And it hits you right out of the gate — bold, brilliant, and fizzing with the kind of electricity that makes your hair stand on end. Hopkins’ piano on “Rip This Joint” doesn’t just drive the song — it detonates it, unleashing the band at their most free, daring, and downright joyous. Here, he’s both the backbone and the spark, anchoring the chaos while cutting through it with brightness that only comes from classical training.

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You don’t even want to guess how many people outside the Western world — far from the usual blues-rock orbit — fell for Exile precisely because Hopkins’ piano spoke to them. He was the key that unlocked the door, the bridge that made this album, and rock itself, accessible to entire demographics that otherwise might never have cared. That was his magic — the ability to make rock sound both polished and primal, to take its strut and give it elegance.

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On “Rocks Off” and “Rip This Joint” which open the album, the guitars snarl and swagger, but Hopkins’s piano slices right through — melodic, radiant, impossible to ignore (or at least, it should have been). That it was shoved so deep into the mix isn’t a mistake — it’s a travesty. Thankfully, the internet is bringing Hopkins back into the spotlight which the original production denied him, right where he belongs. Studio outtakes and isolated tracks on YouTube lay it all bare: Exile didn’t just feature Hopkins; it depended on him. And not just for the “diamond tiaras” Mick Jagger said he placed atop the songs, because Hopkins didn’t just decorate Exile — he held much of the album together. As Keith Richards admitted in a 2024 documentary — when a song hit a wall and nobody knew which way it should turn, it was Hopkins who’d often pull them out of the ditch. Not as a sideman, not as a piano man dropping in some pretty flourishes — he was the fixer, the guy who could crack the code when the band was stumped.

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And it’s a revelation to finally hear Hopkins’ piano blast through the murk on those YouTube clips — loud and clear, like it always should have been. His right hand on “Rip This Joint” throwing down bluesy trills, quick arpeggios, and stabbing little rhythmic jabs, while his left teases the groove, pushing and pulling the tempo with his trademark effortless, cheeky swagger. He sounds spontaneous, untamed, and — more than anything — free. And it’s that magic, that clarity, that lifts the album out of the rock’n’roll gutter and straight onto the global stage.

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But Hopkins wasn’t just some virtuoso hammering away at the keys — he was a prodigious improviser, a creator of worlds. On “Loving Cup” he doesn’t just match the mood; he expands it, breathes into it, as if feeding life into a flame, lets it grow, and ends up shaping the texture of the entire track — not only giving it its full substance, but painting it in hues no one could image before. This is not just music — it is the construction of a world, a world that is as much a reflection of the Stones, as it is of his own singular vision. And he does that by hearing, really hearing the musicians he plays with, and when he answers back, it’s not just a moment of creative chemistry — it’s a transformation, a reimagining, an act of transmuting a song from a blueprint into a living, breathing entity.

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And this gift was something he was born with — rare, sparkling, that set him apart from the first moment he stepped onto the scene in the early Sixties — so blindingly obvious, it didn’t need explaining or defending. It simply was. Take his 1965 jam with Jimmy Page when he is only 21 — Page lays down a guitar solo dripping with swagger, and Hopkins? He answers. Not in the predictable, one-upmanship way of so many rock egos, but with something brighter, better, more expansive — he takes that solo, feels it with openness and pure unguarded trust, and then completes it, lifting it into something so raucous and gleeful it’s practically dancing, music reveling in absolute freedom. It’s playful, it’s wild, and, most strikingly, it’s unguarded — which is the absolute peak of what rock improvisation was at the time. And he carried that spark from his youth, right through the Sixties and the Seventies, never losing that ability to hear, to answer, to exalt.

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But this purity of feeling was met head-on by something darker at Villa Nellcôte — an old stronghold of French elegance where the album was recorded. Though Keith Richards’ claims about the place once being a Gestapo headquarters have no confirmation in historical records, they shed a light on the state of his mind at the time, and our general human tendency to imbue spaces with narratives that reflect what goes on inside us. The villa did not need that story — the darkness was already there, in many of the people who had gathered to record the album. The house simply resonated with its own, subtly colonial echo, and helped the music plumb the depth between light and shadow, purity and corruption, past and present.

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Creativity flourishes when tension is abound, and tension between the opposites at Villa Nellcôte was enormous. Here, in the same rooms, slept and worked those who devoutly believed in Christ, and those who conjured shadows from the dark. Those whose lives had been marked by physical pain, and those for whom the body was only a source of pleasure. Those who were about to decide that music was from now on going to be strictly business, and those who never intended to make money out of it. Those who still saw drugs as a doorway to the infinite, and those who were beginning to feel the first sting of addiction.

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At these crossroads of the rough and the holy, elitist art and street sensibility – Exile on Main St. became more than just an album. It became an alchemical work, a transformation into something that went beyond the talent of musicians who created it.

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While the Stones were recording Exile on Main St., Lennon was working on Imagine (a project Hopkins shaped as profoundly as he did Exile), the Doors were creating L.A. Woman, the Who were recording Who's Next (another album where Hopkins shone), and Led Zeppelin, fresh on their heels, were about to release their fourth masterpiece. Each of these was a peak, an apex of brilliance. But while the music soared, something else was quietly dying. The gilded vision of a counterculture utopia — "peace and love," "flower power" — was beginning to crumble. The adult world had already made its ultimatum to the creative kids: "If you can’t beat us, join us," adamant that it wasn’t going to be shaped by idealistic slogans, that laws of human nature would prevail, and that systems of power at all levels weren’t going to budge. The world was confirming that it would remain a battleground — of egos, power struggles, and a fight for prestige. And that even within the counterculture, even within the bohemia, the world would remain dog-eat-dog. Exile became the last great shout of creative freedom, the final burst of belief in personal expression as the highest ideal. It wasn’t optimism anymore. It was something far more visceral: the final, desperate rebellion before reality closed in for good.

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Exile, as a result, is drenched in emotion, and Hopkins' playing is the heart of its most sensational tracks. On "Let It Loose" he is not afraid to dive deep into heartbreak, mixing the spiritual uplift of gospel, the rawness of blues-rock, and the precision of soul. His left hand holds the track together — bass notes and simple patterns building the harmonic structure — while his right gently unravels song in a dialogue with Jagger’s vocals. He lets each fleeting emotion hover, suspended in air, giving depth to the song’s lament, without distracting from the lyrics or the voice. It’s emotional restraint at its finest — delicate, fleeting, and the kind that shatters you.

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It is staggering how he balances restraint with the deepest, most piercing feeling, knowing exactly when to pull back and when to step forward. Where Jagger blusters, Hopkins whispers, creating a contrast that gives the Stones something they could never do on their own: depth, height, nuance. Where others might opt for the grand, the obvious, Hopkins conveys feeling through subtle changes in tone, phrasing, and dynamics. There is a quiet, almost tragic melancholy in his playing, the kind that resonates so profoundly that it renders any need to scream for attention irrelevant. That’s the revelation of "Let It Loose" — the ultimate lesson in how to make genius sound effortless.

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But here the gospel of the American South came full circle when it met a white boy from England named Nicky Hopkins. Because gospel’s roots are both in Africa’s soil and in the pews of the English church. Hopkins embraced faith while still in school, and after a year and a half in a hospital in his late teens, having endured 14 operations, he was baptized the second time, emerging reborn.

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Hopkins’ piano on “Let It Loose” doesn’t just support the song — it elevates it, channeling something not holy, but almost supernatural. There's discipline in his playing, of course — years of it — but there's also a remarkable, effortless intuition that feels as if he was born knowing. The technique? Flawless. The subtlety of his touch? Exquisite. The choices he makes, the harmonies he conjures, are the work of someone who’s given himself completely to his craft. But beyond the technique, what really gets under your skin is the emotional depth that goes beyond craftsmanship, that feels timeless, eternal.

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Viewed through the lens of gospel, Hopkins’ piano on “Let It Loose” becomes a voice — dare we say it? — of grace, because here we hear a human quest for connecting with something higher. It may not be exactly sacred, but nevertheless a metaphysical dialogue: the piano’s conversation with the guitar, the choir, the vocals. Hopkins doesn’t overload the track with virtuosity — he is restrained, playing exactly what the song requires — and in this restraint, in that act of service, he embodies a profound spiritual truth: that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.

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The only other soul at Villa Nellcôte who came close to Hopkins' cultural heft was Anita Pallenberg. And let’s not beat around the bush — she was what some would call a witch, because she made no secret of the degree of her interest in the occult. She wasn’t just into a little bit of weirdness — no, she dove headfirst into witchcraft. Mick Wall, in his Led Zeppelin biography When Giants Walked the Earth, tells why Jimmy Page was so captivated by Anita after a series of visits to the flat she shared with Brian Jones in London in the mid-Sixties: "He [Brian] and Anita would hold seances at the flat using an Ouija board. … Swinging by the Indica gallery and bookstore, buying the latest occult tomes, searching for Satanic spells to dispel thunder and lightning.”

 

But Anita was the antithesis of Nicky not just when it came to spirituality. She was his polar opposite in every way when it came to how she responded to life itself, although only they two, they two alone at Villa Nellcôte that summer knew European culture in its intricate detail — Hopkins, a classically trained musician, and she, the heiress to the Pallenberg artistic dynasty. Her father was a classical musician, and her great-grandfather Arnold Böcklin was one of the greats of 19th century Symbolism. While each Stone was stumbling around in the dark when it came to Brahms, Chopin, or Rachmaninoff — Hopkins’ sacred ground — and tried to wrap their heads around art history beyond the ragged, half-baked reference to Dada and Man Ray on the Exile cover, Anita and Nicky weren’t pretending to be cultured. They simply were.

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Both Nicky’s and Anita’s childhoods set them on track to pursue a prim, polished future. But then, in one thrilling moment, they did what everyone else was too scared to do: they “got up, left everything, and followed,” as Luke said of Matthew — followed rock’n’roll. When Anita rebelled against her school where lessons had been taught by nuns, she ripped the whole thing up and threw it out the window. Nicky, on the other hand, rebelled in his own way — he didn’t need to torch his connection to the Royal Academy of Music to break free. He took classical music with him, and it didn’t just stay in him — it poured through him through his silver tone, that delicate clarity, that noble tinge which still clung to him, even in the madness of the era.

 

But his defection to rock’n’roll is telling, a reminder of its magnetic pull on that generation. Classical music education was then, and remains now, a fortress — unconnected to other genres, insulated and self-satisfied. Even now, at conservatoires, jazz or rock are not discussed with any seriousness — they’re deemed beneath the sanctity of the tradition. There's a fear, palpable and persistent, among classical music educators: the fear that acknowledging the brilliance of anything “other” would topple the illusion that their music stands on some superior pedestal.

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So in his love for rock Hopkins was remarkable — how he absorbed both classical music and rock’n’roll with equal seriousness and depth, and in how he stretched rock into a thing no one with that kind of real classical training ever has, not remotely close. Perhaps he simply did not want to be a captive animal — trained, disciplined, controlled in a world full of boundaries, of things you must and must not do. He knew that within those boundaries he could achieve incredible things. But they were still boundaries and he wanted to roam free, run wild, create on their own terms. Because it wasn’t just about the music. It was about the way he was made, the spirit behind it. And he certainly knew the irony: that the very things that the conservatoire dismissed in rock, classical composers like Beethoven or Liszt were doing in their own time: breaking rules, shocking people, making music that was alive.

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Both Nicky and Anita were outsiders — neither of them truly belonged to the Rolling Stones, and Anita wasn’t even English. She was German, raised in Rome. What made Nicky a double outsider was the fact that he suffered from Crohn’s disease, the kind of autoimmune nightmare that’s relentless and brutal, and hits you where it hurts: pain isn’t just a side effect — it’s your constant, unwanted companion. It’s the kind of thing that turns you inside out, makes you question everything, and pushes you to find meaning in the chaos. It’s the kind of thing that, for most, erases faith. But for him it was the reason to dig deeper. It was never a grand spectacle, something he’d force on anyone, but it clearly shaped his approach to life and art. His music wasn’t crafted just from technique and theory — it came from experience, the kind of emotional honesty you can’t fake, the kind of rawness only someone who’s really lived it can give you. Pain, faith, and an indescribable depth — things others didn’t have, couldn’t have, because they hadn’t walked through the fire like he did.

 

And when it came to fire, Anita’s was of a different kind — the one that left you with nothing but a singed memory and the smell of burnt ambition. On the surface, she kept the villa in order. Every day, about thirty people would sit at her table, and it wasn’t just for food — it was a feast of ideas, brilliance, creativity. In the summer of 1971 Lennon, Burroughs, Terry Southern, Graham Parsons, Marshall Chess — all trooped through. She supervised the cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, chauffeurs, and had no patience for freeloaders, the uninvited, the useless. Outsiders — no talent, no contribution? Get the hell out. And she was the gateway to something far bigger than all that mundane stuff — a conduit through which something far bigger than mere music, life, or love passed. She wasn’t just a participant — she was the archetype. The one who let the spirits in. The one who channeled the forces which shaped this album into something more than the sum of its parts.

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A muse is never just a person — she’s the gatekeeper to the collective unconscious, that vast sea from which all creativity is pulled. Anita was that conduit — not in some hollow sense, but in the way she reached into you and stirred something ancient and primal. Something Keith couldn’t summon, no matter how many veins he wrecked or joints he lit. It’s the eternal push and pull of marriage, yes, but also of opposites: old European bohemia and working-class England. She was both the dream and the destruction. The Femme Fatale? Perhaps too cheap a label, but she did destroy and inspire in equal measure.

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Some call her the band's fashion designer, but that’s too narrow. She wasn’t just picking scarves and velvet pants. She was building the myth and thanks to her the band didn’t just look like outlaws — they looked like the outlaws, the first Western bohemians to stomp all over the world’s divisions — of gender, class, ethnicity. Without her, who knows how rock style would have evolved beyond greased-up pompadours, scruffy suits and leather jackets?

 

At the same time, while most would try to hush up their messes, she cranked up the volume, turning every moral panic into a full-blown cataclysm. When the press clutched their pearls over the Rolling Stones wearing ethnic clothing, women’s clothing, dazzling colors and long hair, she upped the ante — dressing Brian Jones in a full SS uniform and staging a photoshoot like she was directing Triumph of the Will, the psychedelic sequel. And when everyone on the scene recoiled at her love triangle with Jones and Richards, she didn’t retreat — she turned it into a quadrangle, roping in Jagger, and turning the whole thing into a geometry lesson where the only constant was chaos.

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And if we must talk about Jagger, some claim that it was she who introduced the Rolling Stones to Kenneth Anger, the filmmaker who billed himself as a sorcerer and had a thing for rock stars. That led to Jagger writing the soundtrack for Invocation of My Demon Brother in 1969 — a film that featured, among its assorted weirdos, Bobby Beausoleil (of Manson Family infamy) and Anton LaVey, the world’s least convincing Satanist.

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But for all of its pseudo-sinister posturing, the entire “watch us dance with Lucifer” thing was Jagger trying on the Devil the way he’d try a new scarf: smirking, self-aware, and ultimately unimpressed. He didn’t need Anger to be larger than life — he already was. Meanwhile, Anger and Anita — forever the ones looking in from the edges — clung to their occult affectations, trying to carve out a space where they could matter in a scene that dismissed them.

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For Anita probing the threshold between light and dark was a curious sort of liberation, not only for herself but for the man beside her. In her company, Richards, whether by accident or design, unbolted the door behind which stood his shadow. The unhinged, lawless freedom of “Ventilator Blues” is the sound of that reckoning. Mick Taylor came up with the riff, and Richards and Jagger took it, roughed it up, and sent it staggering with a reckless, unshackled energy. Its lurching, dragging rhythm stumbles forward, heaves with tension, and flies in the face of any salesmanship expectations. It’s a fever dream — intoxicating, dark, unpolished, in total defiance of commercial blues-rock trends. It doesn’t swagger like Page, doesn’t preen like Clapton, doesn’t sulk like Beck. No pretense, no calculation, no market-tested machismo, just the raw self of musicians who do not fear what lies within. When today Richards says that Anita was the one who made a man out of him, this is, perhaps, what he means.

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Hopkins moves with the song, rising and falling with its flow, but doesn’t give in to it. He provokes it, antagonizes it, adds classical-inspired crystalline flourishes — a refinement so sharp it cuts. What he does is escalation, where the primal and the poised don’t cancel each other out — they combust. And the song becomes menacing because Hopkins makes you realize that it is not a mindless beast — but a thinking, calculating predator — capable of elegance but reveling in savagery. It could be something else, something graceful, but refuses to be. And it sounds like civilization breaking down in real-time, while the chandelier still swings from the ceiling.

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Hopkins and Pallenberg were structural elements of Exile. The whole record hinges on that tension between precision and chaos, transcendence and hedonism, and they embodied it without trying, without a shred of artifice. Hopkins brought clarity, Pallenberg brought disorder, and the Stones fed off both. Take them out of the equation, and Exile isn’t Exile — it’s just another decent rock record. And we’ve got plenty of those already.

 

Anita did not know herself fully in those years, and Keith wasn’t exactly pushing her toward self-discovery, preferring to keep her right where he could see her. The endless carousel of parties and other people’s genius didn’t exactly leave room for introspection. Nicky Hopkins, on the other hand, knew himself too well — had no choice in the matter. Crohn’s disease made sure of that, dragging him through the kind of pain and enforced solitude that either breaks a person or burnishes them into something rare. For him to charge headfirst into the lawless, punishing world of rock and roll — where even the strong get eaten alive — was nothing short of astonishing. Determination? Bravery? Call it what you want.

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He embodied the kind of quiet courage that never gets the Hollywood treatment — the courage to tell society to sod off, take the hard road with no safety net, and bet everything on a dream that might just kill you. With his health, a career in rock’n’roll wasn’t just a gamble. But Nicky wasn’t the type to play it safe — he knew what he was born to do, and he did it, no matter the cost.

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Unlike his contemporaries — many of whom were busy cooking up personas and designing elaborate masks — Hopkins was completely disinterested in crafting an image. He was simply himself: raw, unguarded, and utterly without guile. In interviews, he was almost childlike —spontaneous, truthful, matter-of-fact, completely lacking the armor most musicians wore like a second skin. And that was the magic of Hopkins: his honesty wasn’t an act of rebellion — it was real, a purity of spirit which stood out against the grubby, cut-throat, self-mythologizing circus around him.

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Vulnerability in this business is usually a gimmick, a carefully curated act to sell records or justify bad behavior. But with Hopkins, it was the opposite: he was so good, so undeniable, that he didn’t need to protect himself. He could walk through the carnage of rock’n’roll, all the ego, the backstabbing, the desperate clawing for relevance, and just exist in his own space. In an industry that thrives on artifice, he remained defiantly sincere. And that takes real confidence, unshakable belief of a man who knew his music was bigger than his ego.

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Like Brian Jones and Mick Taylor, Hopkins gets the kind of reverence reserved for the ones who never played the industry’s game. No image to sell to the world, no calculated mystique, no “crap,” as he used to call rock star affectations. Just expression — in real time, no filter, no safety net. While the rest of them were busy constructing their own legends, he simply was — pure, exposed, too honest for his own good. And this is what will continue to haunt the music long after legions of others will fade into their own self-made myths.

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And in this, Anita was like him. Like Nicky, she lived a life of fearless individuality. She didn’t just reject convention — she defied it. She could’ve settled, could’ve played the game, could’ve been just another beautiful woman orbiting rock’s most luminous stars. Instead, she dove headfirst into the inferno, making art of experience and tragedy of love. The men she chose — Brian, Keith — weren’t exactly in the business of keeping things calm, and neither was she. But the only currency that mattered in her world was cultural capital — knowledge, art, style — the only wealth worth having. She didn’t play at being bohemian; she was the real thing. She didn’t chase money because money was a joke, a cheap consolation prize for those too weak to live on their own terms. The only currency she dealt in was aesthetic, and in that economy, she — just like Nicky — was rich beyond measure.

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The difference, however, was simple but crucial: Hopkins had a direction. A calling. He wanted to achieve something transcendent through his life’s work, and knew where he was going, even if the road was brutal. Pallenberg, on the other hand, burned in every direction at once. He built, she detonated. His fire was purpose; hers — chaos.

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But the era’s synchronicity hurled them into the same orbit, their energies pouring into something bigger and more enduring than either of them alone. The result? A cultural shockwave disguised as an album. Creative instinct and calculation, tradition and spontaneous breakthrough — both of them knew how to wield it all. And for one brief, chaotic moment, it all fused into Exile on Main St., a record that didn't just shake up rock 'n' roll but rewrote the DNA of Western culture.

 

Years down the line, long after the Stones machine had rolled on without him, Hopkins still counted “You Got the Silver” among his most treasured piano moments with the band. A song dedicated to Anita. But then again, he also crafted the intro to “She’s a Rainbow,” which some of Anita’s biographers now claim was yet another musical offering to her. And let’s not forget his work on the soundtrack for Mort und Totschlag, a film directed by Volker Schlöndorff that strutted its way into Cannes in 1967 — because, of course Anita, had to have a film, and of course, Nicky just happened to be part of it.

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To this day the audacity of a scrappy, raw bunch of working- and lower-middle-class kids — Brain, Mick, Keith, and Nicky among them — is mind-blowing. How they have managed to hijack the cultural conversation at the height of Britain's post-war reckoning in truly one of history's wildest subversions of power. And they didn’t do it by joining the establishment — they obliterated its rules.

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Nicky Hopkins took the tools of the elite — music steeped in centuries-old European tradition — and smashed it together with raw blues, American grit, and his own hunger. But he didn’t just mix the two — he transfigured them. His genius was in how he made rebellion articulate — not a noisy rejection, but an intricate act of reinvention. And that sophistication? It slipped under the radar of the establishment because it didn’t speak the establishment’s language overtly — it burned its own.

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Led Zeppelin (who wanted him but didn’t get him), the Stones, the Who represented everything the establishment feared: talent without pedigree, the one that doesn’t need to ask for permission to matter; global reach without approval, bypassing traditional cultural gatekeepers and going straight to the people; disruption of “taste,” blurring of the lines between high and low culture. They didn’t just crash the party — they threw their own, and the whole world showed up.

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By the time the establishment finally decided the Stones were respectable — Jagger’s knighthood, that big sloppy tongue logo in the Victoria and Albert Museum (peak British institutional approval), their sneering faces on Royal Mail stamps — the damage had already been done. They’d already set an example: real art doesn’t ask for permission. Plenty of those who came after got the message.

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And in 2025 it’s not the establishment that tries to obliterate them, but the tech bros, the digital landlords deciding what’s worth remembering and what gets flushed down the memory hole. Not with censorship, not with outrage — just with sheer, relentless mediocrity. Bury something that is truly alive under so much bland, risk-free dullness that nobody even knows what they’re missing. The rebellion gets pre-packaged, the icons get committee-approved. In 2025 it’s the technocrats who do the gatekeeping and erase the cultural upheaval of the Sixties and Seventies from the public memory. And behind it is fear: that the real thing might get discovered, that another generation might catch the scent and follow it straight to the source. And then who would buy the substitute they’re force-feeding the next generation? 

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But here is the thing: art has a way of sneaking through the cracks. And no matter how much anyone tries to drown it out, all it takes is one kid, one record, one moment of recognition — and the whole illusion crumbles.

 

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Links:

Nicky Hopkins on “Rocks Off,” Exile on Main St. sessions studio outtake: https://youtu.be/Js0EoCYiqEo?si=ClwazxMKwDKvRvAd

Nicky Hopkins isolated piano on “Rocks Off”: https://youtu.be/t0hLCSKrqQw?si=DezS__GvzvKglFCQ

Nicky Hopkins on “Rip This Joint,” Exile on Main St. sessions studio outtake: https://youtu.be/KZx0jG9ZcW0?si=JX9r6BxphzEoNq5I

Nicky Hopkins on instrumental version of "Let It Loose": https://youtu.be/OWACDFBtv78?si=3G1klycFK24Ivtls

Nicky Hopkins on “All Down the Line,” Exile on Main St. sessions studio outtake: 

https://youtu.be/_w_CQ81YZ0k?si=JURH1GYy2jAZKn36

Nicky Hopkins and Jimmy Page on “LA Breakdown”: https://youtu.be/VbIdWaCO74E?si=jqQFmOK-Wkffepiz

Nicky Hopkins piano on “Soul Survivor”: https://youtu.be/EHXmOkX3_OM?si=F16r7zLLhk_0EV53

Nicky Hopkins on “Soul Survivor,” Exile on Main St. sessions studio outtake: https://youtu.be/EHXmOkX3_OM?si=2ccSQL7f7KzaaJPO

Nicky Hopkins isolated piano on “Loving Cup”: https://youtu.be/2FuK-vHIRC8?si=WyMp1nVZGq3TtuVC

Nicky Hopkins featured in Exile on Main St. studio outtakes:

https://youtu.be/5kRz-PhRHZ0?si=htbu4N7fukzdWY8V

https://youtu.be/A_xLbUyYjJM?si=RH7ec0P8W6Y2hLNa

Nicky Hopkins documentary The Session Man on Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0DBPKT9K7/

Anita Pallenberg documentary Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg: https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Story-Anita-Pallenberg/dp/B0CWDKWXD3

Anita Pallenberg talks about her influence on the Rolling Stones: https://youtu.be/x2TnYZBdNb8?si=YzyqSS0IiWDqvV_W

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