The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [131]
Now, there’s no more Lucifer. There’s no more Prince of Darkness. In the ultimate irony, the Queen made Mick Jagger a Knight.71
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Frenzy
RANDALL E. AUXIER
We’re always having something very funny happen when we start that number.
MICK JAGGER, Altamont, December 6th, 1969
In mid-June 2011 the news is dominated by images of a surprising riot in Vancouver, following their hockey team’s loss to the Boston team in the Stanley Cup finals.
I suppose most people normally think of Canadians as a pretty impassive lot, stoic in the face of disappointment, mild if not really meek. West Coast Canadians are, if anything, even more laid-back than their countrymen, so everyone is taken a little off guard right now. Sort of like some were in the second half of 1969, when the New Yorkers were actually able to behave themselves for a few days in August, but on the peace-love-dope West Coast, right across the Bay from hippie central, the crowd couldn’t make it through a Stones concert without violence and death. The Dionysian frenzy? War? Rape? Murder? It’s just a shot away, you know?
In this case, a photographer snapped a picture of a couple engaged in a passionate kiss while lying in the middle of the street, in the midst of the riot. The picture went viral. I’m sure this will all be soon forgotten, but the photograph captured our notice for a historical moment and it reminds us of something humans have known for as long as we have existed: There is a weird connection between the build-up of group emotion, and sex, and violence. That association has vexed us for a long time, and to associate sex and violence, especially in a public setting, is still a good way to get yourself in trouble with the Man. Strangely, we can deal with violence and sex more easily when they’re individualized and compartmentalized. What’s up with this? And why is the build-up of group emotion so scary and so volatile?
Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself
Before we go any further, I need to make a confession. Brian Jones creeps me out, always has. He still has a weird sort of cult following of people who think he was the real genius, or that The Stones were no good without him, and so on. I certainly did-n’t know him and I really can’t remember him at all (I was eight when he died), but I know that even on the fortieth anniversary of his death when the BBC interviewed Mick and Charlie, they couldn’t come up with any kind words for Brian, and you could see them trying to. But no. He was a bad person. It isn’t polite to speak ill of the dead, but Keith tells stories in his autobiography that leave people shaking their heads.
Brian was violent and cruel, and I fancy I can see that in his eyes when I study the old pictures. When I think of the embodiment of the negative energy the Sixties contained, I think of Brian Jones, and for my money, that’s who Don McLean was really speaking of in the verse of “American Pie” about the disastrous Altamont concert in 1969. I know McLean said that the image in his mind was Mick Jagger, and that Brian had been dead almost four months when the concert happened, but to me, the figure “laughing with delight” at the conflagration of the world was Brian Jones.
If you are one of the Jones minions, please don’t kill me. I’ll recant everything if you’ll just let me live. But I think the dark side of that groovy energy needs a face, and I think Brian is it, and so, what follows is a sort of meditation on what gets sacrificed on the altar of rock’n’roll, when the Dionysian frenzy