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By Root 749 0

goddess, they aren’t quite doing it in the limp-wristed, light-loafered way—and that, friends and neighbors, might just be the key to everything: 1. The Stones don’t hate women, this culture hates women; and 2. the men who call the servants of the goddess “fags” are the ones who built and maintain that misogynistic culture. Even if it’s impossible for a woman to win this struggle, it isn’t exactly easy to be a man who doesn’t buy into all the patriarchal bullshit. But to be secure enough in your (patriarchal) masculinity to challenge the very need for women, and at the same time get all the girls (see Bill Wyman’s records in Stone Alone)? Is it possible that the supposedly macho men are unmanned by this totally twisted way the Stones present themselves? I think maybe so.

I also think that the Dionysian frenzy of the 1960s took a dark turn at just the time when we could no longer absorb the levels of testosterone being publicly exuded. We really needed to find some way out of the cultural prison built by our militarism and fear (and these are different sides of the same coin). Dionysus sprang up. There would have to be sacrifices on the altar of Western manhood. As if the Summer of Love had not already ended in a conflagration in Newark and Detroit (“love” my ass), the next year, 1968, was going to show the true face of the world the manly men had built. By the end of that awful year, over sixteen thousand American troops were dead, along with probably a hundred thousand Vietnamese (whose crime was wanting to govern themselves), and so were Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. It wasn’t possible to ignore this any more. This was not about making pop records anymore. This isn’t Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club, this is a job for their Satanic Majesties. In the face of this melt-down, the Beatles just quit. But the Stones looked the demon square in the eye and guessed its name.

From Woodstock to Altamont

In the disastrous year of 1969, everything pretty much fell apart. The one moment people remember was Woodstock, but that wasn’t the real Dionysian frenzy. That was basically a glorious and well-deserved vacation from the bullshit. The kids of New York (and Boston and Philly) had fought hard, and nobly, against the manly men. But the real thing, the genuine Dionysian frenzy was The Stones’ prophetic tour of that year, ending at Altamont, and ending the Sixties. Everyone knew things would just get worse from there, but a corner had been turned, and unlike the others, the Stones would not fade away. The patriarchy doesn’t give up all at once, but by December of 1969, it was on the run. Brian was gone and the Stones were reborn. I think he probably chose it. As Keith said right after his funeral, he wasn’t going to live to see seventy anyway. He wasn’t the kind of person who can. Empires fall too, and for about the same reasons.

I went to see the Maysles brothers’ documentary Gimme Shelter when it was new. Before that I really had no notion of the early Stones phenomenon, being too young to grasp it until it was really over—although, like so many others my age, they, along with Springsteen, wrote the soundtrack to my own refusal of the patriarchy in the 1970s. But I have to thank my father for taking me to see that movie—rated GP in the antiquated system of the day, meaning I couldn’t have seen it without a parent present. He didn’t know what the movie was about beforehand, only that he had kids on the brink of teenage rebellion and The Rolling Stones were supposed to be cool, so get on board or get run over, you know?

The movie permanently formed my ideas about the Stones and the world. I think that if my pop (who was and is an apologist of the patriarchy if ever there was one), had known what we would see at that movie, he wouldn’t have taken me and my sister. But it was the right thing to do, anyway. We lived in Memphis, one of the epicenters of the general disaster, and it had been a rough couple of years. Things were changing very fast. So he also bought me my first Beatles album, and my first Led Zeppelin