Rolling Stones: Classic or Dud

Also I was talking more about the mythology in the music itself, the images of the lyrics (although eventually the spilled out into the real world). All those tales of debauchery eventually become stale, though Nick Kent's 'Twilight Babylon'(in The Dark Stuff) is a great read about the Stones in the 70s, very sick and amusing. Also some brilliant characterizations esp. of Mick 'n Bianca Jagger (man, did he see through them :)

As for Rock Dreams, it's a great book but the whole Godstar decadence trip on the Stones didn't wash with me. It would have worked better for Led Zep I think. Generally though it makes the best case for classic rock and pop of any book out there - some of the images are just magnificent, capturing everything you need to know about a star in one image (the Brian Wilson one stands out).

aside from the odd single ("under my thumb" may be my favourite), a ho-hum dud i wouldn't bother thinking about if they weren't so acclaimed. stiff and wooden rhythm section, mechanical faux-blues vocals. give me the stooges any day. "hand in glove," "handsome devil," or "what she said" are infinitely heavier, more biting, harder rocking, and more dangerous (since when is macho more threatening than effeminate?). in fact, the idea of the stones, an institution as thoroughly mainstream as kellogg's corn flakes, being threatening at all is positively hilarious.

ah well. better get back to stephin merritt and iancu dumitrescu.

I'm prepared to throw my theory out, although since i was re-reading The Dark Stuff I noticed how Kent was fascinated by Mozzer's fear for thugs, crowds and rude violent behaviour (I put 2 and 2 together and built myself a hypothesis, nothing to serious, so I'll take those comments on the wooden rhythm section & the heavyosity of The Smiths with a pinch of salt).

"Oh, I bet they'd be billionaire marrionette ghouls by now..."

But Eminem has come along to CHANGE all that!

Pretty awful, by and large.

Jody Beth - comparing a Jagger vocal and a B&S vocal seems odd - the one is operatic (i.e. meaning lies in what he does with the voice), the other theatrical (i.e. meaning lies in the relation the words and phrases have to 'natural' speech),

good point...don't know how i would anwer this.

good point...don't know how i would answer this.

Good answer, if a bit glib.

Does your taste in rock music run to the hard stuff at all? (Thinking of all the "wimp rock" stuff mentioned above.)

I don't think I have a "taste in rock music" anymore. I like noise and aggression in music sometimes but for me the particular form of 'rock' as The Stones et al. practised it seems to diminish the noise and aggression, straitjacket it and make it an 'attitude'. (I love attitudes and striking poses but this particular one is 35-plus years old and doesn't connect with me any more.)

That's not a hard-and-fast rule, of course - but take the Stooges, who you mentioned. I like them, but the bits of them that draw a bloodline from the Stones (Iggy as onstage 'Rock God', the extroverted attitude of Raw Power as opposed to the introversion of "No Fun"/"1969"/"Dirt") are the bits that stop me loving them. And on the G'n'R thread I suspect I'd be one of those beside-the-point people who like the band for their 'genre synthesis' (the New York Dolls, too), i.e. for their pop qualities. The Stones tracks I do like, I like for those qualities too.

Doesn't seem too odd to me... both bands play variations on fairly straightahead rock music, so it's not really apples and oranges. The B&S vocal sound is pretty monotonous, though; the entire range of emotions is sung EXACTLY the same way. It's not a very creative expression of feeling.

"Now let's remember the most fundamental fact of life, folks: everything good is the Beatles, everything awful and bogus and pretentious and gross and condescending is the Rolling Stones.
Okay?
Mainstream pop has routinely offered two paths... One is all about happy times and getting lucky and being not miserable, while the other, at its most fruitful, might lasoo you something venereal in the East Village if you yap long, loud, and boringly enough. If you're past age 23 and the latter is still your idea of fun then you probably thought Will Self's "My Idea of Fun" was too, and, pal-o-mine, all your ideas are wrong. About Everything."

- Mike McPadden in "Bubblegum Music is The Naked Truth"

Most of Jagger's lyrics, save the occasional stutter, bear more than a passing resemblance to normal conversational speech. I can't even think of a case where this isn't so.

The amount of "emotion" wasn't my point (and I fucking KNEW you lot would get on my case about that, which is why I hesitated to use the word) -- it was the range of things Jagger DOES with his voice within the course of a single song, vs. Murdoch, who doesn't offer the listener that much variety.

I don't KNOW whether Jagger would cover B&S well, but to be fair, the stately Britpop of Between the Buttons and Their Satanic Majesties Request isn't really very different from B&S, is it?

(Mind you I think the stately Britpop era of the Stones is staggeringly awful, loads loads worse than their 'rock' stuff (or even their disco stuff!) precisely because Mick sounds like he's having to squeeze his tongue into a corset for every song. How anyone can listen to "Lady Jane" and enjoy it is a great mystery to me.)

...just because he's sounding like he has to squeeze his tongue into a corset... it's quirky in a good way. also, it matches the harpsichord.

A good alternative to "Lady Jane" is "Play With Fire." Similar mood, similar era, similar theme, much less mannered, much more biting.

bubblegum is good too

it's a continuum

SO THERE.

And yeah yeah the beatles weren't all sunshine and lollipops any more than the stones were all needles and spoons. That's a total red herring. But I think the strength in McPadden's attack isn't that he hates that The Stones are dark, it's that he hates that they are bogus and ... pretentious and condescending and, love em as I do, THEY ARE!

As for the influence thing I guess the most obviously Stones-influenced artists I like are 70s Aerosmith, Patti Smith, and the Blue Oyster Cult. I recognize they're probably all more limited than the Stones but I like their voices or songs or beats more. They all added something else too. Zeppelin got into Stones-influenced territory sometimes but not usually on my favourite songs by them. Is "Houses Of the Holy" Stones-y? I don't know. I like "Night Flight" if that counts. On the whole, I'd probably take Zeppelin-influenced or Purple-influenced or Cream/Hendrix-influenced or even Velvets-influenced.

a late comment: I think there's more cross-pollenization than borrowing going on there: Dylan had certainly listened to "Aftermath" more than once by the time he made "Blood on the Tracks," say

OT, I had no idea Keith Richards had been living in a suburb in CT for the last 40+ years, and apparently an active member of the community (hence the honors bestowed on him this past week).

― birdistheword

he also gave up smoking and mostly drinking and has never sounded so coherent

Connecticut First Lady Ann Lamont presented Richards — who moved with his family to the nearby town of Weston in the early ‘90s — with the award. “I’d like to say thank you to you all, and thank you to the state of Connecticut,” Richards said, per The Westport Library. “You kind of get lost for words with something like this around your neck. I’ve been here for 40 years, and it’s been a great place for me. I brought the kids up here. When the kids were young, I said, I have to get the kids out of New York City before they don’t get any fresh air at all. So, we moved up here, and ever since, we’ve had a great life. … I’m incredibly happy about everything, especially things like this, because you don’t get them every day.”

“This is a great building, a wonderful library, which even I didn’t know the full extent of,” said Richards, who wrote two books: his memoir Life and the children’s book Gus & Me: The Story Of My Granddad And My First Guitar. “As Bill was saying earlier, without our books, without knowing things, without knowing their special meaning — this isn’t movies, this is not someone drawing you images. This is a book, and you have the movie in your head. It’s very important that we keep our books unburnt.”

There's a story I was told (or that I saw or read, I can't remember, but I think I was told this) by a producer for some DVD supplement who went up to Connecticut to interview Keith for something. He gets to the estate and is able to just drive up to the front, where Keith answers the door. He's very welcoming and brings the guy in to his living room, where Keith is busy trying to set up a satellite TV system, or something like that. The producer helps him for a while, iirc a couple of hours, just shooting the shit with Keith while they try to get the thing working. And after they succeed Keith turns to him and says, "ok, now who are you and why are you here?"

I remember that story! IIRC, it was somebody working with The Director's Label DVD people, and they were there to get Keith to sign a release for the Stones videos Gondrey(?) directed.

Exactly!!!!! Good memory. I know I interviewed a bunch of those people, so I couldn't remember if it was on a commentary track or from one of my interviews. I'm guessing commentary track.

I love how the interviewer speaks in the most soft and non-threatening tones possible

The interviewer is Whispering Bob Harris - he spoke like that to everyone, even when doing a piece directly to camera.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DJSbA5RgEs

(or even facing off against Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood)

Bob Harris is 28 in the Keith clip.

28 going on 54

Keith's house is very visible from one of the most popular trails in the Devil's Den nature preserve in Weston… it is a weird looking house, I don't have the necessary command of architecture to describe it… he's lived in this house far far longer than he's lived anywhere else…he had this house at the same time he had taht penthouse on the Tower Records block on 4th and broadway, but he sold the latter I think in the early 00s…

Does he participate in the town community? I live in the town next to weston, and his daughters went to the one public school everyone in that town goes to…I don't know of anyone saying he's been seen at the fair they hold in Weston each year, there is no downtown to speak of in weston, but his brother in law — i spose this must be Patti Hanson's brother? or the husband of her sister?— has a restaurant in nearby ridgefield which Keith hangs out at sometimes… a guy I know once was leaving a restaurant in ridgefield, and saw what at first he thought was a homeless person, and as that shambling person shambled closer…it wasn't a homeless person, not at all…

the library at which the event took place is very very keen to be associated with music culture… Chris Frantz has hosted many events there, they have a somewhat boringly inclined music festival annually that this year will feature "talks" with Patti Smith, Rollins and a performance from the Wallflowers… I have never seen any version of Gang of Four: three years ago, when King and Burnham had Pajo and Lee? I would have loved to see that, but I wanted to avoid covid. So the library is hosting the first show of this final tour, which will have Ted Leo in the Gill chair and the lady who would do high kicks in Belly in the 90s in the Lee/Allen spot…not as good as the 2022 edition, but chiggers can't be boozers.

Mick doing an amazing job of smearing thinning hair over his pate in that clip above, just top denying-what's-going-on action there

Very into Country Stones lately, Mick's fake American accent is always a treat

it is an odd setlist nerd footnote that i was at the only ever stones show where they opened with midnight rambler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlV9AimzUOA

I sing "Dead Flowers" at karaoke often.

Despite having a copy of the Gondry Director's Label DVD somewhere, I've never actually seen the "Like A Rolling Stone" video (probably because Stones' cover is lame). It's very Gondry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRYokc3VBC4

Gondry also did a clip for the No Security version of "Gimme Shelter" that hasn't been officially anthologized (this version is a TV RIP)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrQrEgDbSH4