'Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.' Gustav Flaubert
You don’t need me to tell you that the Beatles have a “new” song out. It’s an impressively hooky one; that first line dip is unforgettable, even if the rest of it meanders repetitively along familiar and pleasing lines and the lyric doesn’t go anywhere challenging or meaningful; it’s late phase Lennon, the equivalent of Prokofiev’s 7th Symphony, but the music is pure Beatles, as shown by the various AI or tribute band (who knows anymore) renditions of it corresponding to the different steps (1964, 1967, etc) of the Beatles’ Passion.
At much the same time the still-living members of The Rolling Stones have released a new album, Hackney Diamonds, and this invites comparisons between these two bands, friends and rivals in their heyday, not least because I’ve been reading Philip Norman’s Mick Jagger bio and it’s a gas, gas, gas. Hackney Diamonds has been subject to harsher critiques than the Rutles-ish ‘Now and Then’ is likely to get, but I find myself liking it; I’m not the world’s biggest Stones fan but I hear in it those aspects of the band I do like. I hear ‘We Love You’ harmonies and quaint English folky chord changes on some choruses - as its title suggests, Hackney Diamonds is the most English Rolling Stones record since, idk, Aftermath as well as being the most reminiscent of that mid-60’s period.
The streets I used to walk on
Are full of broken glass
And everywhere I'm looking
There's memories of my past
The filthy flat in Fulham
The smell of sex and gas
Mick sings in ‘Whole Wide World’, finally addressing ancient history over the kind of descending-bass-line English rock anthem that’s more associated with bands like The Clash or The Libertines than the Stones, one of the album’s highlights.
I hear the right number of dirty-fresh guitar riffs, albeit being played with suspicious precision instead of the classic Stones pile-on; the solos are also better than usual, but I think this just shows that everyone involved, this time, really cared about an exercise that may be their last (not so much because their days are numbered1 as because Stones albums are few and far between). Above all, I hear the band Andrew Loog Oldham made, out of the motley collection of blues fanatics that had gathered around Brian Jones, when he turned Mick into the bad boy he wasn’t by a process straight out of a homoerotic 60’s Trilby, then locked Mick and Keith in a kitchen (metaphorically or actually) until they wrote some hit songs. Songs that would shine through the 60’s like a line of urchin’s phlegm drying as it ran down the back of a Beatle jacket.
At first these songs were unsuitably chirpy for the Stones so sold to other acts; for example giving the high energy Spector-like ‘Shang A Doo Lang’ to Adrienne Posta, who’d recorded the gutsy ‘I Was Only Fifteen’ when she was still only fourteen and well into a successful acting career in UK TV and film. Keith Richards also set Andrew Loog Oldham’s words for ‘I’d Much Rather be with the Boys’, which the Stones’ version arranges as a Beach Boys pastiche.
The Stones were a hit band without an original hit until Jagger and Richards wrote “Satisfaction”, which I think shows the eagerness of British pop fans to take on something a little edgier than the Beatles, and right from the start Mick wants to say what the other singers aren’t saying.
When I'm ridin' 'round the world
And I'm doin' this and I'm signin' that
And I'm tryin' to make some girl, who tells me
Baby, better come back maybe next week
Can't you see I'm on a losing streak?
On the way to his really original creative achievement of satirizing femininity one girl at a time as if doing so was an extension of his sexual prowess. Which is how the audience heard songs like ‘Stupid Girl’ on Aftermath; Mick as the first rapper. But he doesn’t stop there – a song like ‘Under My Thumb’ is surely as much a provocation to the female audience as Schopenhauer’s essay On Women, its open assertion of possessiveness and control inviting reflection and counterblasts (although Lesley Gore got there first, in 1963, with ‘You Don’t Own Me’). Jagger’s girlfriend at the time, and the subject of ‘Under My Thumb’, Chrissie Shrimpton, remembered lying in bed with Mick reading Ian Fleming’s James Bond books to her, and I think that studying the character of Mr Bond has taught him how to play his own.
My favourite Stones album is Between The Buttons (recorded in 1966 and released early in 1967), maybe because I first heard it in an impressionable time after reading it was Syd Barrett’s favourite; it strikes me as a more coherent set of songs than Aftermath, and it has the more interesting sound. Jagger’s voice has an unusual vulnerability and hesitancy in places, there’s a nicely rocking fuzz on the bass (which Paul McCartney doesn’t really match on Hackney Diamonds, sorry) and with the drums it locks into cool and grubby proto-garage riffing (the Stones being proto-garage in the sense that every single garage band was inspired by them), as here on ‘My Obsession’.
‘Back Street Girl’ is an example of the Stones doing their folky thing, which was inspired by the type of gentrified folk songs Jagger sang at school, rather than any proper study of the genre; it’s also a splendid example of Jagger’s ironically condescending charm. Brian Jones is playing the high vibraphone notes, and the accordion is being squeezed by Nick de Caro, who would arrange and produce Andy William’s classic album Love Andy (‘Can’t Take my Eyes off of You’) in 1967.
Please don't you call me at home
Please don't come knocking at night
Please never ring on the phone
Your manners are never quite right
Please take the favours I grant
Curtsy and look nonchalant, just for me
Don't want you part of my world
Just you be my backstreet girl
Note the first line, “I don't want you to be high”. There are quite a few ambiguous references to that sort of thing on Between The Buttons, including in the hammy vaudevillian ‘Something Happened to me Yesterday’, and in this crisp Chuck Berry-style rocker.
Our Amanda Jones
I said up and up and up and up
She looks quite delightfully stoned
She's the darling of the discotheque crowd
Of her lineage she's rightfully proud, miss Amanda Jones
Hey girl with your nonsense nose
All pointing right down at the floor
Hey girl your suspender shows
And the girl behind you looks a bit unsure
Round and round she goes
You really have to wonder about that song. The Stone’s relations with Brian Jones, their founder, had been deteriorating for some time. Their most talented member musically, Jones was also a liability in many ways, being both the least pleasant and most vulnerable member of the band, and was disgruntled by Oldham’s plan for the Stones to become a pop group writing original songs, rather than “authentic” blues reps, and by Mick’s growing sex symbol status. Generally, the other Stones cared for him, even as they eased him out – the Stones, in their disputes, never descended to the cold war level of passive-aggressive bitchiness that the Beatles did. But you do have to wonder about the session for ‘Miss Amanda Jones’.
Meanwhile, the establishments in the UK and USA had long wanted to crack down on the Stones, who were an inspiration to revolutionaries everywhere (despite being as apolitical as they were amoral), and the recent enthusiasm for cannabis and LSD signalled on Between The Buttons made this seem deceptively easy. An acid-carrying Canadian, “Acid King” David Sniderman, was used to bait a trap for them. In the end, Sniderman’s acid collection was never deployed and Mick was caught instead with some prescription amphetamines that Marianne Faithful, now his girlfriend, had bought in Italy. Keith, whose house they were at, was charged with allowing his premises to be used for smoking pot on the dubious grounds that Marianne, a former convent girl for whom Jagger and Richards had written the virginal “As Tears Go By’, was now naked under nothing but a fur rug, which she let slip to mock proceedings she found ridiculous, as you do. Their friend art dealer Robert Fraser, who was into smack before Keith was, was found in possession of heroin and would spend six months in gaol, but the evidence against the Glimmer Twins was very scant indeed. This didn’t stop them being jailed for three and six months in a kangaroo court run by the local squire. But this was over-reach, and now many influential Establishment figures rallied to their defence; Mick’s sentence was suspended and Keith found not guilty on appeal. “Acid King” David Sniderman disappeared, to be posthumously identified as the person who became David Jove, who created New Wave Theatre, the first punk cable TV show, which was hosted by Peter Ivers, who scored Eraserhead. Jove, who released a couple of albums himself, was a suspect in Iver’s unsolved 1983 murder.
While Mick and Keith were in prison, The Who, who by this stage owned their own record company, Track, recorded fine versions of two Rolling Stones songs, ‘The Last Time’ and ‘Under My Thumb’ to show their support, and promised to keep releasing Stones songs for as long as it took.
The Stones next recorded the atypical single ‘We Love You’, with its sarcastic references to their trial, and another interesting album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, considered an unsuccessful attempt to follow in the footsteps of The Beatles while tripping off their faces, but full of good stuff. Then, Mick starred in Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance, first suppressed, then derided, now recognized as the Citizen Kane of modern UK cinema. The fact that Performance involved sex scenes between Mick and Anita Pallenberg, once Brian’s lover and now Keith’s, caused tension between the Rolling Stones songwriting team that took a little time to resolve; ‘Child Of The Moon’, though of course credited to Jagger/Richards, is a song written by Mick with Brian’s replacement, Mick Taylor, at a time Keith was in a sulk; Brian appears in the official video, but he looks as if he’s already dead.
After Brian’s actual death, in famously murky circumstances, the Stones played a free concert in Hyde Park attended by a quarter of a million people. The vibes were peace and love (Stones concerts up till then, especially those on tour in Europe, had often been accompanied by properly violent riots). A small security role was played by the UK Hell’s Angels, a group of motorcycling enthusiasts not affiliated with the notorious US gang of the same name, who were paid in cups of tea, and judged in the police report on the day to be completely harmless and, as security, ineffective.
This explains why the Rolling Stones, on tour in the USA a few months later, didn’t veto the suggestion of their support group, the Grateful Dead, in consultation with Emmet Grogan and other leaders of the San Francisco radical counterculture, that the Oakland chapter of the real Hell’s Angels be employed as security for the obligatory (to the radicals) free concert that ended up being staged at Altamont speedway, in the redneck hippie-hating backblocks of the Bay aea. The concert was a nightmare. Local Angels prospects beat on any naked hippy of either sex trying to relive Woodstock with pool cues, while the Angels proper murdered Meredith Hunter, one of the few black fans there, in front of his white girlfriend. Other bikers roamed the stage intimidating the bands as they appealed for calm – Marty Balin was knocked unconscious for trying to help an audience member. Later, blame was laid squarely at the feet of the Stones, and specifically Mick. David Crosby, who’d fled the scene after the CSNY set, was as usual out-of-touch, so chose to be petty instead, with irrelevant comments that summed up the countercultural sense of sour grapes and unasked-for obligation (what had driven the Stones to take on a free concert in the first place) that was growing around the most successful rock acts.
“The major mistake was taking what was essentially a party and turning it into an ego game… I think [The Stones] have an exaggerated view of their own importance, especially the two leaders”. The Grateful Dead, hometown heroes, the Angel’s supposed friends, and the people who, along with Grace Slick, had given the Stones and their promoters the most assurances about the Angels’ suitability as security, fled the scene without playing before the Stones’ set, leaving a 75-minute gap in proceedings, and have made mealy-mouthed excuses ever since. The whole catastrophe was a shining example of “radical chic” gone bad – the moth-to-a-flame way that soft, activist types – idealists who can’t see their own shadows - so easily get sucked into becoming apologists for violent extremists or cheap thugs.
Never complain, never explain. As was the case after the drugs bust, or after Brian’s death, the Stones did as little as possible to cast blame or make excuses. Mick Jagger is perhaps the only rock star to have retained possession of a healthy ego, and it should be put in a museum when he dies.
Being that tip-of-the-iceberg, Mick’s actual girlfriend, in the 60’s meant letting him hide one’s relationship with him from the press, the fans, or his other girlfriends, at least until he fell for Marianne Faithful, with whom he made for a while rock’s first celebrity couple. The more intellectually sophisticated Marianne had more influence on him than any other woman friend had, sharing her favourite books, which included Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita; this, not the occult library which they soon burnt, was the inspiration for ‘Sympathy For The Devil’. Her descent from European aristocracy (specifically, the family of Leopold Sacher-Masoch, author of Venus in Furs) flattered Mick’s interest in titles, understandable enough when you consider that he and the other Stones wanted to live by much the same rules as ancien regime monarchs, and usually did. But celebrity meant tabloid exposure, and lurid tabloid stories about Marianne’s role in the drug bust, plus the archaic discussions of her behaviour during Mick and Keith’s trials, saw her public reputation drop from virgin to whore overnight. After suffering the miscarriage of the child she and Mick both wanted, Marianne came up with the lyric for ‘Sister Morphine’ and the Stones’ label Decca released this classic Faithful/Jagger/Richards tune on the flipside of ‘Something Better’, the Goffin and King song she’d sung in the film The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus. Mick strums the acoustic guitar, Ry Cooder plays slide guitar and bass, Jack Nitschke plays organ and piano, and Charly Watts drums, and the performance shows that Marianne could find that tremulous, pain-filled voice even before drugs and drink made a virtue of its necessity.
‘Something Better/Sister Morphine’ would be withdrawn from sale after two days due to Decca executives’ concerns about promoting drug use. Marianne wouldn’t release another record till 1975’s country album Dreaming My Dreams, which went to #1 in the Irish album charts when reissued in 1978.
Meanwhile, Mick had also been spending time with Marsha Hunt, star of the recent hippy spectacle (and free speech cause célèbre) that was the musical Hair. Marsha covered previous boyfriend Marc Bolan’s Jon’s Children song ‘Desdemona’ and his ‘Hippy Gumbo’ for a single on the Who’s Track record label (the fate of ‘Sister Morphine’ shows the importance of having one’s own label in the 60’s, but only The Who with Track made an artistic success of it, with a roster including several other important acts – Jimi Hendrix, Tyrannosaurus Rex, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Fairport Convention – as well as chart-topping one-hit-wonders Thunderclap Newman). A year of dalliance with Hunt, whom he endearingly termed “miss fuzzy”, and who would bear him his first child, inspired ‘Brown Sugar’.
Gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields
Sold in the market down in New Orleans
Scarred old slaver knows he's doing alright
Hear him whip the women just around midnight
Brown sugar, how come you taste so good? Uh huh
Brown sugar, just like a young girl should, uh huh, oh (Woo)
Even Mick was surprised by his urge to depict “all the nasty subjects in one go” in this song. The Stones back then, lest we forget, were still making music for teenagers, and teenagers, as Altamont showed, were made of sterner stuff then than teenagers are today; they were the shock troops of a cultural revolution being fought every which way, and their appetite for shocking trash would only increase in the 70’s, to be fed by a generation of bands nourished on the Rolling Stones’ music and image. In any case, ‘Brown Sugar’ wasn’t really that different from the pulp literature that titillated their parents, and the Stones, like the Velvet Underground, were helping to make the point that anything said in a book, film or opera can be said in a song.
Soon enough, and soon after Marsha Hunt had borne their child (in one of the least edifying chapters in his career, he’d later try to deny paternity), Mick would marry Bianca, find a secure place in the jet set, and use enough cocaine (the son of a sports teacher, he rarely over-indulged in drugs) to blunt his rebel edge and become the party animal of his later songs.2 By 1975, on Kill City, Iggy Pop and James Williamson are making better Stones music than the Stones can. But how long did that last? The Stones have never stopped being the Stones – they’ve never been about anything else, never really been sidetracked by the moral issues of the day like countless others, bless them.
Perhaps the best tribute to Mick has come from David Bowie, who was besotted with him in the Ziggy years. Always prescient, in ‘Drive In Saturday’, he imagines a cybernetic future in which the youth have forgotten how to make love. To remind them, and save the population from irreversible decline, the internet shows old films.
Let me put my arms around your head
Gee, it's hot, let's go to bed
Don't forget to turn on the light
Don't laugh babe, it'll be alright
Pour me out another phone
I'll ring and see if your friends are home
Perhaps the strange ones in the dome
Can lend us a book we can read up alone
And try to get it on like once before
When people stared in Jagger's eyes and scored
Like the video films we saw
What’s the film Bowie has in mind? Probably Performance – Bowie would be making his own film with Nicholas Roeg soon enough - or, the half-hour reel of outtakes from Performance that was sold on the porno market as Rehearsal for Performance by Jim Haynes, cofounder of underground mag Suck, and previewed in the Wet Dream Film Festival in Amsterdam, where it was voted winner in the One-Night-Stand category.
Algorithmic Mystery - Carly Simon ‘You’re So Vain’
“Junk doesn’t make you immortal, it only makes you improbable“ - William S. Burroughs on Keith Richards, as recorded by Marianne Faithful, highly entertaining company in her second volume of memoirs, Memories, Dreams & Reflections (2008)
To research this column I made another sincere attempt to listen to Exile On Main Street, the album considered by truer Stones fans than me to be their masterpiece, but didn’t get far. The best thing about Exile is the story Philip Norman tells about its recording - that at some point John Lennon turned up in France, skipped seeing Mick and Bianca, went straight up to Keith’s room, and 45 minutes later threw up on the stairs on his way out.
"i'd much rather be with the boys" is a great lost stones song but the best version is by nikki sudden
coincidentally am currently reading a book set in a filthy flat in fulham in the early 60s ("the L shaped room" by lynne reid banks. worth reading for the disturbing level of racism that was presumably just normal in them days)