Profile/Copyright © 1974, 2006 by Jim O’Donnell
You may have forgotten, but I haven't.
I refer to the fact that just a decade or so ago establishment society had decided that the only records a hard-rock band, the Rolling Stones, were going to make would be worked out in penitentiaries.
The charge: assault with batteries. These guys, snickered half the world, would spend their lives on paroles, not payrolls. The going line was that, sure, they'd probably even get to do their show in San Quentin some day—without a fee.
They were five grotty yet gifted English blokes. Just five, just guys, just rock ‘n’ roll, but all that in 1963 was enough to fire the biggest war since Hitler and Stalin. That is, the one between parents and offspring.
"The Stones," a Times Square billboard accurately bragged, "are the group parents love to hate."
The public image of what a Rolling Stone was made of went some beyond rats and snails and puppy dogs' tails. It was more like 100-proof pug.
According to The Daily Mail, an English newspaper, "They look like boys whom any self-respecting mum would lock in the bathroom!"
So far as any responsible citizen of the world was concerned, a Rolling Stone threw rocks at lame dogs, moved his lips while reading, picked his nose during "God Save the Queen," bit his dirty fingernails to the bone, spit a lot, and possessed a vocabulary with no words of more than one syllable and two words of less than four letters—“the” and "a."
Like, what sort of creature is it, fathers wanted to know, that might wake up in a hotel room one night with a new song in its head called "Satisfaction"? Its "manager," they figured, must use a whip and chair to get it on stage, then throw steaks to get it off.
The Insurgent Establishment was sure that only misfits with infamous heritages tried out for the band, and that you tried out by throwing a tantrum. You had to be so hyperthyroid-mad, Genghis Khan couldn't have hoped to pass the audition.
Rumor had it that the lead-singer had topped off his audition by slipping piranha into his brother's bath. "Apple Polishers Need Not Apply" is how the classified copy would have gone.
The Rolling Stone dress style was no style. A Stone treated a Mohair suit as if it were a fuzzy lawsuit. He never pressed his pants. His clothes always looked schlepped in.
The Bible of English haberdashery, Tailor and Cutter, went so far as to suggest that Mr. Jagger wear "proper clothes for proper occasions," like, say, a tie now and then. Mr. Jagger grinned.
Getting a haircut was beyond a Rolling Stone's public relations' capacities. It was all right, as an English headmaster finally ruled in May, 1964, to wear your hair like the Beatles, but not "long and scruffy" like the Stones.
In fact, as recently as 1969, when they poked their hairs in and out of a bunch of Las Vegas night clubs, more than one customer gambled to inquire if they were in the cast of Hair.
Prowling the continents, the Stones’ road show became less a concert than a sight-seeing attraction—a floating English version of the Indianapolis 500, noise and injury and all. On good nights, they registered at least a seven on the Richter Earthquake Scale.
They came on, as journalist Pete Hamill observed, like an open switchblade. Jack the Ripper had nothing on swashbuckling Mick the Jagger. Most people weren’t sure if the film footage of their Altamont concert was a rock ‘n’ documentary or an executioner’s training film. It’d scare Dracula.
Back in England, the Stones must have violated Parliament's 1715 Riot Act every time they took the stage.
Guys wouldn't want to meet a Rolling Stone alone on a waterfront; girls wanted to meet one alone anywhere.
Those must have been Beatle pictures you ordered from a fan club years back, because Stone pictures you tore off a post office wall.
All by themselves, the words "Rolling Stones" had London bridges falling down and middle America reaching for its hunting gun to go out for an easy ride and split some hairs. It was the Stones vs. all comers, they'd gotten the adult world's goat so well.
But they'd been street-wise, so they were naturally tour-tough. Four of the five original Stones survived the world. Las Vegas duly noted the fact by establishing them as 3-1 favorites against any four Mafia hit men on duty.
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Or as the nice Melody Maker headline-man had phrased it years before: "Would You Let Your Sister Go With A Rolling Stone?"
Well, all that past decade is yesterday's papers, and this ace band that brought rock music to its knees was on the American tube, Channel 5, at 11:30 last night.
(The Beatles were the ones who got invited to play at Buckingham Palace; but today the Stones are the ones who can be as finicky in picking their concert dates and sites as English kings picking their brides.)
Michael Phillip Jagger, who early on in life decided that his life would be discs not desks and who then parlayed his voice into an international reputation, wore heavy make-up, plastering his face with sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice kind of stuff.
He also, as usual, sang brilliantly, and his stage act was like something choreographed by Nijinsky. Which is why he can get away with gobs of cosmetics on his face: everybody knows his glitter is more than make-up deep.
As for the rest of the Stones, Mick and his boys are so good anymore, it's no longer a question of whether they're the greatest rock band in the business today. The question is whether they're the greatest, period.
It's easy for superstars to get slovenly about their work, but the Stones, being the Stones, no one wonders if their shows will sell out, but who will be allowed to go.
The only way to sneak into their concerts these days is by parachute from a rented helicopter. And I don't know of anybody yet who ever bought a Stones' record and phoned the Better Business Bureau about being cheated.
While younger rock bands are hanging around wondering what you have to do to get steady work in this line, the Rolling Stones don't perform or record so much for money these days, but for history, for the ages. Only legends, not people, are in front of them.
Of course, they could, if they wanted, just sit back and watch the rock parade go by as if they were English earls watching a cricket match.
For besides making a hair dryer as necessary a part of a rock musician's road trip as electricity, the Stones also scowled their way into establishment society.
That other snickering half of the globe has learned that Rolling Stones actually eat with knives and forks, wear shoes, and can write their names.
Nowadays, they can also demand the executive suite and champagne in the water bucket every time. Their home decors are early Better Homes and Gardens.
They've ended up hopping airplanes every other day, instead of jumping bail, and pulling in more cash than any other five precious stones in creation.
In far-flung distance and wide-embracing influence, a Stones tour makes the travels of Marco Polo seem like a jaunt.
So, yeah, they're rich, but not idly. In fact, at the very moment Mick Jagger was unisexing it across America's TV rooms last night, the real-life Mick was probably in a studio working out a new secret voodoo backing he picked up from some traveling medicine man in Armenia.
The very possibility makes me wonder if there's hope for any of us who own a functioning eardrum or two, a record player, a not-so-expansive memory, and one or more Rolling Stone records. I mean, will we ever get from under Mick's thumb?
You may have forgotten what it's like under there, but I haven't.
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CD: Rolling Stones, Hot Rocks 1964-1971. Abkco, 1972.
Book: Bill Wyman, with Ray Coleman, Stone Alone: The Story of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Band. Penguin, 1990.
Websites: http://www.rollingstones.com
http://www.stones.net
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