EXILED ON MAIN STREET somewhere in The Mojave Desert

Here I am....late at night...in a great, beautiful...favorite little Nevada casino town on the banks of the Colorado River (Laughlin, Nv).

I do love my favorite state for winter....it's called Nevada....and parts of Arizona.  It's usualy warm and sunny, with a little rain in winter/early spring.




Notice, I qualified my love for Nevada....with a reference to the weather.

I am that way.

I like to walk around with only shorts on in the desert where BLM public lands are the only source of solitude and aloneness for hippster dufous shamans to practise set and settings.



 Nevada...one of the greatest unpopulated (and therefore ruined) states in this lost, hopeless, soulless country. Oddly enough...Nevada has more 9,000 ft peaks, than any other state. The mountains are not as memorable as Colorado...but...the vast open range is what I shoot for and prefer.

 If you do not like noise, the range land is the only place to find that you can study the unbroken silence...

 ...so you can remote view as a cosmic surfer of info that might stun conditioned assumptions that hold us back...from what?

Most Americans....only know Las Vegas....which....sucks down too much attention.

There are better places.

There are always...better towns....than a big, brutal, violent, showy, anti Christ of a city...known as Las Vegas.

I confess........I am a shutterbug. I've tried to "speak with images" thinking that perhaps a "picture is worth a thousand words".  Images are all about mimimization, without the pretense or presumption of mere words.  Words....what good is that when "Acts Not Words" seem more fitting for my path down the road to perdition and back.

Leonard Knight (created "Salvation Mountain" in The California desert) said, "God is Love" and "Keep it Simple".

What could be more simple than...images over words?
I like to shoot photos....of anything...to focus on the beauty...even if....I am in a dusty, Quartzite, Arizona, flea market.












I still like the challenge....like finding this alley Siamese cat cleaning himself in the only available sunlight?















Anyway....LAUGHLIN, NEVADA......is really....a favorite Kerouac, on the fucking road....place for me....I do know a little about this place...having flirted with this town....during my mad cap,
unscheduled...."Go man...Go man" existence.


I know.....what your thinking, "I've never heard of the place...probably a little Vegas or something".

 And...maybe it is. But, it has so much...to offer...so quickly....it works for me...so well. When you first see it....it is just a beautiful journey to get here...ya know. You come down from elevation (either from Kingman, Az, or Neveda side) through the rocky, beauty of The Mojave Desert's Chocolate Mountains.

But...it is something more than that.




















It has a small town friendliness to it....and....it...has some impressive neon lights and casino signage.






















It is....a really beautiful little town........and I like to walk it in the morning before dusk....when it's quiet.....while I hum Joni Mitchel's song, "Morgantown".

A guy needs something called a "Third Place".

A "Third Place" is....or was...uh....defined by a writer whose name I do not remember....and...uh...well....he seemed to suggest that "The Third Place" is a place you go away from home (First Place) after work (Second Place) like a Kelsey's Bar in Archie Bunker's life.

 A bar....like....Cheers.

A place where....everyone knows your name....and you "can get shitfaced after work"...and no one judges you. Unlike work, with all the back stabbing, and posing....and...."Survivor tricks of survival".....where social masks become a three card Monte of the mind.  The third place is the place where you socialize with booze among your third peer group.  It's a place to socialize without fear.


Anyway, Laughlin has a good third place...open all night and morning for the subterraneans living a lonely, nocturnal life of thought crime (In Nevada casino towns, the booze flows all night into the morning and prostitution is legal, like it should be).






I stayed up all night into the morning...drinking 2 dollar Coors beers.....and......listened to the Stones "Exile on Main street"....over and over again.

The piano.

The piano is so perfect on so many songs (thank you Nicky Hopkins).

 Jagger is at his prime.

The harmonicas....Keith's stunning creativity....a Chicago fusion wall of sound based on Chicago Blues...with Mick Taylor so good....and....these songs...are not known as the Stones hits, but...they are so much better, so better layered....like the washes of soft tint at the hand of a brilliant water colorist.

 And the bluesy, nutty, wacky....American Negro experience type freedom....known as the blues...is all over this amazing gem of a diamond like sutra.

 I cannot sell.......this album more.......but can say.........since I got to it, it blew all Stones albums away......and.....stays with me more than any Beatles album.

Don't know why....Beatles are so sublime....yet....would never leave this album far from my ears....no matter what.

 Almost like a set of mantras...or sutras for the blessed doomed...and, at the time the album (Stones first and only double album) was recorded, The Stones were pushed out of England with heavy handed police frameups, facing years in prison.  The Stones felt they were doomed and disregarded by the authorites, so...they hit the road and left for greener pastures and some freedom (that never came, since The Frence Police raided Keith's rental manor creating more problems that always vexes the best and the brightest).

This album is............Exiled from all other studio albums....and music...
....THERE IS NOTHING LIKE IT, AND IT IS MY MANTRA OF VISION...WITH SO MANY DIAMOND SUTRAS.










Like a good mantra or sutra...it was an emotional anchor for me.

It did keep me sane....while the world was clearly insane and wrong.

It is that kinky.

It is that perfect, and...hey man....no pretense.

No pretense.



No pretense.

No ego.

No posing.











It is......................................EXILED FROM ALL MAIN STREET, STUDIO, EGO DRIVEN ALBUMS or art.  It is Chicago Blues where The Stones were trying to record "one thing" (a wall of sound).  At this time, no other band had recorded a "wall of sound" with harmonicas, blues piano, electric guitars, and a saxophone.  Nobody.  Blazeing new trails.







No pretense.  Chicago Blues.




From Rolling Stone Magazine's "500 Best Rock and Roll albums", Exile on Main street was listed as the seventh best out of 500 albums.

From the magazine at "http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-19691231/exile-on-main-street-the-rolling-stones-19691231":

..." A dirty whirl of blues and boogie, the Rolling Stones' 1972 double LP "was the first grunge record," guitarist Keith Richards crowed proudly last year. But inside the deliberately dense squall — Richards' and Mick Taylor's dogfight riffing, the lusty jump of the Bill Wyman/Charlie Watts rhythm engine, Mick Jagger's caged-animal bark and burned-soul croon — is the Stones' greatest album and Jagger and Richards' definitive songwriting statement of outlaw pride and dedication to grit. 

 In the existential shuffle "Tumbling Dice," the exhausted country beauty "Torn and Frayed" and the whiskey-soaked church of "Shine a Light," you literally hear the Stones in exile: working at Richards' villa in the south of France, on the run from media censure, British drug police (Jagger and Richards already knew the view from behind bars) and the country's onerous tax code.

 The music rattles like battle but also swings with clear purpose — unconditional survival — in "Rocks Off" and "All Down the Line." As Richards explained, "The Stones don't have a home anymore — hence the Exile — but they can still keep it together. Whatever people throw at us, we can still duck, improvise, overcome." 

 Great example: Richards recorded his jubilant romp "Happy" with just producer Jimmy Miller on drums and saxman Bobby Keys — while waiting for the other Stones to turn up for work. Exile on Main Street is the Stones at their fighting best, armed with the blues, playing to win."....