Hands down, no doubt, Mainstreet beats Guysville in the battle of the Exiles. Now I’ve said that, what next? Mainstreet beats most albums, it is one of the greatest albums of all times and so is Guysville. Liz Phair, a twenty something from Chicago, whose Girlysound demo -just her and acoustic guitar, lead directly to the this recording, trail blazed through 1994.
The Stones greatest album, from 1972, trailblazed itself from a junked out palace in the south of France where dangerously out of it Keith Richards, and coked up rock royalty Mick Jagger, somehow, somewhere, made the most political sex album ever. It is all blues and all jive and with “Rocks Off” set the stage for Liz Phair’s reply twenty years later.
Phair was “a cunt in spring” and lead with her cunt the way Jagger lead with his dick. She was all sexual promiscuity in search of love the way Jagger was. They were siblings in sexuality.
As Robert Christgau wrote about Mainstreet, the Stones album was about “sex as power, sex as love, sex as pleasure, distance, craziness, release.” Guess what. So is Guysville: “Divorce Song”, “Fuck And Run” … Actually I’m gonna give you the lyric to the latter:
I woke up alarmed
I didn’t know where I was at first
Just that I woke up in your arms
And almost immediately I felt sorry
Cause I didn’t think this would happen again
No matter what I could do or say
Just that I didn’t think this would happen again
With or without my best intentions
And whatever happened to a boyfriend
The kind of guy that tries to win you over?
And whatever happened to a boyfriend
The kind of guy who makes love cause he’s in it?
And I want a boyfriend
I want a boyfriend
I want all that stupid old shit like letters and sodas
Letters and sodas
You got up out of bed
You said you had a lot of work to do
But I heard the rest in my head
And almost immediately I felt sorry
Cause I didn’t think this would happen again
No matter what I could do or say
Just that I didn’t think this would happen again
With or without my best intentions
And I can feel it in my bones
I’m gonna spend another year alone
It’s fuck and run, fuck and run
Even when I was seventeen
Fuck and run, fuck and run
Even when I was twelve
You almost felt bad
You said that I should call you up
But I knew much better than that
And almost immediately I felt sorry
Cause I didn’t think this would happen again
No matter what I could do or say
Just that I didn’t think this would happen again
With or without my best intentions
The money shot was the “even when I was twelve” of course and Phair, on this her first album, didn’t merely court but begged to be misunderstood. So guys misunderstood her and girls got it. I remember reading a review ages ago in which the woman reviewer claimed Phair’s album was a big statement like Costello’s Imperial Bedroom was a big statement.
Mainstreet was nearly a decade into the Stones career and listening to it you get the sense they were in control, or at least Jagger was in control, of their destiny.It is big the way Chess Records was big, it was big sexually the way the Blues greats -the Muddy Waters, were big sexually: it bypassed sexual arrogance, even self-confidence, it simply WAS.
Here is the first side of the four sided album:
Rocks Off
Rip This Joint
Shake Your Hips
Casino Boogie
Tumbling Dice
It’s a bit insane, right? How could anything sound that good?
And so Phair heard it and fucked him and as Jagger got outta bed and said, “yeah, call me sometime”, Phair got out of bed and wrote “Fuck And Run”.
All the girls left in the wake of Jagger, all the stray cats, are Liz Phair, who finally answers on behalf of all of them. It’s not that Phair doesn’t love sex on Guysville, it’s that she loves sexual love and the Jaggers keep on fucking her over. Eighteen songs (both albums by the way) of sexual bewilderment.
I personally loved Phair’s follow-up album Whip Smart (“i wanna be involved, be involved, be involved…”) but after that not so much. The Stones follow up, though it sounds better now than it did then, was… ugh… Goat’s Head Soup.
St
ill I think living in sexual exile was the highlight of both Mick’s and Phair’s careers
ill I think living in sexual exile was the highlight of both Mick’s and Phair’s careers