The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [19]
The secret, then, to the creative power of the Glimmer Twins is that the dialectic between Mick and Keith just builds in its tension until Charlie kicks in. I don’t mean to pull a cheap one on you, but the twins aren’t enough by themselves to pull off what The Stones did. It would be cheating to end the chapter this way, except that you can keep reading and I’ll try to explain in another chapter how this rhythm section of The Stones channels the creative energy to ground and makes it rock. The works of art in question originate with Keith and Mick, but their genius lies beyond the dialectic and in the group. What Mick is to Keith, or what Keith is to Mick, is the left and right ventricles of the heart of rock’n’roll, exchanging blood between sixty and 160 times a minute, but the body that dances to that beat is the band.
2
My Dinner with Mick
JERE SURBER
When the Stones played Denver in the early 1980s, a local Moroccan restaurant hosted an after-hours post-concert dinner for the band. I knew the owner of the restaurant and he invited me. Completely buying into the public image of the Stones as rock’s original ‘bad boys,’ I expected that there would be an orgy of fawning groupies, raucous and rude behavior, alcohol and drugs in abundance maybe a fight or two. It turned out that my expectations could not have been more off-base.
Of The Stones, only Keith and Mick attended. Keith sat at the other end of the table, and he seemed to mumble a lot in his heavy accent. He just seemed tired. But both Mick and Keith were very polite (in a rather ‘British’ sort of way, it struck me) and dinner came off entirely without incident (and as for groupies, Keith and Mick were accompanied only by a few managers, road staff, and local promoters). Now I don’t remember all the details of the conversation I had with Mick, but it struck me that offstage he was exactly what you would expect of a middle-class lad who had attended good English schools and studied at the prestigious London School of Economics. He was slightly reserved, thoughtful, considerate, witty, and seemed quite interested in my work as a philosophy teacher. He had interesting things to say about various types of music, both as art and, especially, as business. And, of course, he had some entertaining ‘stories from the road’ to share.
Ever since, I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around these different Mick Jaggers—the one I met and talked to at this dinner, the rooster-like frontman for the world’s greatest rock band and all that they symbolically represent (groupies and drugs, again), and the “Mr. Jagger” (as the local concert promoters called him) revered as one of the must successful businessmen in rock. Some of the puzzle pieces fit, since money, drugs, and groupies often go hand in hand. But I remain puzzled about the violence that had long become associated with rock and, through Altamont, with The Stones themselves. How could a ‘nice bloke’ like Mick be at home in a rock’n’roll culture that was so often black, blue, and bloody?
The Death of the Woodstock Nation
Altamont, of course, was a bad scene. On December 6th, 1969, only four months after the birth of the Woodstock Nation with its credo of Peace and Love, the Rolling Stones played the closing set of the Altamont Speedway Free Festival. Originally planned to be “Woodstock West,” the concert was a fiasco from the beginning. It was moved from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park to the Sears Point Raceway, and then again, at the last minute, to the Altamont Speedway, a venue that lacked most of the basic amenities required for 300,000 festivarians, including trained security personnel, enough toilets, and adequate water supplies. Concertgoers remembered the vibe as being ‘ugly,’ with crushes