Exile on Main Street

Every once in a while I take a walk along one of the city's main streets.  It is one of the main streets by virtue of being the busiest, with the most vehicular traffic, leading for 3 miles from the freeway toward downtown and the cross street there that is really the main street of this city.  But as long and wide it is, there are few pedestrians along those three miles, and businesses along it have much trouble staying up.

Which is one reason I take those walks - to see what's new, who's taking chances opening a business.   Restaurants and coffee shops come and go, motels stay, gasoline stations are all located near the freeway where my walks don't reach, starting at a point downtown, and ending halfway to the freeway.

A new chicken wings restaurant called legion of Superwings opened up, I noticed today.  The empty storefronts I saw six months ago remain empty.  The supermarkets,  drugstores and chain stores selling imported tchochkis are long gone.  The hi-fi equipment repair shop is kaput. The old timers are still somehow hanging on. The store where you can order T-shirts with your own designs is still operating.  The last anywhere near and far electronics parts store selling all kinds of small electronics components for hobbyists and do-it-yourselves is miraculously surviving.  The music store continues to give lessons.  And there is even a typewriter repair shop.

American cities such as this one, even if they had been designed when first settled with some reasonable plan of layout, don't make sense any more, and neither does this city.  There is to my knowledge no street named Main here,  but if you found yourself on the street so named  in the nearby big city, you'd be scratching your head at whatever happened to it in the past 100 years, since the last time it had some significance.   Only small American towns, those which haven't yet been destroyed by suburban development, interstate freeways, and big box stores on their outskirts, still make some sense.

I wonder what city the Rolling Stones had in mind when they named their 1972 album Exile on Main Street. Was it the French town where they were at the time residing as tax exiles and recording this, arguably their best, work?