TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/090489/09048900.058

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 20.2 KB | 400 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 58

COVER STORIES: Roll Them Bones


It's middle-aged and still crazy. It's only rock 'n' roll. And
it's still the Stones

By Jay Cocks


    There was so much history this summer, and so little change.

    The anniversary of Woodstock arrived and waned, much like
the first time around. It was mostly a convenience for the
media, a way to get a handle on an upstart pop phenomenon. For
music, a fan remembered, all the festival symbolized was a
washout. Lysergic mud and bad amplification. The rest was a
fairy tale.

    And, as the fairy tales say, it seemed that it might be time
again for legends. Twenty years later there were suddenly on
every side the familiar sounds of the '60s: Bob Dylan, the Who,
Van Morrison, the Bee Gees and the Jefferson Airplane. But the
flashiest news was that the Rolling Stones, well aged and
embattled, would be lumbering out of the woods and into the
lights again. "The world's greatest rock 'n' roll band" (an
unofficial title the band never originated but did little to
discourage) had not only cut a new record but was embarking on a
tour that would take it to nearly 40 U.S. cities.

    Just look at these guys. Giants. Golems. Geezers with a
quarter-century of history together, "a long shadow," as Keith
Richards says, "that we drag around." Their tour starts Aug. 31
in Philadelphia; when the New York City shows were announced,
some 300,000 tickets (at an average price of $28.50) were sold
in a record six hours. The band, which fussed over choosing
photos and picking among twelve different covers for their new
record, knows it's no longer got the look knocked. Image is
vital, and taking the stage will be a severe test.

    Steel Wheels is the name of the record; Nothing Ventured
would have suited too. It boasts five reprobates cranking
themselves up for yet another crack at the distance, showing
their years -- flaunting the things, in point of plain fact --
while they swan around some of the nation's largest concert
stages, soaking up the applause and the revenues, blowing off
their greatest hits, taking the new material out for an
audience airing.

    Of course, the audience has had a summer of softening up.
The Who, who had played at Woodstock, had already come back,
getting a jump on things when they were meant to be gone for
good. Keith Moon, their great drummer, had taken some of the
band's careening keenness with him when he died in 1978. Pete
Townshend, their great songwriter and guitar player, his
hearing shredded by more than two decades of high decibels,
could not even re-create all his lead parts. Still they
soldiered on, three bowed veterans suffering the onset of shell
shock from a barrage that hasn't even landed yet.

    With a splendid new album, Oh Mercy, due out in September,
and on the strength of permanent regard, Bob Dylan hit the road
again, doing the vintage songs in new ways, singing the newer
songs as if they'd just been minted. Dylan perpetually remakes
himself, reshapes his work. He has made history, but even the
most dedicated fan knows that Dylan's history is peculiar, part
of the past with a claim on the future, but existing in a kind
of new space, a new tense: the present imperfect.

    What did this have to do with now? The fan grew up with rock
'n' roll. He gawped at Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show. He thought
Jerry Lee Lewis on Steve Allen's TV program was the wildest and
altogether greatest thing he had ever set eyes on. When Chuck
Berry showed up on American Bandstand, one young world got
jolted into a different orbit. The music was that strong. All
velocity and no drag.

    And it had no past, either. Not at first. Rock 'n' roll put
down roots like some jungle creeper, overnight, and was suddenly
there one new morning, loud and outsize, full of lurid colors
and maybe even a little poison. It was new, and it could be
owned, wholly and instantly, by a new generation. It was what
everyone was who heard it first and would love it forever. It
was young.

    No more. Not on the calendar, and not in the heart. Now rock
has some 30 years of history behind it. That's time enough, and
weight enough, to make it hidebound.

    Grim prospect. All summer, the fan looked about for
reassurance. There were familiar sounds all around. Van
Morrison, a favorite since the early '60s, released yet another
album, Avalon Sunset, a lyrical, ruminative shard of
spirituality that he refused to push or publicize. The Grateful
Dead persisted, a whole band of Peter Pans camping out in a
hippie never-never land. The Bee Gees returned; so did the
Jefferson Airplane and the Doobie Brothers. These weren't
revivals; they were exhumations.

    Paul McCartney issued a sprightly new album, Flowers in the
Dirt, on which he collaborated with Elvis Costello, and
announced a world tour to begin Sept. 26 in Oslo. And Ringo
Starr, fresh from an alcohol rehab, hit the road backed by a
peerless band of studio all-stars. Strawberry Fields forever.

    The fan felt often, now, as if he were out in the middle of a
foggy sound, in a weathered boat, with an old radio that kept
drifting from station to station. To be sure, there was a lot of
new stuff on. Madonna: slick and smart. Rap: angry, slangy and
assaultive, good and righteous, but restrictive in its heat.

    Honest, now: Can you be a veteran fan and still respond as
rock 'n' roll demands you respond -- by belief, by passion, by
always raising the stakes -- to performers who may be a
quarter-century younger than you are? You could do it with
Springsteen; you both were younger then. You did it with U2.
But for somebody new? Was rock 'n' roll, forever young, finally
middle-aged?

    The questions went deeper than chronology. Rock wasn't just
the sound track for the '60s. It spurred on and helped shape a
whole culture. It was central to change in a way that nothing --
certainly no music -- has been since. Rock was always a music of
turbulence, and history, for a while there, caught the beat.
Woodstock was a dodge, a growth industry that tie-dyed much that
was fierce and righteous in the music into something stuporous
and evasive. The seeds of nostalgia were planted in those
sodden, trodden New York State fields before the festival was
over. Memories were rolled like joints. Smoke 'em if you got
'em.

    Nostalgia was the only dirty word in the rock vocabulary.
This music had never looked back before. But history could walk
away from rock once it had been put snugly into that Woodstock
pasture. Rock reacted by turning inward, to the softer personal
speculations of the '70s singer-songwriters, then reacted
again, first by exploding (punk), then by chilling out into the
cerebrations of the New Wave bands like the Talking Heads and
the slick, slightly spooky amusement-park soul of Michael
Jackson.

    But is it nostalgia that is keeping the sound of the '60s
alive in 1989? It has to be something more. Something like . . .
that sound on the radio now. Some kind of homing signal. Coming
in strong now, and now you know the sound. It's only rock 'n'
roll, but no mistake: it's their rock 'n' roll. It was even once
the title of a Stones song, a hit . . . forget the exact date.
Not so long ago, after all.

    Mick Jagger, the Stones' co-leader, co-writer, singer, front
man and flakmaster, is supposed to have said he didn't want to
be a full-time rocker past 40. He denies saying it now, maybe
because here he is, 46 and still doing it fine. That makes him
older than the fan by a few years. The fan feels better already.
Smiles, settles back, listens close.

    The boat starts to move. That's encouraging. After all the
band's public bickering and rheumatic concertizing, after all
this time and all these damn years, the Rolling Stones can
still rock the boat. They are back all right.

    The Stones know their audience, though. It's pretty much the
same as it's always been, and it will be happy to see them. It
will also be happy to know that the material on Steel Wheels is
a lot like them -- up to date but fundamentally unchanged. The
record kicks off with Sad Sad Sad, a creditable attempt to
capture again the dynamics of the group's early sound, when the
rhythm came in solid sheets and the lyrics sounded as if they
were being spit out of a semiautomatic weapon. After that, it
bustles through a very commercial, danceable tune or two, a
couple of extravagant experiments (including Terrifying, with
some heavy jazz underpinnings) and a few desultory rockers,
performed with practiced agility.

    The fan heard it right away. The Stones still have the
stamina, but there's always at least a hint of strain in the
music too, a self-consciousness about the energy, as if they
were the oldest guys at the gym and trying to look good on the
Nautilus. Rock 'n' roll may be their life -- and their
business. It may come naturally to them still, but it sure
doesn't come easy. That's what's different. That old winning
smugness -- their magisterial self-assurance -- is gone. There's
a lot of sweat in these songs.

    The band must know it too, because finally, on the last
song, they face it. Slipping Away is a song about -- indeed,
almost consumed by -- a sense of impermanence, of loss, of
lives eliding into compromise. It's about ending. It's about
dying, and it's a great Stones song. Jagger and Richards have
some supernal ballads to their credit (As Tears Go By, Wild
Horses, Moonlight Mile), but busy being naughty, they did not
cultivate their more sensitive side. Slipping Away is an
autobiography that could be anyone's life story.

    Jagger and Richards have spent a fair part of the '80s
separately pursuing extra-Stones interests, playing the
Bickersons in the rock press whenever they were queried about
the plentiful tensions within the band. It was tough to pin
down, even when the sniping drew a little blood, precisely what
the boys were bitching about. Keith wanted to tour, Mick wanted
to cruise the night life; individual ambitions ran contrary to
the good of the band. Whatever it was, it seemed likely that
they had been together too long -- 27 years, to be exact. So
when Slipping Away begins and the husky fragility of Richards'
vocal takes instant hold, it is clear that this is more than
just a good closer for a record. Richards takes the lead for
once, and Jagger glides in on harmony. It's a political
gesture, a way of dealing with all that friction, even as it's
being moved out front. And it's something more, an envoi, the
start of a long goodbye.

    The Stones always encouraged a dynamic of dissipation --
"their satanic majesties" -- and loved flirting with the flame.
That shadow Keith Richards talks about was always there, deeper
and darker than with most bands. Mick was a dandy about his
decadence; Keith was devout. One book about the Stones even
insisted (over Richards' later bemused denials) that Richards
had his blood washed, changed and purified.

    No surprise, then, that the last time the Stones took an
American stage, in 1981, they looked like the supporting cast
from a George Romero epic, specters from the boneyard of the
pop psyche thirsting for a transfusion of celebrity. Now the
boys have regrouped and regroomed; better care is being taken
all around, and light is being made of age, of gossip, of old
reputation. Charlie Watts, the Stones bedrock drummer, who was
never one of the group's wilder revelers, looked momentarily
startled the other day when a visiting writer extended a hand in
greeting. "Sorry," he said, recovering. "I thought you were
going to take my pulse."

    "There's a lot of energy in the band right now," says Keith.
"This new record's been miraculously fast for us. Mick and I are
still holding our breath, saying, `This can't last.' We pretty
much wrote it in a month and laid down the basic tracks in about
five weeks.'' To get the steel wheels on track so quickly,
Jagger and Richards set aside those publicized vexations to find
a common footing.

    Richards made a solid solo album last year, which was
helpful. It got him a piece of the cynosure that has always
been Jagger's property. Mick turned out two solo albums himself
-- the second enterprising and entertaining -- but neither
enjoyed superstar success. Jagger, when interviewed, had put the
Stones in a coffin, but never lowered them into the ground.
When rapprochements were reached and offers tendered, he was
ready to listen.

    "It's the easiest thing in the world to work with the
Stones, and for me to work with Mick," Keith says. "Mick and I
work together perfectly. It's when we're not working that we
have problems." If Steel Wheels does not have the full surprise
and thermal energy of a Stones classic like Let It Bleed or
Exile on Main Street, at least it holds on to a sense of
continuity. No advances maybe, but as another great songwriter
put it, no retreat either.

    The Stones are aware of the risks. What looked cool, dodgy,
outrageous a while back could look antique and stupid now, more
like a Monty Python skit. "The parody aspects of it are
overwhelming," Keith admits. "It'll kill the music, you know?"
Watching the Stones take their chances with all this -- for
revenue, for glory and for something more -- has become a new
part of the show. They could become what they used to mock.

    What will save them is that in a positive way, in a way that
rock was never expected to tolerate, they are acting their age.
The fan keeps coming back to Slipping Away and thinks about the
deaths in the band family. There was, famously, the passing of
Brian Jones, one of the formative members and chief sybarites,
overdosed in 1969, found dead floating in his swimming pool. And
more recently and just as crucially, there was Ian Stewart, the
keyboard player, who died of a heart attack in 1985.

    "That was probably the final nail," says Keith. "That really
took the glue and the heart out of us all. It has taken us this
long to reconcile being able to put the Stones together without
him. Nobody knows much about Stu out there, but to the boys in
the band, the Stones was his band. He was a real taskmaster,
strictly rhythm and blues, jazz. You could see his face when you
were writing, and if it sounded like a pop song, you knew he was
cursing under his breath. In a way, we're all still working for
Stu."

    Easy to imagine Stewart smiling over Slipping Away. Easy,
too, to hear such a stalwart pro lose patience with all this
fretting about age and nostalgia. That may be the better way.
Play the music, keep it up front and don't sweat the future.
"Talent will survive," says Aretha Franklin, who mounted a
successful tour herself this summer. "People with true talents
and gifts will stand the test of longevity, with good business
management." Right. Leave the fretting to everyone else. There
is, indeed, a good measure of concern to go around.

    Even Jagger, when pressed, can come out with an observation,
characteristically jaded and spoken like rock's foremost
mandarin. "There's not a lot in rock that is new," he says.
"It's the same kind of chord sequences and the same kind of
rhythm references and the same recycling of subject matter. But
I don't think it's a problem. I mean, traditional musical forms
like folk music in three chords or blues are endearing to
Americans. They find some comfort in them."

    Neil Young, who has a new album coming out in October, isn't
bothered about restrictions of form, or of age. "Rock 'n' roll
is about life, and age is a state of mind," he says. "The
music's still wide open. All you need is the nerve, the nerve to
do what you want to do." It takes more than nerve, though, to
get played on the radio. Ken Barnes, editor of the industry
trade magazine Radio & Records, figures that at least 40% of
what is available to the whole American radio audience is
"classic" or "oldies" rock. Demographics restrict station
playlists and tie up formats; besides, as Barnes puts it, "the
sheer cultural weight of what we're now calling classic rock is
somewhat stifling."

    Rock's been a megabusiness for much of its adult life. In
1973 there was $2 billion worth of record and tape sales in the
U.S.; in 1988 total sales (including CDs) were $6.2 billion.
Bucks like that encourage uncivil marriages of commerce and
creativity such as tour sponsorship (the Stones are going out
under the aegis of MTV and Budweiser -- careful driving home
from the show, now) while discouraging the innovation, the
sheer recklessness, that rock music needs in abundance.

    Legends are tough to fight; legends with fat wallets become
moving targets. "I grew up on most of these people. But I don't
really like what a lot of them are doing anymore," says Perry
Farrell of the cutting-edge Los Angeles band Jane's Addiction.
"A lot of bands are willing to be commercial or a commodity.
It's kind of like a drug problem. I think rock 'n' roll has
money in its veins."

    Peter Case, a wondrous songwriter and singer whose recent
album The Man with the Blue Postmodern Fragmented
Neo-Traditionalist Guitar is good enough to carry like a
talisman into the uncertainties of the '90s, sees the
difficulty in broader terms. "Rock 'n' roll has just become a
new form of Disneyland," he says. "The whole thing has got
mythologized to the point where it's just a bunch of rubbish."
Greil Marcus, who writes formidably on popular and radical
culture (the recent Lipstick Traces), talks about the "suicidal
nostalgia" surrounding a lot of contemporary music: "People have
been sold a bill of goods about the '60s, as if it were some
kind of social Golden Age, when there was no Viet Nam, no
social conflict. There weren't any Negroes, nothing bad
happened. You have Woodstock, but you don't have the war. You
have Jim Morrison as some image of sexual nirvana, but you don't
have Janis Joplin for the miserable junkie she was. But Dylan,
the Beatles, Aretha, the Stones, all the good music cannot be
separated from the fear and the terror that people were
feeling."

    What matters is that the best of the music -- and the Stones
made a fair portion of it -- blowtorches nostalgia away,
enlarging the memory, terror and all. The music reasserts
history, not sentiment, and makes the same tough demands on
head and heart as more traditional literature. Says the writer
and essayist Steve Erickson: "Rock displaced the impact of
American fiction because it wasn't afraid to believe in itself."

    As some of the greatest American novels of the past
quarter-century, Erickson would put up Blonde on Blonde, Frank
Sinatra's Where Are You, Little Richard's Grooviest Seventeen
Original Hits, Springsteen's The River and Marvin Gaye's What's
Going On. And anyone who's scandalized by such an idea . . .
well, they just haven't been listening. Try this simple test at
home. Ask what made more sense to your life: any novel by V.S.
Naipaul or any record by Bob Dylan. Any voters for Naipaul
probably wouldn't have read this far.

    Now maybe rap is shaking and shaping different lives the
same way. It has some of that same risky, visionary power. "Rap
today is what lyrical rock 'n' roll was in the '60s," Neil
Young says. "The message is really important, and it's a rebirth
of language," says Peter Case. All right. History will see to
that.

    What's happened already, and a fair, far time ago, is still
happening too. There was never any cardinal rule about rock --
that was its only cardinal rule -- and it can't be written off
or knocked off because, from its sheer quality and audacity, it
has persisted. No rules, no predictable half-life. Rock may
have become Big Business, but it still has no set agenda and no
fixed address. Lots of names, lots of labels, lots of styles,
and by now lots of history, some of it even proud.

    But despite everything, it still can't be tightly classified
or tied down. It's still a cultural orphan, hiding out on the
far end of respectability: it has age, but it has no home. Or,
as the greatest rock writer of all put it, splitting the
distinction like an atom, no direction home. Like a complete
unknown. Like a rolling stone.

    Caps on those last two words at any fan's discretion.


-- Elizabeth L. Bland/New York and Denise Worrell/Los Angeles