Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [69]
The Stones were saying the same thing in “Honky Tonk Women,” and “Brown Sugar,” and “Sympathy for the Devil.” They provided a full arsenal for lesser bands to loot at will: riffs, melodies, attitudes, approaches to lyrics, concepts in packaging and even clothes and haircuts. So in a sense they held the entire music industry together, because without at least one band charting out the new territory there's no place for the hype to go.
Somebody's gotta tell people what they’re gonna do tomorrow, or they may not even get out of bed. It's unfortunate, but that's the way it is. Every day a new album comes out by a new band from England or L.A. or anywhere and the first song's a direct “Honky Tonk Women” steal, with Allman Brothers or Winwood or some other vocal style overlaid. Second song's a steal of Lou Reed's “Sweet Jane,” combined with Stones guitar moves. Etc.
These records keep piling up, and most of them are garbage, but the point is that somebody's gonna have to start providing all these brainless ditzels with some new ideas pretty soon or the whole thing's gonna break down! How many times can you recycle “Honky Tonk Women”? Just because the Stones have abdicated their responsibilities is no reason we have to sit still for this shit!
Because there is just literally nothing new happening. Bowie is a style collector with almost no ideas of his own, Reed's basically just reworking his old Velvets ideas, people like Elton John are reaching back into nostalgia but that's a blind alley, and everybody else is playing the blues.
So unless we get the Rolling Stones off their asses IT's THE END OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL! I’d like to just flip ‘em the bird, because I’m mad at
‘em, but unfortunately I’m not in a position to do that and neither are you. We are in a position to do absolutely nothing but go get these sag-gin’ junked-up jerks and punch ‘em up straight again or not only will there be no more Rolling Stones records, there won’t be any New York Dolls or Lynyrd Skynyrd records to flush all those hot Stones ideas away. There won’t be nuttin’!
So I hereby issue the Rolling Stones a challenge on behalf of myself, Creem magazine, and yourself if you so desire. I challenge those lazy, sniveling, winded mothermissers to PRODUCE or mark off the days till their next American tour ‘cause we’re gonna bounce ‘em off the walls of every arena in the Western Hemisphere!
Creem, December 1973
It's Only
the Rolling Stones
The rut to which we have all been habituated: we’ve been sitting around half a year muttering and we know it's time for that Stones single and album that’ll save our airwaves and our summer and our souls and our faltering faith. And yet we wait each year less tenter-hooked because we’re only pragmatic, colluding with the inevitability of erosion. So when the single comes out it falls way short of the heroism that was ever only intermittently there, and satisfies our fidgety compulsion to write ‘em off once and for all. Born to lose and hell Brian didn’t even have the sense to die on the highway.
Yep, here they are again, cinemarketing their dubious magic more shamelessly than Mad Dogs & Englishmen, and what do we snap on the dial but this crunchy little number which sounds at first like something Leon Russell might have concocted for T. Rex. Jagger's voice is more strained and thin and mannered than ever, Keith (hope for some reason) is upchucking his usuals with scant fervor, and the whole mess drones on twice too long but becomes a hit anyway because there's nothing else on the radio. And since there's nothing else in the LP racks but Aerosmith plodders like Bad Company, we buy the single. Home, headphones, and second playing we begin to catch a familiar, belabored yet somehow still-moving last-gasp:
If I could stick a knife in my heart
Commit suicide right on the stage
Would it be enough for your teenage lust
Would it help to ease the pain
Ease your brain
Pretty good, an MC5 reference and Iggy prophecy in the same stanza. Meanwhile you pin him in white pantaloons schmucking