The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [18]
Beginning with Aftermath, we began to see the credit Jagger-Richards after nearly all the songs, and The Stones stepped into the company of the Beatles at that point as creative forces, more than just glitzy personas. That was a huge step into history. It made it obvious then, as now, that these guys intended to say something of their own. If they hadn’t made the move into being songwriters, The Stones would have faded after two or three years, along with many other groups whose names now only show up in trivia questions.
Andrew Oldham, their “producer” is credited with putting Mick and Keith together and insisting they write songs. I would guess that he had an eye for talent, and he had scoped out the situation and saw where the creative energy in the band was. Long before we could tell which of The Stones was Keith, and point him out, Oldham had worked out that the pairing of Mick and Keith was his own personal retirement plan. And maybe he saw even more than that. Who knows? What people saw on stage was a presentation, in highly organized space and for very limited time, of something quite real that was happening in a complex and interesting way back behind the scenes.
But the outcome wasn’t just forty or fifty songs that were works of cultural genius—and with the self-destruction of the fine arts, these songs became works of cultural genius, historically contextualized, since that is all the genius that was left. There were, in addition to the songs, a dozen albums that were works of genius. And there were shows and tours of cultural genius. In the latter category, it is really hard to imagine cultural events that would or could ever top the great tours between Steel Wheels and A Bigger Bang. The Rolling Stones perfected the “tour” as an art form, which wouldn’t even have occurred to me as a possibility, frankly.
Beyond that, we have the personas of Mick and Keith as art forms. Unlike so many of today’s pop icons, who have to reinvent their personas every three years or so (Marilyn to Cher to Madonna, or Michael Jackson, et al.), Mick and Keith each worked on perfecting the one persona they had initiated in 1962, and have found that plumbing the depths of what they really are is better than trying to make up something superficial and new. That “something real” is the way they write the songs, which is the basic building block of the whole shebang. Keith describes this process at the time the band was working on Exile on Main Street, where the twins were writing the material as they were recording it, which they have done many times. People would be coming to the studio, expecting to record, but the songs didn’t exist yet. Mick or Keith might be tempted to panic when they realized they had nothing to offer the other studio performers, who might be expecting ready-made material straight from the gods, when in reality it could come only from Mick and Keith. But the twins knew they could come up with something new every day or two—even if it was just the bare bones of a riff, it would be something to go on. And as the band tried to shape this elemental idea, the song would just fall into place:
Once you’re on a roll with the first few chords, the first idea of the rhythm, you can figure out other things, like does it need a bridge in the middle, later. It was living on a knife edge as far as that’s concerned. There was no preparation…. The idea is to make the bare bones of a riff, snap the drums in and see what happens. It was the immediacy of it that in retrospect made it even more interesting. There was no