Precious Stones
Michael Wale The Rolling Stones this month return to Britain to play for the first time for three Years in concert. There is also a new album, Black and Blue, from the group who more than any others in the first half of the .sixties created the Generation Gap which, ironically, with the passing of the years they have now themselves traversed. It is a reflection of these passing years that the first interest in them this time around by the national press was on the City pages, and involved the Stones' tax Problems. They all live outside Britain now, _like many other of our best pop musicians, because of the punitive tax system here, as Well as a climate of steady intolerance towards their work, which elsewhere, and especially in America, is regarded as a branch of the arts. It is good that The Stones will be performing here, because they have always been better on stage than on record. Led by the gyrating, flickering figure of Mick j agger, they have seldom been able to recapture the energy of their stage act Within the recording studios.
The new album is no exception. As a piece of pop music I found it, even after several playings, inconsequential. The Stones are no longer merely a rock 'n' roll group : they use extra musicians of the calibre of the keyboard player Billy Preston as well as the ubiquitous Nicky Hopkins.
The Rolling Stones in 1976 are the onstage musical figurehead of an enormous commercial concern.
Once this circus takes to the road in America in particular their earning power runs into millions of dollars. It should also be stated that the show they present upon these occasions is superb theatre. Watching them in September 1973 at the Empire Pool, Wembley, with 10,500 other fans, was an amazing experience.
The music too was good, coming from, as most of it did, an album recorded during that year, Goat's Head Soup. The lyrics were still abrasive as in Star Star, composed like the majority of the Stones' music over the years, by Jagger and his lead guitarist Keith Richard. It was a taunting number, reflecting how fashionable the Stones had become in America. A thump between the eyes for radical chic. With a bellowing chorus of 'Star fucker, star fucker, star fucker star'. A 'star-fucker' in rock language, is someone merely interested in, and who wishes only to be seen with, a rock star. Jagger knows all about that.
In 1973 they still retained some of the rawness of their early days, despite the onstage presence of Billy Preston and the addition of a brass section. I dare say once they play tracks from Black and Blue on stage all will be forgiven, and yet I can't help feeling that the machine is taking over from the music.
The machine, by the way, also includes the media, which are quite happy to be manipulated on these occasions. The fact that the London Evening Standard deemed the Stones' opening European concert in Frankfurt worthy of leading their first editions last week seemed to me amazing.
In earlier days those same newspapers would not have been so happy to embrace them, which is where Fleet Street made the first of its many mistakes in coming to terms with a changing life-style.
The Stones grew out of the success of the Beatles. But whereas the Fab Four from Liverpool had, in those days, worn neat little suits and boots with pointed toes, the Stones were forced by financial adversity to break all the rules of the game.
The Beatles were polite, posed for pictures with anyone from Marlene Dietrich to Harold Wilson, and were awarded the MBE. In fact just the lads for your daughter to marry. The Stones on the other hand were not nice at all. In fact in the person of Mick Jagger they became a leering, unisexual affront to society.
They were a rhythm and blues group who first appeared in the Railway Tavern, Richmond. Their first hit, 'Not Fade Away,' in 1964 reflected the pill-swallowing lifestyle of their followers, the mods. It was the ultimate song to 'speed' to, a rhythmic clap on the beat. In 1964 they also recorded one of rock music's classic songs, 'Satisfaction.' And when Jagger roared out that he could get no satisfaction, he left you in no doubt at all what sort of satisfaction he was after. In 1969 there were musical differences within the group, which led to Brian Jones leaving. Jones, with his girl-like looks, had also affronted conventional society, and in June 1969 he died face down in the swimming pool of his Sussex country house, once lived in by A. A. Milne.
They have throughout their history as a rock band presented the alternative side of society, although Jagger himself has become more and more a show business personality.
Already on the European part of the group's tour he has been reported as delighting his audiences by swinging above them, Tarzan-like, on a rope. Of course, this has nothing to do with music. It has more in common with pyrotechnics, and it is precisely this approach that has, for me, gradually affected the validity of the Stones' musical output.
Compare them with a group like The Who, guided by the musical genius of Pete Townshend, their leader-composer, who created the rock opera Tommy, and concentrate upon their music. They too will tour again soon, unaided, however, by extra musicians and singers on stage. They have remained loyal to rock music, and avoided the musical pitfalls that the Stones' tax-avoiding life-style seems to have led them towards. I've often thought that Jagger should dismiss his group, and perform his cavorting act before a big band, as the Mick Jagger Show.
In a direct equation with their multidollar success as a touring circus, the music of the Rolling Stones has become a mellowed echo of its former abrasiveness.
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