Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [68]
So what I say is fuck ‘em. On September 28th of this year, Jagger sang “Angie” in heavy makeup and leather boy drag on the ABC-TV/ Don Kirshner Midnight Special. The night before, Mickey Rooney and Milton Berle sang some old musical comedy flytrap about what a hunk o’ man Flo Ziegfeld was, and it was far more transsexually elaborate. Berle's been doing this schtick for twenty years and Mick (in spite of the “Have You See Your Mother” jacket foreplay, which was more of a joke than a move) had to wait for Alice Cooper and Bowie to make it all right. The Stones had class once, why are they trying so hard now to retain a tooth-hold of their outrageousness by doing things they don’t need to do at all? When what really counts, the music, is finally beginning to turn bland.
There's no point in blaming them, though. They’re helpless. In the past ten years the Rolling Stones created an enormous situation in which they’re just a factor now. They’re ironic victims of the endless new world which it was their triumph to create, because their efforts helped make it possible for hordes of other hopefuls to move into a relatively vacant atmosphere of electricity, expectation, and money. Flooding the market. Which is where both we and the Stones stand right now; up to our asses in brackish water.
When it gets like that, you’ve got to maintain a standard of surpassing brilliance just to keep up with yourself, even if the balance of your past work wasn’t that brilliant. Because by the cumulative eminence of your enormous pile of past accomplishments and the mere fact that you have managed to sustain, you have set an impossible standard which you’ve gotta struggle constantly to meet if only to keep yourself from being drowned in all the scunge passing through. Like the New York Dolls—new Stones album's gotta be a classic or all the so-called arbiters of taste will jump on it and proclaim the Stones senile has-beens and the Dolls the new true mania. Not that that matters at all, but these little clamors mount up, and every one drains a little bit of energy and momentum from the Stones.
Another danger is that no matter how excellent you continue to be, people will just get bored with you. Not anybody's fault particularly. But the Rolling Stones, my god, how many different ways can you recycle Chuck Berry riffs? How many different phrases can you use to talk about balling before you have to resort to outright grossness? And when you reach that point (which means you have begun to lose the battle), how long do you think you will last trying to come up with new variations in grossness and obscenity until it becomes merely depressing? There's only so much mung to go around, and most artists do their best work in a very compressed period of three to five years or at most ten years. The Rolling Stones lasting twenty, thirty years—what a stupid idea that would be. Nobody lasts that long—very few novelists; the greatest directors don’t turn out classic movies over a forty-year period. So as the ideas peter down the general body of personal and artistic interest in the creators has gotta wane.
In other words, why don’t you guys go fertilize a forest?
Q: What can you say now that hasn’t been said yet about the Rolling Stones?
A: Turn on the radio. Where you’ll hear a rather raggedly sung ballad that grows on you, and is certifiably the best song on Goat's Head Soup.
Q: Still, why jump right on a ballad for the first time in history?
A: Because none of the fast songs are hit singles. They’re not much of anything, in fact, except unlistenable on a nice, forgettably nonof-fensive label.
There is a sadness about the Stones now, because they amount to such an enormous “So what?” The sadness comes when you measure not just one album, but the whole sense they’re putting across now against what they once meant.
They were suppliers of context: a friend once said when I played the Yardbirds for him that, “It sounds like they just sat down and said, ‘Okay, you mothas, here's what you’re going to be