THE SPECTATOR
1 • ARTS • LETTERS • MONEY• LEISURE POP
Stones in the sticks
DUNCAN FALLOWELL
Once upon a time, way back in the murk of the early 'sixties, there was a band of jolly rockers who used to play, along with names like the Pretty Things and the Yard- birds, at a famous pop shop on the river at Richmond called Eel Pie Island. Their music was unashamedly raw and exuber- ant—or seemed so at the time—and their appearance unforgettable. The most strik- ing feature was the length of their hair. No one had ever seen it that long before except in stained glass windows or pictures of great-grandfather, certainly not on young men who had just escaped National Service by the skin of their teeth. They called themselves the Rolling Stones.
While Brian Epstein was slowly winding the Beatles in sheets of cellophane, the Stones' manager, Andrew Long Oldham (himself an oddity and at the ripe old age of nineteen given to wearing make-up, immense dark glasses, and stroking snow- white tabby cats), presented his group, as it were, naked. The rock 'n' roll idols of the 'fifties. Little Richard or Chuck Berry or Bill Haley, had been wild enough and could kick up a storm when they wanted to, But, looking back, their sound seems meagre, thinly metallic and packaged in traditional show-biz style. The Stones were the first to turn up the loudspeakers and let it all hang out, the first and archetypal modern rock band, cretinous and long- haired and mean.
Since then a great deal has happened, to the Stones as to everyone else. Eel Pie Island folded to become a hippy commune then folded again to become nothing in particular. Rock music grew louder, more neurotic, more mature in many ways, much much freakier. The Stones have had their full share of attention through it all: personal scandal, drug arrests, Brian Jones drowned in his swimming pool. replaced by Mick Taylor from John Mayall's blues band, the Stones in Hyde Park, the Stones at Altamont (where the famous four deaths and four births took place), the Stones, around 1968, in the doldrums. And now they are back again, bashing it out about the country in provincial halls and theatres, and it is almost as if they had never been away. That Mick Jagger is still sane, having been tracked relentlessly by reporters and photographers into the farthest corners of his private life, is a major achievement in itself. That the band are playing with as much guts and excitement as they ever have done, and all of them with the excep- tion of Mick Taylor now pushing thirty, is encouraging for anyone who doesn't want to believe that life will necessarily end at twenty-three (though Jagger at fifty is a curiously inconceivable image). And if their appearance no longer strikes one as outrageous, if their hair indeed would hardly now rate in the trendier corridors of Lambeth Palace, 1 for one don't care. The Stones are beyond all that, they are much more than their appearance. They have become a syndrome, a parameter of the contemporary consciousness whether we like it or not.
Last Thursday the Stones opened this, their first country-wide tour since 1967, not before an elite audience of professional • hipsters in the trendied-up metropolis, but out 'among the people' at the City Hall, NeWcastle, which is about as far away from London as you can be without leav- ing England altogether. To those of us who are more accustomed to attending super-smart events like the Neil Young concert at the Festival Hall two weeks ago, it was a strange experience finding the Stones in Northumberland at the end of a five-hour train journey, bumping and grinding away with tremendous enthusi- asm.
No adolescent girls stormed the stage like Gadarene swine, or wet their knickers in some orgiastic gestalt; no one died and no one was born: the cordons of police- men guarding the entrances withdrew empty-handed. Those days when Jagger with one stab of his pelvis could have the first thirty rows in clammy uproar are over. Not that the event was like a wvs knitting 'class either : there were enough high spirits to fly the Concorde. It was simply that the Mick Jagger—'the centrifugal force'
atmosphere had altered, was more mellow, `together' in the best sense of the word.
It is now obvious that the Stones are not Satan's disciples on earth, even if they were once asked to assume that posture. All the sex and violence and energy are still there but none of the callous and embittered gloom of, say, John Lennon. There is a limit to the number of times you can run the Jolly Roger up the mast and still con- vince people. Jagger does not have to start verbalising about the Alternative Society, for the Stones' very existence is enough to set off repercussions in that direction. While the current fashion among rock groups is to look as inconspicuous as possible in denims, levis and obliterating shrouds of hair, or try to pass themselves off as heavies from Red China, it was mar- vellous to see Jagger prancing under the spotlight in a pink satin suit and multi- coloured jockey cap. pouting and grinning like a 3n Technicolor lunatic, delivering the message direct. In the rock junta of the Revolution I should be far happier seeing Mick Jagger up there instead of Lennon. At least then the Third World might he guaranteed some fun. John Lennon, with the long puritan face of a politician. is flogging a dead horse because he's flogging himself. Mick Jagger has a more dynamic power to arouse other people.
Although Jagger is patently the centri- fugal force. it would be wrong to consider him apart from the rest of the group. For this reason he could not now go solo as a pop singer (his last single was a solo and didn't make it). So much does one associ- ate him with Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts. and his co-songwriter, Keith Richard, that any break would be completely dislocating for all parties. Keith Richard's stage role is now more in keeping with his musical one. Looking like death cooled down until he started working on a Jimi Hendrix take- off at the back of the stage. he soon came forward to join Jagger at the microphone. Mick Taylor has not yet become part of the legend. He has Brian Jones's weird impassivity but not his charisma.
Quite what the legend means or how it was built up. it is difficult to say. They are not the best musicians in the world by a long way, and the Stones' music is not in any sense avant-garde. But in a society moving towards an understanding of the Eternal Present perhaps pointers to the future are over-estimated anyway. Jagger's voice, critically speaking. is nowhere. In the context of modern rock it is still pretty awful. It has neither strength nor flexibility and is incapable of sustaining one note for more than a second. Yet in the context of Mick Jagger it is absolutely right.
Perhaps that is the secret. Independent of other value judgments, there is an un- erring rightness about who they are. what they do and how they do it. And now, before the Stones disappear to the south of France. there is an onportunity for sonic lucky people. most of whom will never have seen them on stage before, to find out reasons for all the hullabaloo. The tour. winding up at London's Roundhouse on Sunday. has long been a sell-out.
Previous page
