(Blues/Blues-Rock) VA - Exile On Blues St. (The Rolling Stones Songs) - 2003, MP3, 320 kbps

Exile on Blues St. is the third in Telarc’s blues series based on classic rock albums -- the others were The Blues White Album and Blues on Blonde on Blonde. I think it’s long past time to retire these multi-artist tribute or theme discs. Hal Wilner’s approach to them has been unique and one or two other collections have been musically successful, but they’re usually unfocused and they often feel thrown together. I almost always find myself running back to the original versions of tracks covered on them.
Tommy Shannon and Chris Layton, the bassist and drummer for Double Trouble, play on every track on this disc and they have a clear understanding of what Exile On Main Street was about. Their playing is rock solid and economical throughout. Nearly everyone else seems to have either missed something essential about Exile or lacks the skills to recast the songs. The exceptions, Otis Taylor’s "Sweet Black Angel," Jeff Lang’s "Sweet Virginia," and Joe Lewis Walker’s "Shine A Light," are strongly felt interpretations that pull something new from the songs.
Other cuts are off in small but important ways. Lucky Peterson’s version of "Ventilator Blues" is an exciting enough guitar rave up, but the original is slower, dirtier, and just plain meaner. Many tracks are hugely miscalculated. Tab Benoit takes "Shake Your Hips," three minutes of pure funk in both Slim Harpo’s original and in the Stones’ version, and turns it into six minutes of guitar excess. Andrea Re and Deborah Coleman offer lifeless performance of, respectively, "Tumbling Dice" and "Happy," but they may have been hindered by arrangements that get important things, such as the chord changes, wrong. The irony of Exile on Blues Sreet is that it takes a conservative, purist approach to music created by a band that had moved beyond purism to adapting the blues for its own purposes.