How times change. Our forebears once thought that full-figured Bill Haley was at the razor-sharp, frighteningly decadent and anarchic edge of pop culture. Compared to the Rolling Stones’ subsequent carnival of drug busts, court appearances, car crashes, house fires, paternity suits and chosen or enforced overseas exile, not to mention the matter of Keith Richards’s alleged blood transfusion, or of his unusual choice in dispersing his father’s ashes (cocaine, nostril), Haley’s act now seems as quaint as the background accompaniment to an Edwardian tea-dance.
Of course, the Stones themselves have moved on a bit from their heady, satanic-majesty days, when local shopkeepers prepared for their arrival by shuttering up their premises as if in anticipation of a natural disaster, and no less than the Archbishop of Canterbury denounced them from the pulpit. Back then, it seemed the Stones in general, and Mick Jagger in particular, had formed a withering contempt for the “incestuous bartering-house for vested interests,” as John Osborne called the British ruling elite. Mick saw them as the arrogant, toffee-nosed scions of privilege, like the unnamed rich girl he pulverized so superbly in his 1965 song “Play with Fire.”
Mick and Keith are like Merrie Melodies cartoon characters, no matter how often vaporized, they bounce back
Two years later, in one of the defining episodes of the Swinging Sixties, Jagger and Richards found themselves in a British courtroom facing drug possession charges, amid rumors that the police who had called for them at Keith’s country home had interrupted an orgy of diabolism, voodoo or worse, that the interior of the house had resembled nothing so much as a scene of smoke-filled decadence out of some banned Arabian erotica, and that Mick himself had been found in an unusual combination with his girlfriend Marianne Faithfull and a Mars bar.
The two Stones were duly convicted and handed custodial sentences, although both men’s convictions were later overturned on appeal. In the times ahead, both they and their band would become as polarizing in their way as Britain’s Great Train Robbers before them: either plucky scapegoats, or heinous thugs who had committed every crime in the tabloid book, from indiscriminately screwing the nation’s womenfolk to adversely affecting the currency exchange rate by “giving a bad impression abroad.” Jagger himself later told me that at the time, “I might have been a young pop star with a few quid in my pocket, but I still couldn’t find a taxi anywhere in London willing to pick me up.”
It was therefore not without amusement that the press discovered, as his tastes matured, that those who were once the target of Jagger’s satire became numbered among his closest friends. Today, he’s an 82-year-old knight of the realm who divides his time between a Loire Valley château, a beachfront Florida mansion and a central London pad for easy access to his beloved Lord’s Cricket Ground. He and the surviving Stones most recently appeared on stage in July 2024, and, even in the absence of their late, inimitably cool drummer Charlie Watts, it was still an arresting show. Jagger himself remains a glorious one-man rebellion against the march of time, while the band have never been ones for over-rehearsal. At a time of sometimes sterile, auto-tuned, note-for-note reproductions of recorded songs, the Stones have always brought a certain spontaneity to the mix. Go to a McCartney or an Eagles or a U2 concert, and it’s like visiting someone’s immaculately neat garden. The Rolling Stones give off a whiff of the jungle.
But what of the future? The Stones have lived and died (literally so, in the cases of Watts and their original wayward genius Brian Jones, who drowned at the age of 27), and been reborn again and again. There’s a seam of fans for whom the continued existence of the band represents not just a feat of perseverance, but a sort of sainted vision. To them, Mick and Keith’s increasingly unsteady gait and crumpled faces are themselves deeply endearing: they’re like Merrie Melodies cartoon characters – no matter how often shot, vaporized or tossed off cliffs, they always seem to bounce back and get on with the show.
Recently, some of those same fans have turned into old-time Kremlinologists, forced to analyze such titbits as the photo captions to the band’s latest coffee-table book, Jagger’s online postings or what Ronnie Wood may or may not have told a French newspaper interviewer, among other cryptic details, in an attempt to understand the inner workings of an opaque organization like the Stones – and more specifically, if and when the band will ever play live again.
It’s known that Richards suffers from advanced arthritis in his hands – not an ideal condition for a guitarist – and has proven reluctant to commit to even one of the shorter tour itineraries the band have favored in recent years as a result. There’s been talk of the Stones taking up residency at a venue like the Las Vegas Sphere and having the fans come to them, not vice versa, but that could be wishful thinking by those for whom the group responsible for “Satisfaction” and all the other chestnuts still conjures up the heady aroma of youth.
Much of the Stones’ familiar but still somehow improbable saga is retailed in the American journalist Bob Spitz’s new book, The Rolling Stones (Penguin, $38), which over 700 pages doggedly follows them from their unassuming roots in suburban London to the present-day offshore business empire that exists largely as a merchandising operation rather than an active musical entity. It’s a laudable effort, even if there are one or two passages calling out for an editor’s attention, such as the moment when Spitz describes Jagger and Richards as sharing the formative experience of “coming from council estates” (in the former’s case, a four-bedroomed villa with a front doorbell that played “Greensleeves”), or that the time in California is eight hours ahead of that in London, which is simply inaccurate. But these are quibbles. If it’s the road of excess you want, the Stones more or less wrote the Lonely Planet guidebook. Spitz again takes us from Jagger’s storied love life to the louche adventures of the Richards clan, including Keith and his 1970s inamorata Anita Pallenberg skiing in Switzerland while blissfully high on heroin, or the day on the French Riviera when Richards rashly waved his son’s toy pistol in the local gendarme’s face and the other party responded by drawing his own, very real service revolver and chasing the guitarist up the winding clifftop road to the Berghof-like mansion that then served as his lair.
Following a subsequent incident, Richards was handed a 5,000-franc fine and a one-year suspended sentence for heroin use by a court in Nice, effectively ending his life as an honorary Frenchman. Five days later, he and Pallenberg went on trial in London, where they were found guilty on more drug charges but again escaped with a one-year conditional discharge. Celebrating the outcome that night, Richards nodded off in the Londonderry House hotel and burned his room down. And that was just a single week in the life of rock’s iconic Human Riff.
If it’s the road of excess you want, the Stones more or less wrote the Lonely Planet guidebook
Spitz relates all this in brisk, on-with-the-show style, highlighting the personal misadventures but also giving the group’s music the attention it deserves. By and large, he does an estimable job of shaping the large, sprawling Stones story without losing the spontaneity and looseness that’s a large part of the band’s charm. He also avoids the lure – rightly so, in my opinion – of the enduring myth that Brian Jones was murdered, as opposed to having fallen asleep while swimming alone and intoxicated late at night in an overheated pool. Sometimes Occam’s razor applies, even in the case of the Rolling Stones, and the simplest explanation of events turns out to be true. One need only look at the pictures of the leering Jones in 1966, dressed like a young Regency buck, and then compare them to the images of the ravaged, puffy-eyed individual staring forlornly back at the lens not long before his death in July 1969. The band’s founding father seems to have aged far more than three years in the interim.
We hear a lot about the Stones in general and Jagger in particular apparently refusing to grow up, although some of their best work contains an undertow of knowledge that the good days inevitably come to an end. “Time waits for no one, and it won’t wait for me” ran the chorus of a song released in 1974, when its principal composer was all of 31.
Of course, set against that there’s the stirring climax to 2023’s “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” the penultimate track to the band’s last album Hackney Diamonds, in which Jagger exhorts us: “Let the music play loud… let’s all stand up proud,” defiantly shouted over a soulful backing track. If it really is the end, it’s hard to think of a more fitting epitaph than that.
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