If
you grew up as I did, long after the door had closed on the 1960s and 70s, millions
of blog years after those time periods had been analyzed, picked over,
regurgitated, rehashed, and reformulated, then you likely don’t have the same
feelings towards those decades as people who lived through them. Becoming a
sentient, music-discovering person in the late 1990s, I viewed the music and
culture from those time periods with the same kind of cold detachment most
people assume when reading about the Thirty Years’ War. Sure, I knew the ‘60s
and ‘70s weren’t all that long ago and I knew my parents and grandparents had
been alive then, but the way it was all portrayed—as a mix of war protests,
free-loving hippies, oil crises, disco, punk—were as foreign and unfamiliar to
me in my suburban mind as any protracted battle on the fields of Germany in the
Seventeenth Century. Of course, as I grew older and gathered more knowledge
about history, it became easier to see the connections between the time I was
living in and the time just before I was alive, but that took wisdom that only
age can provide.
To
say that I was detached from everything from before I existed would not be
fair: I’d basically been a fan of the Beach Boys since birth. I grew into a
fascination of the Beatles, and went through the requisite young-American-male-obsessing-over-Led-Zeppelin
phase. But pretty soon, all those concerns became quite minor once I entered
high school and underwent the process of becoming a fan of ‘indie rock.’ I was
convinced the golden age of music hadn’t been in the 1960s like everyone said,
but rather in the just-ended 90s. I would begin, without even realizing it, to
shape my view of musical development as beginning with the birth of punk rock
and ending with whatever I was listening to at the time. This meant that
Television, Minor Threat, the Pixies, Pavement, and the Unicorns were all fair
game, but the Who, Boston, Def Leppard, and Jet were not. So I declared all of
classic rock and its progeny to be dumb, simple, overplayed, and lifeless. And
in truth, even today I can say that much of that music is terrible. I still tremble
at the thought of being trapped in someone’s car and forced to hear “Carry on
My Wayward Son” or “Feel Like Makin’ Love.”
Based on these selections alone, I feel I was pretty justified in trying
to avoid classic rock altogether.
However,
as I was dumping an entire era of rock n roll from my life, I didn’t realize I
was missing gems that fell through the cracks. I did come to learn that David
Bowie had some pretty good songs, and there were many merits to the Stooges,
MC5, and even the Who. But one band I would never budge on, wouldn’t even dare
speak their name even until a few weeks ago, was the Rolling Stones. This
specific aversion was borne out of the fact that the band still somehow existed
when I was in high school. Seeing people my age shelling out big bucks to witness
what I could only then describe as decaying dinosaurs playing songs that I
already heard on the bathroom radio five times a day seemed depressingly pathetic.
The band appeared as nothing but an irrelevant anachronism that was being
propped up by people who longed for ‘the good old days’ and threw their money
at a set of senior citizens to ‘recapture the magic’ once again.
What
I’ve mentioned thus far against the Stones is admittedly very superficial and
has nothing to do with the actual music, but I’m sure I could have thrown
around insults about their musical contributions too. The few songs I’d heard
by them were all kind of schlocky or seemed like contrived aping of foot-stomping
American music (“Honky Tonk Woman” really made my blood boil). But that was about
all I had to offer as justification for thinking the worst of them. So, having
finished high school having largely avoided the Stones, I was able to more
easily do so in college as my musical preferences fell further into the indie
abyss. And all that was good and well.
But,
lo, things were not destined to remain that way forever. Just a couple of months ago, just after a
frighteningly aged Mick Jagger hosted Saturday
Night Live, something changed. Out of the blue, I felt curious to listen to
Exile on Main Street. I’d heard about this album for some time and
was at least able to acknowledge that it must be somewhat ‘good’ based on the
fact that so many people with decent taste seemed to like it. So I fought back
my old hang-ups and just listened, with an open mind, and actually really liked
it. In fact, what really surprised me is that on their most highly lauded
album, I’d only heard about one song previously. And all these songs were
really enjoyable, and by virtue of being new to me, they didn’t possess the
tired taint that so many of the overplayed radio-popular Stones tunes seemed to
have. In short order I found myself listening to the album again. And again. And
again. Then I realized I couldn’t get “Rocks Off” out of my head. So then I moved
on to Sticky Fingers and I really
liked that one too. And then I tried out Beggars
Banquet and my reaction was the same. I was puzzled by the urge to ‘keep
exploring’ this band. What had happened to me? What had happened to the brash
soul who had so vehemently disavowed and denigrated this band for so many
years? Had I really changed so much?
After
taking a step back to ensure myself that I wasn’t undergoing some kind of
existential crisis, I realized I was pretty okay with the fact I was starting
to like the Stones. So I watched the documentary Gimme Shelter which follows the Stones on their 1969 tour of the
United States which ended in a horrifying climax at the Altamont Free Concert
in December of that year. (Trivia: three births and three deaths occurred at
this festival, including, most famously, the stabbing of Meredith Hunter by a
member of Hells Angels while the Stones were playing “Under My Thumb.”) The
film, in spite of the violence, had some incredible footage of the band playing
live. Even as I had listened to their records, I had not before considered the
Rolling Stones to have actually existed and been composed of living, breathing
people during the 1960s (“Sympathy for the Devil” seemed to have been looping
on radio stations around the world since time immemorial). But this documentary
startled me because the band at one time was made up of young people who were
uneasy, frustrated, and really seeking and searching for love, sex, drugs,
truth, satisfaction, etc. This experience was akin to how seeing pictures of
your parents as teenagers can give you perspective on how they ‘aren’t that
different from you’ after all. The Stones of that era were just regular people
trying to figure it all out, not some immovable object or sterile institution
that had been handed down from the heavens. The whole experience was a
revelation. Finally, finally I felt broken of my old prejudice against a band
that had no real basis, I can now recognize, in anything other than youthful
ignorance.
Before
I knew it, I was reading up all I could about the band on Wikipedia and listening
to Let It Bleed late into the night.
Now, as I write, I’m listening to the song “Sway” from Sticky Fingers and I feel quite satisfied. The song is soulful,
forlorn, and agitated, yet it shuffles over welcoming piano chords and a guitar
line full self-assured familiarity and calm.
When I hear it, I experience that feeling that simultaneously makes me
want to sit in my room and write poetry all day and at the same time grow my
hair out and run away forever (which is for me an indicator of great music). Perhaps
this newfound obsession with the Rolling Stones is really just a symptom of
maturity, or of aging, or of on the onset of senility. Whatever it is, I quite
like it, and imagine it will continue—no matter how upset my 17-year-old self
would be if he could see me now.
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