It Is The Evening of the Day: The Rolling Stones at 50
So it’s official: The Rolling Bones — I mean, Stones — have turned 50. Can 50 really be so bad? Well, that all depends on who you are. To celebrate the “50th Anniversary” of the Rolling Stones, as the media have cautiously been doing, is really just a polite way of saying that Mick Jagger, Keith Richards & co. will turn 70 next year. And 70, in the context of “the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band,” sounds deadly. Grotesque. A car crash you not only don’t want to rubberneck, you want to turn around and drive away from it at maximum speed in the opposite direction.
You can chalk that reaction up to the Stones having once been global ambassadors for youth culture. It’s also an unfortunate side-effect of the historical resilience of their uniquely powerful, raunchy, amoral, decadent, sex-drenched aura. While their fellow ’60’s idol, Bob Dylan, embraced geezerhood and mortality a good 20 years ago, wrapping it around himself in song after song, sucking it into his eyes and flesh as if to conquer it before it conquers him, no rockers have been as successful as the Stones at deflecting attention from just how old they are, and how old they have been, for so long. And now this “50th Anniversary” thing turns up like the Grim Reaper in a smiley mask to strip away the last vestiges of pretence. For the Stones, to cite the beautiful opening line of “As Tears Go By” (allegedly the first song Jagger and Richards wrote together), “It” (finally!) – “is the evening of the day.”
Not that any one is standing over their withered limbs to pronounce the last rites just yet. We’re not quite at that stage. For now, the euphemistic media chatter is only of “last gigs,” a potential “last album” or “last tour.” Which does little to disguise the fact that a very large and weighty curtain will soon be brought down on an era, more or less for good. Before long the Stones will be like Jack Nicholson at the Oscars — the guy you never see any more.
None of this would matter if so many of us (millions, in fact) — men and women, truckers and poets, tax attorneys and waiters, conservatives and liberals, kids and their parents — didn’t deeply, genuinely, love the Rolling Stones. Others have sold more records, or at least sold them more quickly, but few if any have crossed class and gender and race lines so easily. And it’s not difficult to see why. Their best songs (and there are a lot of them) are as hypnotically listenable as the day they were recorded, while the merely good and average ones, the fillers and retreads and often uninspired later work, are still superior to most people’s efforts.
What the group’s fan base is these days I have no idea, but in New York you hear their music all the time. “Brown Sugar” busting out of bars packed with drunk kids at midnight; “Sway” swaying majestically through hip cafés and afternoon eateries; “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” soaring skyward from a window on the wings of Mick Taylor’s guitar solo. And those are just three of the first four tracks on Sticky Fingers.
About a month ago, for a few days it seemed that “Gimme Shelter” was being played almost everywhere I went. I even heard it, at a teasingly low volume that had me doubting my ears, emanating from a pizza parlor in that haven of the 1%, Greenwich, Connecticut. (About 20 miles from where Richards maintains an estate.) The sudden ubiquity of the song — undoubtedly one of the most hair-raising ever recorded — made sense. With each new headline about dissolving currencies, leaping tax hikes, vampiric bankers, stubborn unemployment, restive populations, and financial disaster, the whole idea of “Gimme Shelter” (“Rape, Murder, It’s just a shot away…”), let alone its indelibly haunting, edge-of-the-cliff melody, no longer seemed to point back at apocalyptic images of Vietnam, race riots, and the end of the ‘60s. Instead it seemed to be pointing to something at least as bad in the future, and whatever it was, it didn’t feel very far off.
But there’s another, more subtle and insidious reason for our fealty to the Stones that runs parallel to the music. I suppose you could call it the myth, the group’s collective persona. Of all the great rock bands of the 1960s, they are the ones who truly got away with it. With all of it — the fabulous back catalog, the women, the money, the drugs and booze and smokes, the offshore bank accounts and multiple residencies, the legendary run-ins with the law (“I don’t have a drug problem, I have a police problem” – Keith Richards), and always, even in their dotage, if a little shakily by then, the ability to maintain at least the semblance of a rebel’s pose.
What’s more, the hard edge of their music is mirrored by their own personalities. They may have played the odd charity concert, but they have never bothered to pretend they were in it for anyone but themselves. The Beatles they were not. U2 they are not. Brian Jones drowned, lovers, groupies, flunkies, hangers-on, and fellow musicians perished or were ruthlessly discarded, but the Stones rolled on, decade after decade, impervious to death, taxes, and (so it seemed) even the faintest stirrings of conscience.
They also appealed deeply to our gun-slinging, outlaw streak — that incurably anti-establishmentarian niche in the human heart without which true freedom is impossible. “You can’t always get what you want,” they proclaimed in a track that used to belong to Let it Bleed and now belongs at least as much to You Tube, but it sure looked as if they got what they wanted. It was the majority of their fans who couldn’t get what they wanted, or for that matter, even what they needed, and so the bad boys from Britain, with their unerring knack for dialing into the black American vernacular, for raiding everything from the blues to samba to country music and disco, and for infusing and enriching it with English irony, distance, and theatricality, provided the perfect platform for millions of people around the world to indulge in lavish vicarious fantasies. Men dreamed of being a Rolling Stone, while women dreamed of being with one.
And that – the tide of glamor on which they effortlessly floated — is also why we loved them. Whatever your opinion of the social changes wrought by the 1960s, no one snatched them from the air and transformed them into foot-stomping rock ‘n’ roll more memorably. In fact, you could say the brilliance with which the Stones did so was one of the best arguments for those changes, proof that on some level they were both unavoidable and necessary.
And now, decades on, the Stones’ half century is quietly being marked by an exhibition (at Somerset House in London) of photographs taken of the band over the years; a coffee table book (The Rolling Stones 50); a downloadable recording of a concert in Tokyo; and a polite interview with the arts editor of the BBC. It’s so tame it’s almost funny. But then “Sir” Jagger, thanks to Tony Blair, is a Knight Bachelor (the Queen, bless her, so loathed the thought of having to bestow the honor to the author of “Stray Cat Blues” – “I can see that you’re 15 years old / No I don’t want your I.D.” – that she scheduled an operation for the same day, so Prince Charles would have to do it instead). Last November, Richards won the Mailer Prize for Distinguished Biography for his memoir Life. The man introducing him to an audience of distinguished literati in New York was Bill Clinton. Not only are the Stones old, they now seem more establishment than the establishment. (Clinton knew who Richards was long before anyone had heard of Clinton.)
The irony, for those of us who didn’t grow up on Beggar’s Banquet and Exile On Main Street, is that the Stones have always been old. That they were old and past it was practically the first thing I ever heard about them. If you came of age during the punk era in Britain, as I did, then (theoretically) the Stones were Public Enemy No. 1, a bunch of decadent, social-climbing tax-absconders that bands like The Clash and The Sex Pistols had sworn to bury. But it didn’t happen. The Stones, declared dinosaurs before they were in their mid-thirties, had already feathered the center of the rock ‘n’ roll dartboard with so many bulls-eyes that those who followed them had to content themselves with hunting for space on the periphery.
Increasingly, the Stones had to scour the edges of the dartboard themselves, competing with their own past. Overall, they managed reasonably well. For every great rocker, like “Brown Sugar,” there’s always a very good one, like “Hand of Fate,” to fall back on when you tire of the first. And now, with the Internet and You Tube, you can watch and listen to live performances going back decades, alternative versions of classic songs, bootlegs galore, unreleased gems, outtakes, rehearsals, interviews, documentary footage, you name it.
Passionate love tends to breed passionate disappointment. Diagnosing the precise onset of the Stones’ creative demise has almost become a parlor game, in which the fun lies in situating it as far back in time as possible. (The legendary British D.J., John Peel, topped everybody by claiming that the best Stones album was their first one, which began with “Route 66,” ended with “Walking the Dog,” and didn’t contain a single original composition.)
Most amateur judges lower the gavel somewhere between 1973-1981, which is to say between Goat’s Head Soup and Tattoo You. Hard-line naysayers, stern as Stalinists, dismiss everything after Exile on Main Street (‘72) with a contemptuous wave of the hand, while loyalists follow their heroes to the end of the increasingly bumpy ‘80s, citing albums like Undercover of the Night (’83) and Steel Wheels (’89) as proof that the Stones still had some mojo. Some even go so far as to claim (not without reason) that they’ve put out at least a few good songs in the 20 years or so since.
But if so many itch to specify exactly when the Stones stopped meeting their expectations, that only proves how richly those expectations were met in the first place.
***
More on music at PJ Lifestyle:
What do you mean by “we,” Kemosabe?
When Milton gave Satan some of the best lines in Paradise Lost, I could get on board, but the Satanism of the Stones and their subsequent popularity marked the beginning of the end of Western civilization. I wrote about primitivism as ritual rebellion here: http://clarespark.com/2011/05/12/the-great-common-goes-to-the-white-house/.
Or, if you don’t like the one on rappers, try this one on Tom Wolfe and his particular brand of genteel primitivism. http://clarespark.com/2011/09/08/getting-down-with-tom-wolfe/.
I have to fully concur with you. I “accepted” “Their Sstanic Majesty’s Request” because of the music on it; didn’t understand the full context of the title at the time (I was maybe 14). But when “Goat’s Head Soup” came out I lost all interest in the Stones!
Think about this: When I first started listening to the Stones (when they first burst onto the scene), 50 years before that would have been smack in the middle of World War I, before the Yanks had even joined the fray! There was virtually nothing from a 1916 grammaphone that a young adult like me would have wanted to listen to.
Like it or not, that’s how enduring the Stones have become.
A little correction, but it makes only a minor difference. The Stones formed up in 1962 (hence the 50th, duh), and I first listened to them in 1965. Going back 50 years from then would have been 1915, and going back all the way from the band’s birth woul have been 1912, when recording was in its infancy.
I’m forty, and am reminded regularly that for high school kids today Nirvana (the band, not the state of being) is as distant in time as the Doors and Led Zeppelin were for me as a teenager.
Happens to all of us.
Yet I have friends who still swear that Nirvana was THE MOST IMPORTANT THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO MUSIC IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD!!!! Somehow, everyone’s favorite group is the one that changed everything, forever. Then the next high school graduating class comes along and wonders what the big deal was.
I grew up hearing older people proclaim the Beatles and/or Elvis the source of all that matters in rock and roll; that is just as obnoxious and inaccurate as people my age who say the same about Nirvana.
That said, Elvis, the Beatles, and Nirvana, as well as the Stones to a lesser extent, are important because they marked shifts in popular music and culture, even if they were neither unique in that regard, or solely responsible for the changes they have come to symbolize.
We are about due, by my reckoning, for the Next Elvis/Beatles/Nirvana, which is to say the next great transformational rock act, and accompanying shift in popular culture. I’ve been waiting a decade now for hip-hop to collapse under its own dead weight, much as anyone who was paying attention in 1990 saw that hair metal had more than run its course. Somehow, the rap zombie shuffles on.
I can still listen to them because they never got into the self-righteous lefty/eco-freak/multiculti political posturing that nearly everybody else in the popular music business has fallen prey to.
Most of the time they were not political. Sweet Neocon is an example where they were political. Note the Stones had no lyrics about hypocritical Greens with BIG carbon footprints, such as Al Gore.
Gimme Shelter and Heartbreaker had some “heavy” social commentary, but in general, the Stones were more into decadence than idealism.
… women dreamed of being with one.
Um, no.
Me neither.
They still put on a heck of a show!
When they busted Keith Richards for drugs, they usually found guns as well. Keith loved his guns.
Albums like Sticky Fingers, Let It Bleed, and Exile on Main Street should be required listening for anyone who wants to know what rock and roll is all about. Especially for anyone under the age of 30.
Grew up with the Stones. Love their best stuff. Their worst stuff is still passable and better than nearly all rap and certainly anything from the Katy Perry genre. When I saw them live, they convinced me that they were the best rock’n'roll band in the world, hands down. As far as rock’n'roll goes, it was a great run. They could easily settle down and be old blues men in their dottage and go another fifteen or twenty years. Age and time eventually humbles all, however.
The Rolling Stones are just creeping me out now. I think Mick Jagger will eventually be 80 years old and they will bring him onto the stage in a wheelchair screeching “I can’t get no, satisfaction” like a crazed alzheimer’s patient. Some things are best left to CDs and old video clips, and the Rolling Stones is one of them. Quit while your ahead, boys, before you really start looking foolish.
Not nearly as bad as a 50-something woman flouncing around the stage like a 20 year-old, exposing her breasts in a desperate bid for attention, and letting slip her jealousy of younger artists by mocking them in rehearsals.
I’m pretty sure Mick and Keith will hang it up before sinking to those pathetic Madonna-esque depths.
Not that you said anything about Madonna – I just thought I’d point out how much worse it could be.
No – Madge frolicking around is not worse – they are BOTH equally horrible. Old people need to give it up. There is no fountain of youth and yes – you ARE old!
As someone who remembers “Satisfaction” when it was first a hit, I have to say I’m a bit embarrassed for them to still be doing this. Lord knows they make a lot of money at it, but it just seems wrong–almost loathesome–for old men like they are to be replaying their 20′s and 30′s. I agree with Libertyship 46. It’s been a good run but it’s time–in fact, long past time–to call it over. I don’t think I would go see them in person now if I had a free ticket. I’m just not interested in seeing a man Jagger’s age jumping around on stage like a crazed fool. It’s just not right.
I first heard “Satisfaction” on WOWO or WLS from the transistor radio under my pillow back in the days when there was almost no FM radio and most AM stations signed off at sundown. Went to the music store the next day to see if they could get me one of those fuzz tone thingys. Must have played “Satisfaction” a thousand times at high school dances, frat parties, proms. The Stones made music that a half decent garage band could actually play live and they never much got into all the pretentiousness that so many bands succumbed to. Unfortunately, they’re about the only big name band from the ’60s I never saw live and I wish I had seen them in their prime. I saw them on TV at the Super Bowl a few years ago and they were simply an embarrassment. You need to know when to just gracefully fade away.
If you think about it, most of the Stones’ influences were artists like B.B. King (soon to be 87), Buddy Guy (76 today), John Lee Hooker (played well into his 80′s), Pinetop Perkins (played until he died at 97), Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters (both played until they passed away in their mid 60′s). Not saying whether the Stones should still be out there or not (it is sort of sad to watch them now), but a lot of those guys that influenced them are still out there making some pretty fine music, or did so until they passed away, albeit in a somewhat different setting. That may have something to do with why they’re still doing it 50 years later……some of their idols are still doing it, too.
Read Keith Richards’ autobiography “Life” recently.
All I can say is that the old folks were right; he was and remains a bad influence.
They always played up the self-interest at the expense of the civilized common interest. Distructive and proud of it.
“Sympathy for the Devil” pretty much sums up their whole worldview.
34 years later, New York City still has bedbugs uptown.
I haven’t heard them sing or play recently. I think that if they still have their chops as musicians, they should keep on performing – just maybe in a different format or different venues. I’m not sure I can respect a grownup who does the same schtick he did when he was 19. It’s like, “Haven’t you learned anything or changed since the old days?” Where the wisdom that’s supposed to come with age?
I know – they should jump on the American Songbook bandwagon that was so popular a few years back. Who wouldn’t want to hear Mick’s rendition of “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Sante Fe” or “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin?”
Steve Marriott died in 1991.
That was when the “music died”.
Think of this: If not for the British 60′s Music Invasion, we wouldn’t not have had the 60′s, free-love, Marxism, & President’s like the Bush’s & Obama! Just saying…
They also did a mean Kellogg’s Rice Krispies commercial back in the day…
I haven’t kept track of their later stuff but the first time I heard “Satisfaction” I was hooked on the early stuff. I don’t know what the current generation thinks of the Stones but ask any budding rock and roller if they have heard anything by Jimi Hendrix and the answer will be yes.
Saw them live in the late 70′s or early 80′s, whenever it was they were going around with that giant inflatable penis that popped up halfway through the act. Nobody, I mean nooobody…. thought that was cool or edgy or even funny…. It was just understood that these guys hadn’t a clue when it came to putting on a visual performance, and we enjoyed a decent arena concert.
At this point, a Stones concert would be nothing more than an expensive novelty, like when Sinatra performed huge venues in his late 70′s….. you just go so you can say you saw it and enjoy it for what it’s worth…. I enjoyed Paul McCartney on the Olympic opening ceremony, botched high notes, Deputy Dawg jowels and all.
We took our teen boys to see the Stones at the Hollywood Bowl in November 2005. It was an absolutely awesome concert, beginning with a robust “Start Me Up,” and going on for two hours without break. The audience all stood from the first note, and never sat down again, sustained by the drive of the concert. I’ve seen performances by bands of twenty-something musicians who lacked the stamina and incredible energy of these senior citizens. It wasn’t just simply easy to forget their age — it was impossible to think that they weren’t in their prime. Both of my sons are making careers in music, and I’m glad we were able to share this generation-bridging experience.
That may be the biggest key to the Stones’ longevitiy, especially since as others have noted their songwriting creativity petered out in the 70s or 80s. They have always put on great live shows, rarely mailing it in like so many other ’60s retreads do. I have been able to see them 6 times from 1966 to 1994.
I get a little tired of people saying rock musicians are too old. No one ever claims jazz or blues musicians are too old. People were happy to see Ray Charles or B.B. King up into their 70s and beyond. To say old musicians can’t do rock is to say rock music is inferior and is some kind of youth freak show. I am sure some believe that. And the worst rock probably is. But not the best rock.
As far as the Stones go, listen to or watch the Shine a Light movie they did in 2006 at the Beacon Theater. They still sounded fantastic. Still gave a great show. Richards is still a great band leader. In many ways they sounded better then than they did at their height because they are much more professional and tight now. The old days they were truly live without a net. And when that didn’t work, which was more often than people remember, it really didn’t work. I hope they play next year and I will happily go see them. If B.B. King can still give a great show, so can the Stones.
As far as their music goes. I love it. But I will admit that there is no accounting for taste. But I will say this. When music manages to appeal to multiple generations of fans and still be popular decades after its release, I don’t see how you can not call it great art. What is the purpose of art if not to appeal to and entertain large numbers of people over a long period of time?
Many of us who perform(ed) as musicians often felt the urge from others to “give it up” after a certain point in time. My attitude is, if you can deliver live, why should you give it up? I’ve seen many bands that have toured well past their prime and it’s been an embarrassment to watch them perform. I’ve also seen other bands that have gotten tighter and better with age. The Stones just happen to be one of those bands that have kept it together in that regard over the years. They are not going to win an award for being my favorite human beings, but I’ll give credit where it is due, they know how to throw down live, even going into their 70s.
No question boardmadd you have to be able to play. And you have to be great to still be good at that age. Mediocrities probably ought to hang it up. But not the great ones.
In an old interview years, meaning a decade or two, ago Jagger was asked if he will still be playing rock and roll when he hit 60. He replied “If I was black you wouldn’t be asking me that” meaning, no one asks BB King, for example, when he’s gonna quit playing music and performing. He can barely walk, plays his whole show sitting down now, and he kills every time. Little Richard is another example. Why shouldn’t the Stones keep playing? They were a huge influence on what defines rock – then and now.
These guys are masters of the craft of rock and roll. So they may be less influential now – so what? Watching a master at work is it’s own reward.
In the summer of 1962 I was just getting into Radio just out of high school and can remember the first time I heard the Stones. I was not a fan in the beginning
as I was not a fan of most of the British groups that would spring up at the time. The stones in the early days had to grow on you before you realized they were not just a flash in the pan.It is hard to comprehend that they have been together as a band for 50 years. I went to a concert a couple of years ago and could not believe how good they still are.Jagger was all over the stage like he was still in his 30′s. They were in the beginning and will always be the definition of rock and roll.
Yes, I definitely preferred the Stones to the Beatles. There was more honest dishonesty.
But that dishonesty kills in the end.
Their influence is a substantial part of the cause of where we are now.
It is a bad attitude with nothing going for it but human folly.
And now we live with it.