I've always loved the Rolling Stones, who are being worshipped on BBC1 as I write.
This is because I have always loved classical music, and the Rolling Stones are classical music par excellence.
The Beatles were great, yes, but they were what I would call "imaginative". Their songs were composed, with all their la-di-da tunes that went wandering off all over the place, under the influence of all sorts of drugs, and with all manner of orchestral instruments in the background. The best Rolling Stones tracks are like discoveries. They weren't so much composed as dug up, revealed as always having been there. Their best tunes, by which I simply mean their great, popular rock and roll standards, have the same absolute rightness about them as have the cantatas of Bach, the string quartets of Haydn, the piano concertos of Mozart, the songs of Schubert, or the symphonies of Beethoven. Ah, they're playing Brown Sugar now. Everyone loves that, and count me in.
Lots of people loved the Rolling Stones because they were rebels. I loved them because they were musical … not conservatives exactly, but the originators of something which musical conservatives from then on would always want conserved. I never took to all that sex drugs rock and roll lifestyle stuff. It frightened me back then and it frightens me still. For many of my contemporaries it felt like a personal liberation. To me it looked like the alpha males on the rampage, and alpha males are always scary to all the gamma and delta males, and I was a timid little creature way down the Greek alphabet, plenty of brain but no hormones to speak of. Everyone has their ideal age, and nineteen was absolutely not mine. I think that those who said that all that stuff was a threat to social decency and social order were quite right. But then there was that beautiful music.
If you want to go all Music Professor about the Stones, I suggest you concentrate on the first few bars of those best tracks. The best Stones openings are sheer genius. How they work is: you put together your Stones track (this is if you are a Rolling Stone – I'm not suggesting you try to imitate this procedure with your stupid little band) with the words and the tune, the lead guitar part, the bass guitar part, and the regular drum beat. Then you introduce each bit separately with the least obvious and most rhythmically mysterious one coming in first. Often this would be a guest instrument, like that cowbell thing for Honky Tonk Women. Or it would be a regular instrument played in a really weird way, like the guitar playing at the start of Gimme Shelter. But sometimes it would just be the offbeat lead guitar riff (riff? is that the word?) as in Brown Sugar. Anyway, you add the various musical lines in ascending order of musical obviousness, and finally the machine is up and running. When it works, this kind of thing takes you to musical territory only previously inhabited by such things as the opening of Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata or of things like Mozart's Dissonance String Quartet (where the key and the tune is kept a secret for about fifteen bars much as the Stones start a classic track by keeping the rhythm a secret). Now we've just had the opening bars of Start Me Up, and the game there is you can't for the first second or so work out what the rhythm is. Rhythmically, a parallel would be the opening bars of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, where you can't tell if it's in 3/2 or 2/3 or whatever it's called. DA di di DA di di, or DA di DA di DA di. Central to all this is Keith Richards, as already stated here: one of my all time favourite musicians.
This all may sound rather Pseud's Cornerish, but the point I want to make here is, it's the music. Not the drugs and the drug busts, Marianne bloody Faithful, the stupid funny voices and the imitations of them by their youngers and worsers on the telly. It's the music. The fact that this music used to emerge from Human Threats to Everything Decent didn't matter. It didn't matter when it became clear to everyone that the Rolling Stones were actually pillars of society and no more of a threat to the Establishment than Dame Thora Hird, and that it will soon come out of old men who wouldn't be out of place as characters in the Goon Show. All that is a good laugh and everything, but is of no consequence to me. It's the music.
As for going to Rolling Stones concerts, I think I would feel much the same about that as I find that I do about going to live football matches. I prefer it on CD.
