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By Root 647 0

body all of our sins and somehow rising from the dead every night at show time, not redeemed, but certainly ready to party. Both Mick and Keith actually lived the sort of life we could barely imagine—and they survived when we were all certain they’d never grow old. Keith’s talent for suffering, and for rejecting the very society Mick courted, was every bit as important as Mick’s public climbing. It kept things grounded and kept them real. The saviors of rock’n’roll have to be real and they also have to be able to get behind the gilded doors in order to rip the joint.

I’m not saying we quite have the needed historical distance to begin drawing conclusions, but we wouldn’t have been wondering about the Glimmer Twins twenty years ago like we do now, because so much of Keith’s personality has begun bubbling to the surface. And there is something about the way that Johnny Depp, an artist everyone takes seriously, captured what we hadn’t quite managed to put our fingers on. He modeled the character of Jack Sparrow—the look, the physical movements and gestures, even the accent—on Keith Richards. How could we have missed this? Keith is a sort of pirate, and that’s what we had always responded to in his Stones persona. Having been shown Keith in a two-dimensional form, by Johnny Depp, we began to become more aware that this guy really had to be something else, even to have survived. It dawned on us how smart he must be, too, in spite of his earthy vocabulary. I’ve never met a truly good artist who was anything less than killer smart, and Mick and Keith both have that.

Keith is now pretty much out of Mick’s shadow these days. His autobiography has surprised the world. We didn’t really expect something so insightful, even intellectual. It is so well written that I have to wonder how much is Keith and how much is James Fox. On the other hand, I now realize I should have been wondering about the Jagger-Richards pair long ago, and I can see that I never tended to think of Keith as a creative force until Johnny Depp drew my attention in that direction. I was told by those wiser than I to pay attention to Keith, long ago, and I tried, but I now see how far behind the curve I was. It’s a good thing I don’t agree with Hegel about history. If he was right, I’d be totally screwed. I can’t even figure out what has already happened, let alone what’s going on now or coming next.

Anyhow, it’s now pretty clear that the shadow Mick was casting, which was large, was also part of the total package. It wasn’t important that the public know how the art was being made, and in a way, it was actually more important that we not know. Some of The Stones’ mystique would disappear if we knew too much about the nuts and bolts. That Stones mystique is like the secret of the varnish on a Stradivarius violin. It may or may not really make the thing good, but it makes us wonder, and that’s more important. I had the strange fortune to learn from my college roommate, who later became one of the sound crew for The Stones for the Steel Wheels tour, how very un-mysterious it all is. “All business,” he reported to me some twenty years ago. “It’s a show and these guys are businessmen.” That sort of burst the bubble, but what did I expect? It’s art, and this art is about creating illusions—that’s what Langer says—and in this case, where the artist is an all-pervading public persona, it’s about creating that illusion, a public perception, while disguising the mundane realities is as much a part of the arts as is the finish on a violin.

The Songs

But there has to be something real in the illusion, and in the case of The Stones, it’s the songs that are real, which is to say, the songs are the primary illusions that give life to the rest of it. Your life is not a song, and neither is anyone else’s. Rather, the songs symbolize in an artistic work, how it feels to be living our lives in our times. In another essay for this volume I talked about how the rhythm section contributes to the aesthetic value of The Stones’ music, and I avoided talking about songwriting there