Relics of the past or living legends? Shaun de Waal explains why The Rolling Stones are still exciting 30 years into their career
`BLAME it on the Stones,” sang Kris Kristofferson in 1970, mocking the “Mr Modern Middle Class” who saw in The Rolling Stones the personification of evil and all that was corrupting of “the younger generation”. Nowadays we blame television, rap groups and violent movies.
Only someone who’s ignored popular music for two decades would seriously argue today that the Stones epitomise malevolence. In the Sixties, juxtaposed against the dippy charm of the Beatles or the quiffed vacancy of a Fabian, the Stones certainly represented rebellion, a cross between the uncouth laddishness of the teddy-boys and the trippy excesses of the hippies.
At first it was mere marketing, a matter of ragged haircuts and unmatching outfits, but they soon grew into the role, and played it with aplomb. Indeed, they were naturals. There were scandals, drug busts, trials, deaths. Famously, Keith Richards told a judge that they were not interested in “petty morals”, and the anti- establishment contempt of that utterance summed up the Stones of the Sixties.
Now The Rolling Stones are an institution, a multi- national conglomerate, the “greatest rock’n’roll band in the world”, certainly the most long-lived. Their tours are a juggernaut which lumbers around the world, entertaining millions and raking in the money. Each tour since 1981 has broken the record for biggest-grossing world tour. They are all extremely rich. Mick Jagger once said he’d rather be dead than singing Satisfaction, the quintessential anthem of sneering youth, when he was 45 – – and he has passed that deadline by nearly seven years.
Some deride the “Strolling Ruins” as relics of the past. In 1977 the Sex Pistols (whose rise to fame was blueprinted on that of the Stones) consigned them to the junk-heap of pitiable nostalgia. Journalists like Nick Kent tried to pinpoint the precise moment they’d “lost their souls”; counterculture gurus like Frank Oz railed that they had joined the establishment, become little more than jaded hacks. Even John Lennon peevishly wondered why they needed to go around in a “gang”.
Today critics jibe at Jagger the grandfather wriggling around a stage, and smile that what was once so threatening is now enjoyed by middle-aged ex-hipsters with children of their own.
Yet to try to reduce the Stones — an artistic, social, iconic complex all on their own — to one or other of these snapshot images is folly. They were driven by contradictions right from the start. For every complaint about the misogynist machismo of songs like Under My Thumb, there was a frisson of unease (or pleasure) at the outrageously camp mannerisms Jagger affected on stage — let alone the silly, frilly frocks he occasionally sported. And listen to the music: alongside their stomping rockers lie songs of aching tenderness and yearning.
The band’s very core is a paradox, the pairing of Mick and Keef. Jagger is often caricatured as a machiavellian mogul only in it for the money, while Richards is worshipped as the coolest man on the planet, the very soul of rock’n’roll. But this is a couple who have, together, written and produced some of the greatest popular music of the century.
The Stones package has a frequently overlooked quality, one that pulls the contradictions together: irony. Their music claims the raw authenticity of the rhythm’n’blues they based it on, but grafted on to the sounds of black America is the legacy of Oscar Wilde and No`l Coward. We can take them utterly seriously even while they send themselves up, and vice versa. They can toy with their own legend.
What makes it all work, and what in part explains why they are still exciting 30 years into their career, is the Stones’ mastery of performance itself. In song, Jagger is one of the best actors of the age. When he sings of his sympathy for the devil or his lust for brown sugar, it is theatre — theatre of the grandest kind, a vaudeville of hallucinatory proportions. And that theatricality governs the fact that they now marshal around the solid core of their music a spectacle of awesome proportions.
Since the 1970s, The Rolling Stones’ tours have become bigger and bigger, ever more extravagant. By the end of that decade they had set a standard by which Michael Jackson and Madonna would be judged. And then, coming out of internal rifts and a period of separation 10 years later, they were able to outdo their juniors once more with the immense Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle tour.
Of course, the Stones have time on their side. Their tours are not purely occasions for nostalgia, but their unique niche as the only one of the Sixties megabands to survive that heyday more-or-less as a unit gives them a unique marketing angle. It was widely believed that their huge 1981 tour would be their last, and South Africa is now being told the same thing about Voodoo Lounge. Yet the Stones seem further from splitting up than they did a decade ago.
The Stones have outlived the era that made them famous, and their acts are no longer coloured by the social conflicts of that time. They float free, above it all, in the realm of myth. Now, more than ever, they are pure performance, rough rock’n’roll and spectacle for its own sake. In 1995, as the Voodoo Lounge engineers build an almost self-contained fantasy world at Ellis Park, we don’t have to worry about petty morals. We can just enjoy the show.
The Rolling Stones perform at Ellis Park in Johannesburg on February 24 and 25