Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [66]
He looked like everything dark and tragic that the Stones trip had ever threatened: soul flattened, skin sallow, bone scraped, and behind the reflector-shaded eyes the suggestion of a diseased intelligence too cancerous to spit imprecations anymore. Fucked up. It was beautiful. Junk bust in France, passport miasma, more rumors: disciplined self-erosion, on for six months, then abrupt shutoff for six months, then back. Lovers succumbed; they didn’t have that much control. Neither did Charlie Parker. They all die sooner or later, and it's always sooner.
You can say that all this text amounts to is a romanticization of the ugliest sort of unsupported myths. But that was always what the Stones were supremely good for. And maybe it won’t matter for any of us out here who just live for a record, a tour. Because the legal-governmental-immigration-chemical tangle grinds on, and if he sticks around Keith may not be able to leave his own block without running headfirst into the sort of authority which has made sporadic and often amusing attempts to close in on the Stones while waiting for something like this for years. Only too glad to shut you down, jive boy. Stay in your room and run the distillate of your not aborted but rather overfulfilled, exploded potentials for the rest of your life … so if he can’t tour, and Ron Wood is in … maybe he doesn’t play much guitar onstage anymore, and sure Ron Wood's a great chunky chording boyo from the pubs, but Ron Wood is not Keith Richards, nor are the Stones anything but disintegrating shards of past glory without Keith standing there. I don’t even care whether he's awake or not. Prop him up. But don’t muddy the line up any more than it's been already.
On the other hand, it has also been suggested that the reason the Stones are touring so extensively now is that they’re planning to break up soon, soon as they can get out after wringing a few more big bills from it. They would never say that, but they emphatically deny Keith's departure: “It wouldn’t be the Rolling Stones without Keith Richards.” Which everybody knows. That's why the atmosphere is getting so grim.
The others, good as they play, look more like sessionmen all the time. Even ugliness only goes so far.
They went home then, in the fall, and you read the stories in every magazine, and they were all terrible. The stuff filtering back through the fields of rusted wire was much better. Like Keith at the Jamaica Goat's Head Soup sessions: according to a friend, wiped so far off the map that he picked up a bass and began trying to play a lead guitar line through it for a take. And was so gone, supposedly, that he kept on for 13 minutes before he realized he had the wrong instrument.
It was funny, and it was hearsay, and the rumor mills and professional scenemakers banter over lives: an English trade held a music biz poll asking who would be the next rock person to die. Keith came in first. Lou Reed was second. Eric Clapton placed. Mick missed out. Too bad. I think I might like him better now if he was in trouble. He seems too smug, or perhaps it's just the rational indifference of a realist, and I don’t like his wife. Rumors of rock couples in elegant swaps didn’t help the quease. You always knew, really, that the predilections of certain of your heroes were exactly what you didn’t want to think they were when you were in school. “Memo from Turner” was cool, anyway—it appealed to your vicarious need for dips into sleaze, as well as (on a slightly different level) to the defensively twisted and even more amoral desire to kick the cat's face in even as you baited him into his groveling rodent hardon. Great macho nihilism.
But now Jagger was overstepping the tolerance of even us television sleazoids. Not by his preferences in flesh, but the