The Rolling Stones
I‘ve never read anything about The Rolling Stones that gave me much of a handle on what they were and are. I don’t mean a summary. I mean something that tells me where and of the magic. I wouldn’t usually roll with history, but for The Stones it will help with the moves.
The Stones started in the Jazz scene. This scene doesn’t get it’s dues. The chart music of the time, played out in post‐war recording and replay technology, was orchestral Art‐music. The intrusion of other musics was mainly as the crooner, where artists replayed influences through American songwriting, as a pop sting based displaying in voice light effects of other music, from Country to Opera. Now look at the Jazz scene. This was played out in basements of urban areas. It put a high value on authenticity. The British Jazz scene in the Fifties was an underground item.
There have been scenes like this since. There was the Reggae music which made it’s way into the seventies, and had an effect on Pop and Punk at the time—The Clash, The English Beat, etc. There was Rap, which, well, we don’t need to talk about that, parts of it are part of the Pop scene of the current day. So bear in mind that, for Brits anyhow, Jazz was on of these scenes. A blast from another culture, A wholly different sound, squalling, sometimes angry, demonstrative, leaking from cellar doors. Yours and not your parents.
Within the Jazz scene were sub‐scenes. There was the acknowledged but vastly underrated Skiffle scene, which was Jazz musicians deliberately using their instruments and techniques to delve into homemade folk musics, both British and American. Then there was the Blues scene. Much as can be said about the Blues scene, it was based in fascination with records that came from urban areas of America, associated with Black culture. This gave it things that are just gonna dig for a young man, grinding and squalling guitar, woman problems, tough times. Weirdness that seems to speak of something different, yet you get it.
To a larger extent than is usually recognised, the Stones started with Brian Jones. He dropped out of school to play music, sailed abroad, returned to be something of a fixture in the Blues scene, played in Alexis Korner’s Blues Inc. Meanwhile he started his own group. Still part of Blues Inc., Jones met a couple of guys called Mick Jagger and Kieth Richards. Richards was a guitarist with an interest in Blues and Country records, Jagger was an Art student who sang. Both of them played sometimes with Blues Inc. At his stage, these guys were beginning to be a band, and had other Blues Inc. players to build with, such as pianist Ian Stewart, drummer Mick Avory, and bassist Dick Taylor. These extra players either left, or were shunted out, and others came in to make the group. Then they got to record.
We ought to dig into what we have here. Mick Jagger was no kind of singer at all—what he could do was enunciate words like a stage actor, and I’m sure that worked at a microphone in a club. The drummer, Charlie Watts, was no kind of folk or Blues artist either, but a Jazz background made him restrained and solid, interesting with the cymbals. So it went with the whole band—if this was Blues, it was not like anything before. And it didn’t have the same roots either, most of the band were what used to be called middle class—Watts was a graphic designer and Jagger went to the London School of Economics. But where it wasn’t the Blues, it had something else interesting. And where it was the Blues, they were deeply into what they were doing. If they wern’t virtuoso, or could immaculately imitate model records (like Eric Claption later replayed the musician Otis Rush), they could as a band imitate aspects of those old records that others couldn’t. Some, hung up on rebel poses and homespun philosophy, call this ‘slop’, but it turns out it’s difficult to create these off‐timings of phrasing, tuning and time‐stretching, and barely another English band has achieved it since.
This all came together in 1963. This was when The Beatles first broke through. So here was a band based in something other than the Beatles stew of Skiffle and Rockabilly. A new manager, Andrew Oldham, latched onto the sound and look then started to sell The Stones as a dirty alternative.
And what were they doing? They were covering songs from the vast store of weirdness and wildness they had gathered. There’s practically nothing in common between the song choices on their first albums, ‘Walking the Dog’ is a novelty pop item from the American south in the original and realised Stax style, but ‘I Just Want To Make Love To You’ is urban electric from Chicago, and Chuck Berry music is something else. The Stones were projecting these things through their own brand of weird. Nowadays, this music sounds like a tape recording in a church hall, not only the approach, but the lesser recording technology of the day makes it archival—what pulls it through is the understanding of performance and clarity of thought. And it was music effective enough to convince America, something that was difficult for bands ten years later.
There was something else going on too. The story is that the manager, Andrew Oldham pushed them into this, but I’m sure wise‐guys like The Stones didn’t need convincing—‐it would be good to write your own songs. In any group based music, it’s good to have music that suits the group, and the way the industry was and still is set up, songwriters get their royalties. It’s a no‐brainer.
For reasons unknown to me, the writing fell to the childhood friends, guitarist Richards and singer Jagger. In any case the first efforts were not up to much—the singles were still cover versions. But after a year or two, there were glimmers—‐songs got distinctive, songs got good. There is the musical experimentation. The wild selection of early covers hinted at that. Just where did the slow metronome of ‘Play With Fire’ come from, or the flair verses and dramatic chorus of ‘The Last Time’? It seems the pair, perhaps aided by suggestions from within the band, had a whole load of interesting moves.
As for the lyrics, Jaggers/Richards songs, however assembled, are plain‐spoken—‐not for them the wordplay or scenarios of The Beatles. They adhered, aside from some experimentation, throughout their career,
Red blood, like a carpet
But between lines lyrics are near‐always sharp and fast moving.
Also, the songs near‐always use the Pop convention of adhering to a relationship song. Except a lot can be done with this and, throughout the ages, better songwriters have. In fact, Jaggers/Richards songs rapidly gave birth to something new. They’re usually riddled with class aggression, money complaints and personal manipulation. One of the only helpful comments I’ve heard about The Stones, don’t know where I found this, is that their relationship songs are really class‐aggression,
You’re not in Knightsbridge any more
Apology this comment may be, but a Young Mans Blues it is.
For many, the songwriting came to a place where The Stones ‘found their voice’. To me, it was just where their voice hit the world. This was the single in which they complained that their,
society is a letdown
role models were phoney
girl won’t make out
This single rode on a blitz of electric guitar repeated through. The story is the guitar needed to substitute for a horn (I’m presuming Stax again). Whyever, the effect was a main contribution to the riff that drove much later heavy music.
Anyway, any partnership like this will rebase the group, so what of Brian Jones? At this time, he had a place. He decorated the records with arrangements, often played on instruments which nobody else owned.
We’ve reached ’65/’66 now, and the Beatles are fully fledged in Pop, the years of ‘Rubber Soul’ and ‘Revolver’. Stones tracks havn’t made that complete Pop leap, they sound echoy and are plainly drums and guitars. But they do have musical contributions and frankly, intelligence. The way Jones, mostly I think but the group too, add things is notable. Kicking off from the felt slide guitar on ‘Little Red Rooster’, there is the glockenspiel on ‘Out Of Time’ (get it?), and the dulcimer on ‘Lady Jane’ is Prog Type 1 before Prog was prog. I feel The Stones are underrated in this way.
So where are The Stones at musically? Limited by the technology, they are making sonicly murky music that was being surpassed at the time. But they are running on different fuels to the wonders of the age, The Beatles. They’re doing well in popularity, thankyou, with a songwriting team that has an original take on Young Mans Blues. This proves, despite my reservations about such comments, to be very influential. America recognised what The Stones did as a group. American fans related as music, not pop artefact. Also, a friend of mine once said, “You can’t dance to The Beatles”, meaning you could to The Stones. The steady Charlie Watts, the drummer, the soul‐influenced movement of bassist Bill Wyman (Soul an influence on other bassists such as session musician John Paul Jones) made the Stones dancable. So that, and their unrestrained takes on dissatisfaction, were taken up by young men. In America, many ex‐school bands had a shot at greatness by recording a track or an album, as gathered on the collection ‘Nuggets’. Often the superficial production hints at Beatles Pop artefacts. But dig down and you’ll hear the bands experimenting with Stones ideas, which, after all, were easier to copy.
However, society was due to catch up with the Stones. To rehash, they got busted for drugs. They tried the Summer Of Love, only to record the sarcastic ‘We Love You’. They tried psychedelia. At this stage, they were still a Pop phenomenon, and still very important to an audience. Now in ’68, they were surrounded by new musics sprung from the same earth of the so‐called Blues, and some new musics unrelated like the singer song‐writer movements. What were they to do?
They retreated into their record collections. Jagger and Richards worked up a lot of music that Richards must have been storing maybe in pain, even as he discovered new ways to play it. They released the Beggars Banquet album which had not much to do with what was about them except a somewhat Bob Dylan aspect to some lyrics but otherwise crawled with cartoon country, ‘Dear Doctor’, the old weird blues, ‘’Jigsaw Puzzle’, ‘folk’music, ‘Factory Girl’, and some of that hard rock fuzz. Brian Jones was split away by this, so split from the band, citing artistic differences. People say he was taking a lot of drugs. A few weeks later he was found dead in his swimming pool—in this happening, Joe Carducci said, “They lost their pop charm”.
Now we’ve reached ’69, and the Stones hired other guitarists to replace Jones. They can still do Pop, sort of, but their main business is their popularity on tour. And they’re overdoing the women, the alcohol and the drugs. Various things happen here. In composing and recording they continue the trawl through old music. Except the drugs are here, and where ‘Beggars Banquet’ was about dissipation, early seventies albums ‘Sticky Fingers’ and ‘Exile on Main St.’ were dissipation itself. Somewhere in this, someone comes up with a headline ‘World’s Greatest Rock & Roll Band’. They’re not, they’re not a Rock and Roll band at all, and far from the later distillation into Rock. But the headline works in Pop terms ‘a guitar band’ who tour an ace back catalogue.
At this time, maybe ’73, a pattern emerges. Richards is mired in drug addiction but middle‐class instinct twangs, so the image gets a logo, the tours arrive, the Long Play records hit the shops. Jagger becomes an international artiste of celebrity and a fashion‐peg. They hone down what they do to the ‘Rock and Roll’ idea. They jazz with a professional stage act. And so The Stones become a big‐money act of the Seventies. Musically, they have a take on the hard rock of the day. The usual tales of hard‐working bands and ‘love lost on the highway’ sound compromised and weird from The Stones. When they sing, ‘It’s Only Rock ’N Roll (but I Like It)’, it’s the distance that tells, and the trek is personal.
By the turn of ’80s they were functional enough to do something about it. The interest in other music came back. This was always twisted into The Stones, but Punk/Disco reactions, hard‐rock adaption, perverted Dad Rock then electronica. Unfortunately, when they crawled up for breath, Jagger and Richards didn’t like what they found, put them at odds with each other, and the band’s popularity either faded or was swamped. Here and there they did some work that was the real Stones. ‘Miss You’ and ‘Waiting on a Friend’ were hit singles. The albums were and are hard work.
After a decade Jagger and Richards figured it was not so bad to hang out, or they needed the money or the company. There followed a decade of live releases interspaced with studio albums, parading a hard rock sound they likely thought people wanted. Millions flocked to the tours. Then they were filmed by Martin Scorsese, which is likely the end of everything for anyone, so they patched together some memorial work.
They had a musical shape that was hard to replicate, a string of hit singles that introduced a mean sensibility to the music, and for three decades they parleyed as an eccentric hard rock unit. It’s enough for anyone.
References
Robert Christgau’s take,