The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [133]
No matter what the reason, a lot of people find it upsetting when accepted standards of public behavior (aesthetic or moral) begin to be strained by collective human emotions. That’s true at a soccer match just as it is at a Stones concert, but somehow, conventional people are willing to make some room in their tiny hearts for a good sports-brawl, even if people die, in ways they won’t for what happens at a Stones show gone bad. In every case where this amazing mass emotion is released, there is this moment, I think, when it seems that all order has disappeared and we come face to face with, with … I don’t know, whatever it is “we” are without that imposed order. We usually don’t like what we see, or at least some people don’t, and those of us who do aren’t making any important decisions in the world. The revelers also have difficulty remembering what happened when it’s all over. The riot doesn’t have enough structure to hang a memory on.
The early Stones concerts in Britain were the scene of bedlam. I can barely imagine being there. There were girls screaming, and always a few angry rednecks calling our boys faggots, and before you know it, Keith kicks some guy in the face and it’s lucky nobody is killed. Here is what he says, in part, about onesuch:
Maybe if we’d been wearing our houndstooth jackets and looking like little dolls we wouldn’t have outraged the males in the audience at the Wisbech Corn Exchange…. And a riot was started because the local yokels, the boys, couldn’t stand the fact that all of their chicks were gawping and blowing themselves out about this bunch of fags, as far as they were concerned, from London…. That was a good riot, which we were lucky to escape from. (Life, p. 131 )
More in a minute about this special sort of “fags.” The point is that the riots at the Stones’ shows were a little different from what surrounded the Beatles. It came to the point that almost every Stones concert led to some sort of disturbance that took a toll on property and persons.
The Riot Act wasn’t actually repealed in Britain until 1973, though its last “public reading” was in 1920. But I’m guessing that at least a few among the British establishment might have been happy to dust it off and try it out in 1963–65—for the Stones, not the Beatles. With the Fab Four, one didn’t get the same sense of impending danger. Beatlemania wasn’t much different than the fuss over Sinatra and then Elvis. When The Stones showed up, somehow things turned darker and got ratcheted up a notch or two. So, on the one hand, The Stones per se do seem to make a difference in what happens. The scary tone of violence seems to form itself around the sounds and the whole atmosphere of The Stones. It isn’t just female lust. It harbors violence.
A Little Help from Their Friends?
It’s probably a good thing that our favorite fellows headed to the USA when they did. The UK needed a rest. On their first US tour, no one in America knew who The Stones were, so the girls didn’t scream and the boys didn’t see the need to take any swings at anybody—even in Texas, where a long-hair limey might get a pop on the snout just for crossing the state line. Only at the end of that tour, when manager Andrew Oldham placed some teeny-bopper plants among the New York audience, did the Americans get the idea that this was supposed to be a frenzy. So on the other hand (and there’s always another hand), we can see it wasn’t the music alone that was causing the riots, or even The Stones, per se. They needed a little help from their friends, a context and a clue to tell everybody this was a moment