Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [64]
I guess I just feel that circumstances effectively disrupted that certain aura of spiritual intimacy represented by the comment of my friend at the ‘64 concert, and even by meeting friends after the ‘69 shows. The Stones were with us even after we went home.
I don’t feel snubbed because Mick Jagger didn’t call me up the minute he hit America, to thank me for my Exile review. It's just that even though I don’t exactly have any illusions to be destroyed anymore—even illusions about the Stones being inhuman manipulators with evil ends—I’m happy with what illusions I do have. You probably are, too.
So this piece is dedicated to all the people who didn’t see the Stones this time, from one who excluded himself for no particular reason, but wouldn’t worry too much about being excluded anyway.
Creem, January 1973
8Arthur Bremer was the misfit who nearly succeeded in assassinating Alabama governor George Wallace during his surprisingly strong run for the Presidency in 1972, and for a while thus stood as a symbol for crackpots of all stripes.
1973 Nervous Breakdown:
The Ol’ Fey Outlaws
Ain’t What They Used to Be—
Are You?
Those poor bastards. I’m talking about the Stones, of course. They’ve got problems aplenty these days, and it's really not their fault, so we should pat ‘em on the back and give ‘em a helping hand, maybe with a tablet of speed in it to get their next album or at least their current spirits out of the doldrums.
You may think I’m being condescending, but I’m not. The Stones are popstars, light years from where you and I sit in stucco puzzling out whether Goat's Head Soup is their latest triumph or the epitaph of old men or just… the Stones can still put us through those kinds of changes, like when so many people gave months to the challenge of Exile on Main Street, and came up winners because it paid off so monolithically
The only question remaining in this cozy situation, then, is:
Q: What if the Stones no longer pay off?
A #1: You desert ‘em. After all, they’re justa buncha old men.
A #2: What kind of friend are you? You grew up with these cats! Christ, are there no values left in this lousy culchuh?
What's wrong with the Stones, you say? Oh, honey. This really can’t be the end, more like one of those situations where the whole enterprise, in spite of all nostalgic emotionalism, just seems to be unreeling out into space somewhere like a kite lost in spring. And we’re powerless to stop it.
The Stones are getting flaky; that much is obvious to anyone who's listened to their last couple of albums or observed them recently. How much you may like their recent music is irrelevant—it's the mood and the manifest state of the nerve that counts.
Summer before last the Stones did their biggest U.S. tour ever. Unlike ‘69, everything was tightly arranged with no room for Alta-monts or anything beyond minor antler-buttings. But there was something about it. You just had to look at the pictures in Life magazine or anywhere else to know that the Stones were getting a little dazed.
Mick's dancing was as urgent as ever—maybe more so, because these days the live Stones seem to carry a last-ditch mood of amped-up desperation that they saved for pure effect in looser times. In 1969, Rolling Stone captioned a tour shot with something like: “You could see the evidence of years in Mick's face.”
Yeah, coy minco dervish in Uncle Sam hat. He was more cute than dangerous, and the Stones didn’t seem particularly concerned about anything but a good time until those grinding too-late moments at Altamont, where Mick's utter impotence in the face of the forces he’d unleashed—it was all too obvious: “ Broothers and siisters,” he pleaded in a voice as shrill and thin as Chip ‘n’ Dale, “let's all pleeeeuhze just cool out….”
Like Betty Boop trying to quell a race riot. What