A Free Man

The sunshine bores the daylights out of me.
Chasing shadows moonlight mystery.
Headed for the overload,
Splattered on the dirty road,
Kick me like you’ve kicked before,
I can’t even feel the pain no more…

My first memory of The Rolling Stones is one of profound dislike. I’m not saying that I was some sort of music snob child progeny, but the Stones songs that I heard on Top 40 radio and saw on MTV in the early 80’s just flat out sucked. Cap their sub-par 80’s work off with the absurd duet that Jagger did with Bowie in 1985 that MTV played the hell out of and I think my impression of the Stones as overrated and lacking in any real talent was a legitimate, if short-sighted, one. This was a band for graying, beer-bellied bikers with the tongue emblems on the leathers that periodically roared through my dank north Florida town on the way to Daytona, not for the discerning young Culture Club fan. (Yes, really. Regrettably.)

The source for this distaste was that I had very little exposure to the Stones’ earlier work. The only “oldies” that I listened to was the old records and 8 tracks that my Dad had and he preferred McCartney and Lennon to Jagger and Richards. Certainly I would have heard “Satisfaction” and “Gimme Shelter” on the radio, but they never resonated with me growing up - they just didn’t apply to my small town childhood.  And then you see Mick Jagger “dancing” in the streets in a bright mauve silk shirt on MTV and it’s pretty easy to dismiss The Stones as irrelevant.

My opinion about The Stones started to change the first time that I saw Lawrence Kasden’s “The Big Chill”, or more precisely, listened to the soundtrack for that film. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is used so effectively in the funeral scene of that film (yes, that’s the kind of teenager I was) that I was inspired to go and check out more of The Stones’ earlier work. I bought the double cassette “Hot Rocks” and never thought of The Rolling Stones in the same way again. I can still remember the feeling that “Satisfaction” inspired the first time I really heard it in my late teens. That raw frustration, rebellion, absolute disdain for “that man”. The Stones were punk before punk was even an idea in Joey Ramone’s teenage mind. That rock and roll swagger of Honky Tonky Women” and “Street Fighting Man” that seemed cliched to me in the early 80s got me through the bulk of my 20s. From that greatest hits collection, I dug into Jagger ad Richards’ back catalog and some of the the obsessive, darker, introspective stuff from those late 60s and early 70s records hit home for me in my early 30’s.

‘Cause all you women is low down gamblers,
Cheatin’ like I don’t know how,
But baby, baby, there’s fever in the funk house now.
This low down bitchin’ got my poor feet a itchin’,
You know you know the duece is still wild.

Now, “Let It Bleed” is my favorite Stones album, but it’s not the one that the iPod chose on my Friday free day with Boy Z. Instead we got what is generally considered to be their best record, “Exile on Main Street”. This behemoth, upon its release in 1972, changed The Stones from just another 60’s rock band to THE rock band of the 1970s.  changed rock and roll on its release in 1972. So much so that whenever a band crosses some sort of critically established threshold, this is the album evoked as a comparison. For example, “‘Being There’ is Wilco’s ‘Exile on Main Street’” or “With ‘Brighter Than Creation’s Dark’, the Drive-by Truckers have recorded their ‘Exile on Main Street’”.

And it is a magnificent album. It’s a rollicking, seemingly endless trip - like a drunken summer afternoon riding around in the back of a pick up truck. It’s hot, it’s dirty, it’s fuddled. The boogie piano and mellow slide show this band at it finest - borrowing elements of country, soul, rhythm and blues, even jazz - to make a new kind of rock and roll.

Listening to “Exile on Main Street” with my son on Friday, listening through his virgin ears, I heard a song like “Hip Shake Boogie” for what it must have been at the time - a redefining of rock and roll. The subject matter of the song…

…I wanna tell you ’bout a dance
that’s goin’ around…

…is bog standard rock, is in fact how rock and roll started out a couple of decades earlier. But the way that The Stones come at it would have been all new at the time, the dirty boogie sound that they were employing and Jagger’s grumbling, lackadaisical vocals.

Z was indifferent to the music, but did like my singing and hip shaking. He’s more of a fan of dance than music right now. I’m a little disappointed that hes’s not up shaking his own hips yet. Particularly since Chris’s daughter, who is younger than Z, is all over the interwebs with her dancing. But hey, it’s not a race, right?

Right?

I do think that The Rolling Stone have held on for far too long. I also think that they’re the McDonalds of rock and roll, a universally recognized franchise with that damn tongue logo ubiquitous. And I think that they haven’t made a really good album since “Goat’s Head Soup” in 1973 (maybe 1980’s “Emotional Rescue”). But all that aside, the Rolling Stones changed rock and roll for the better in the late 60’s and early 70’s and some of those albums -  “Let It Bleed”, “Sticky Fingers”, “Their Satanic Majesties Request” and “Exile on Main Street” - are among the finest ever made.

Z, most likely, is never going to see the depressing spectacle is The Rolling Stones today and I’m a little envious of that. He’ll be able to pick and choose from their back catalog, ignoring “Dancing in the Street” and “One Hit To The Body“. Hell, Z may even think of The Rolling Stones as they would like to people to think of them - as the greatest rock band the world has ever seen.

Let this music relax your mind, let this music relax your mind.
Stand up and be counted, can’t get a witness.
Sometimes you need somebody, if you have somebody to love.
Sometimes you ain’t got nobody and you want somebody to love.

——————-

The Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main Street” is available from Amazon.

 

 The Rolling Stones - "Shake Your Hips" [3:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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