LET’S STOP the story there, because in a way, that’s where the story does stop. The Rolling Stones would go on to make some good-to-great work, including Exile on Main Street (a 1972 album of dense, brutal music that worked beyond rebellion, or more accurately, worked against rebellion in the sense that it cultivated dissipation); Some Girls, in 1978 (as R & B-informed as their early records, as prideful as Aftermath); and 1981’s Tattoo You, with the band’s last great single, “Start Me Up.” I’d even be willing to add Dirty Work (1986) to the list—if only because, for once, the group’s music was revolving around notions of anger, emptiness, and rejection that seemed candidly self-derived and mutually directed—plus 1995’s live album Stripped, because it features some of the best singing of Jagger’s career: He finally sounds like an aged blues-jazz-pop pro, as mean, witty, and weathered as latter-day Frank Sinatra. (It really makes you wish Sinatra had covered Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” or Jagger and Richards’ own “The Spider and the Fly”; like Jagger, Sinatra would have torn the songs open anew.)
But after Exile on Main Street, the Rolling Stones would never again make music that defined our times, that helped us or even hurt us. They would never again make music that mattered much outside the needs and contexts of their own career—and even then it’s hard to imagine that records as inconsiderable as Goat’s Head Soup, It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll, Black and Blue, and Emotional Rescue mattered even to the Stones.
SO, WHAT HAPPENED? What flattened one of the smartest, most fearsome bands that rock & roll has ever known? For a chance at an answer, let’s consider what two different kinds of historians have to say. The first historians to consider is a pair of authors, Stanley Booth and Philip Norman, each of whom in 1984 published essential books about the band. Both books—Booth’s Dance with the Devil (later retitled The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones) and Norman’s Symphony for the Devil—managed to rehabilitate the spirit of the Stones’ peak period better than even a replaying of the group’s music might, which is no small accomplishment. On the surface, such works of remembrance might seem superfluous at best. Rock & roll, after all, is an art-and-entertainment form bound in immediacy and performance, and it isn’t easy for a retrospect to add much to our understanding of that music’s impact or meaning. (Which is to say that no work of criticism or biography can possibly replace—or perhaps even truly deepen—the experience of first hearing “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Street Fighting Man,” “Gimme Shelter,” “Midnight Rambler,” “Brown Sugar,” and “Casino Boogie” and understanding that well-defined visions of murder, revolt, chaos, rape, racism, and profligacy had just become notions to dance to.)
Still, Booth and Norman’s narratives succeeded because the authors understood not merely the Stones’ token tough-guys stance, but because they comprehended the quite real nihilism that consumed the band’s ideals and creativity (and, at times, their physical health), and how the journey into that nihilism mirrored the dissipation of pop culture at large. In both books, it is the disintegration and death of the group’s founding member, guitarist Brian Jones, in July of 1969, and the debacle a few months later of the Altamont free concert, that spells the effective end of the Stones’ journey.
Of the two works, Stanley Booth’s does the more impassioned job of putting across the Rolling Stones’ remarkable rise to deterioration. A powerfully adept stylist with a seemingly inborn comprehension of blues music and blues sensibility (he also wrote about Elvis Presley, Bukka White, Howlin’ Wolf, and B. B. King, among others), Booth attached himself as a journalist to the Rolling Stones’ odyssey in England, during one of Brian Jones’ star-crossed drug-possession trials, and then finagled his way onto the group’s epochal (and fateful) 1969 tour to compose this book.
Some years later, resolved to overcome some of the emotional and drug problems which had derived, in no small part, from his association with the band, Booth finally pulled free of the Stones’ sway to tell his tale—a tale that is as big and funny and bitter and shattering as the failure of an entire generation. True to his original intent, Booth’s account sticks to the time frame of that single tour, interspersed with chapters detailing early band history. While one can’t help but feel Booth has a much larger, probably more incriminating tale he could reveal, his implicit dismissal of everything in the Rolling Stones’ history after the horror of Altamont is perhaps the most truthful and succinct summation possible of the consequence of the band’s last twenty-eight years of touring and record-making: Simply, they are of little consequence whatsoever.
More important, of course, Booth’s narrow focus on the Stones’ late-1960s epic lends his insider’s view a certain grim effect. He recounts the story of the band’s trek to Altamont in parallel motion with a chronicle of their early ascent and its sad climax—the decay, dismissal, and subsequent death of Brian Jones—until by the book’s end, there seems a certain inevitable connection between the two events, as if whims, ambitions, insights, and indulgences such as the Stones’ couldn’t help but demand human cost.
But Booth never draws his characters as mere exploiters or spoilers. He insists, and rightly, that at their best the Rolling Stones aimed to meet, understand, provoke, and rattle the spirit of their times with more inquiring intelligence than most of their contemporaries. “The Stones and their audience,” Booth writes at one point, “were following decent impulses toward a wilderness where are no laws, toward the rough beast that knows no gentle night, nor aught obeys but his foul appetite.”
In Jagger, particularly, we find a disdainful and intelligent blues fancier who meant to confront the moral and political questions of the late 1960s without forfeiting his taste for pop privilege. It is a contradictory approach, of course—one that cannot work. But to Jagger’s eternal credit, with such overpowering, nondoctrinaire, and darkly compassionate songs as “Salt of the Earth” and “Gimme Shelter,” he raised political pop to a summit that wouldn’t be equaled (or topped) until the music of the Sex Pistols and the Clash. At the same time, with “Sympathy for the Devil,” Jagger questioned the nature of personal and social evil with such flair that many listeners bought the song’s surface allure of infamy and missed its underlying plaint. At Altamont, Jagger came face to face with the fatal outcome of his labors, and his music, manner, and singing were never the same after. Helping provide the context for murder can do that for you.
By the end of his tale, Booth has found his voice and momentum with a pitch and passion I’ve rarely seen equaled in pop journalism. He pulls us into the mad, deadly center of Altamont with the awful, compelling tone of someone who understood exactly the meaning of what he saw there on that day—on that occasion which was the worst in rock’s public history, which helped kill off whatever thin idealism that 1960s youth might still have claimed. “You felt,” writes Booth, “that in the next seconds or minutes you could die, and there was nothing you could do to prevent it, to improve the odds for survival. A bad dream, but we were all in it.” Compared to Booth’s account, all other recapitulations of Altamont—even the Maysles Brothers’ excellent documentary, Gimme Shelter—seem secondary. Reading Booth’s narrative, you can hardly wonder that it took him nearly fifteen years to face the task of remembering. I, too, would try to defer reiterating such fear and slaughter, even if it meant deferring my craft.
Compared to Booth’s work, Philip Norman’s Symphony for the Devil reads simply like a scrupulous history—which is exactly what it is. Indeed, Norman—who wrote Shout!, the beautifully factual account of the Beatles’ career which somehow seemed to miss altogether the spirit of that band’s music—does an immensely more able job of recounting the Rolling Stones’ familial and sociological origins and detailing the resounding impact the band had on the British pop scene. In addition, such necessary extras as early producer-manager Andrew Loog Oldham and Jagger’s protégé-paramour, Marianne Faithfull, receive a full-fleshed, good-humored treatment here, while the always fascinating, perpetually heartbreaking Brian Jones
undergoes a more critical (though no less compassionate) examination.
Both books finally reach much the same deduction: that the Rolling Stones came as close to the truth about pop’s real sociopolitical effect—and spiritual cost—as anybody during that naive-but-dread-filled term of 1969, and that such insights probably stunned the band into a long season of grandiose irrelevance. So Mick Jagger became a sometimes silly peacock, and Keith Richards became a rather pampered excuse for an outlaw; so Bill Wyman was, for a time, an irreclaimable womanizer, and Charlie Watts remained the finest and kindest drummer in rock & roll; so guitarist Mick Taylor saw death coming down the same long slide that claimed Brian Jones and stepped out of the band, and his replacement, Ron Wood, seemed merely a spirited prop, meant to assure Jagger and Richards that the band still had a hard-tempered, exciting presence onstage. Why, then, do the Rolling Stones keep going—when loving fans like Booth and Norman figured out that their real dream died that one cold day twenty-eight years ago, knifed to death before their eyes, as they pondered the meaning and freedom of responsibility, and the connections between ideals of loving community and violent revolt?
Norman more or less says the Rolling Stones keep on because their image is too immunizing—from a brutal world that promised to shove a knife right down their throats just for asking the right questions at the right time—ever to let go of. Booth doesn’t pretend to say why, because he realizes it means turning the questions on ourselves, on the terrible corrosion of our own beliefs about what rock & roll might accomplish, and about everything it failed to change. He comes to this resigned but hardly uncaring place with the knowledge of one who once stared into the passageway to hell and finally found a way to move beyond the terror of that vision, and for that reason his book outdistances anything the Stones have wrought since Let It Bleed. Also for that reason, Booth’s is clearly the work to choose between the two volumes—that is, if you only have so much taste for tales of generational decline. Because Booth brings us closer to all the Rolling Stones’ failures and deaths, he ultimately makes us feel more alive—and hopefully, more frightened.
OUR NEXT HISTORIAN is Mick Jagger himself. After all, it’s only fair.
I’ve been reluctant to include any question-and-answer format interviews in this volume, since, to be truthful, when that form of writing succeeds it is as much the work of the person being interviewed as it is of the person asking the questions. That is, the interviewee more or less makes the article succeed or fail by the nature of his or her own thoughtfulness and articulation. Jagger’s interview is the one exception I’m happy to make, though, believe me, getting Mick Jagger to talk at length about the Rolling Stones’ history was neither an easy or fun endeavor. I spoke to him on three occasions in London in the summer of 1987, for Rolling Stone’s twentieth anniversary issue. We talked once in a pub, once in a large Indian restaurant that Jagger had reserved for just the two of us (he was clearly delighted when I offered to pick up the tab), and once at the Rolling Stones’ offices near King’s Row. After each conversation, I genuinely had a painful headache. Jagger was certainly gracious, but the man had been interviewed for over a generation by that time, and he was quite practiced at the art of evasion. Sometimes I had to pose questions in several forms—or try to back into them—before he would divulge much. Later, when I transcribed and edited the interview, I was startled to see how much he did have to say about some matters, and not surprised to see how much he held back in other areas. Along with Lou Reed, Joe Strummer, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and only a few others, Jagger is among the smartest people I’ve had the chance to interview, though more than any of the others, Mick cost me a small fortune in Tylenol.
This interview originally appeared—in greater length—in Rolling Stone, November 5, 1987, and appears in this collection by kind permission of Straight Arrow Press.
We hear a great deal of talk these days about how inventive and magical and bold the sixties were. In fact, it’s not uncommon to hear people speak of those times as if they were somehow better than any time that has come since. Do you share that perspective?
Every time is special, surely, unto itself. But to actually say it was better in 1964 or ’65—I find that a bit strange. I mean, maybe it was a bit better, because you were, like, twenty years old back then, and you looked better, and you didn’t have any responsibilities. You splashed around the beach and didn’t have a mortgage and five children to look after. Given all that, it might appear better, though the truth may be that you were having a hard time back then, because you were strung out on too many acid trips or something. You forget about all that. I’m not talking about my own personal experience. I’m talking about people that actually, um, nostalgize. Is that a verb? It should be.
But yes, things were very different then than they are now. And they’re never going to be the same.
I mean, there are two views of the sixties: one, that it was just a big hype; the other, that it was a wonderful—I hate to use the horrible word renaissance, but I suppose I can’t think of a better one—that it was a wonderful renaissance of artistic endeavor and thought. But the underside to it all, of course, was the war in Vietnam and various other colonial-type wars. Also, all the political unrest of the times, particularly in Europe. I realize that most people tend to think that all the political unrest took place in America, but I really think it was on a much smaller scale there than you realize. To be honest, I don’t think real political change ever took place at all in the United States. I mean, there were all the protest movements and so on, and I suppose there was some philosophical change, but in terms of deep political change, I don’t think it ever really happened.
That’s one of the ironies about all the current nostalgia for the sixties: Although we seem to believe that those times awakened our best ideals, I’m not convinced that we’ve carried them over to the present day with any lasting practical political or social impact.
Nor am I. On the other hand, one can’t ignore all the social undercurrents of the time—how people became more tolerant of certain kinds of ideas and looks, and how that tended to influence general social thought. For example, look at the changes in civil rights. It’s just tolerance of other people’s ideas and the way they look and think. Perhaps that was the one political change in the United States that really took hold. It may not be perfect, but in the area of different minority groups achieving the political weight they deserve—or in the acceptance of feminist thought—at least there’s been some improvement. But perhaps none of that alters the political power structure.
Looking back at the early and mid-sixties, the political climate in both the United States and Britain seemed relatively liberal—at least, compared with the political climate in both countries today. Do you think that atmosphere helped contribute to the sort of cultural explosion that rock & roll became during that decade?
No, I don’t really think so. By the time the Labour party came into power in Britain in 1964, youth culture was already a fait accompli. That is, youth had already benefited from the prosperous inflationary period of the early sixties—that whole period of teenage consumerism that Colin MacInnes wrote about in books like Absolute Beginners. I mean, in the early sixties the cult of youth was already well on its way. In Britain, youth was already largely economically independent, and it just got more that way as things went on. So when the Labour government came in, they had no choice but to run with youth culture as an idea, because they couldn’t afford to put it down. They wanted to be seen as trendy—all socialist governments want to be seen as trendy. They want to be seen as the friend of the young, because the young are the ones that are going to vote for them. You know, [former prime minister] Harold Wilson used to invite black singers to 10 Downing Street to try to look trendy.
Meanwhile, the government’s policy really was to stop all this going on, because youth culture was entrepreneurial—not really socialist at all. Also, much of what was going on in youth culture wasn’t really considere
d the nice thing to do.
At the time, it seemed that if there were any real leaders, they were artists like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Did you ever feel that you and the Beatles were helping to break the culture open?
It was more a sense of sharing a joke that these people were taking it all so seriously.
To be honest, we never set out to make cultural changes, though as they were coming, one was dealing with them on a natural basis. We were making certain statements and so on, but I don’t recall actually intellectualizing those things—at least early on. Initially, I think the driving force was just to be famous, get lots of girls, and earn a lot of money. That, and the idea of just getting our music across as best we could.
And I think that’s perhaps where that attitude of defiance really came from: those times when you’d come up against somebody who would say, “No, you can’t do that. You can’t go on television, you can’t do this.” But that had all been done before, really, back with Elvis on the “Ed Sullivan Show” and all that. What was happening with us wasn’t anything new.
But nobody had really talked about the idea of Elvis Presley wielding political power. By the mid-sixties people were talking about artists like the Stones, Beatles, and Bob Dylan as having genuine political and cultural consequence.
What I’m saying is, I don’t think any of us set out with a political conscience. I mean, I exclude Dylan, because he definitely had a political consciousness. And there might have been a seminal conscience in both our groups, but I think it really only applied itself to the actual mass culture at hand. You know, questions like “What do you think of people wearing their hair long?” or “What do you think about your clothes—aren’t they a bit scruffy?” That was the real thrust of it all at the beginning. I think it was more social than it was political. You know, you’d go into a restaurant without a tie and get thrown out. It was really pathetic.
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