The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [24]
Who really killed the Sixties? It may just have been you and me.
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The Beggar’s Genius
KEEGAN GOODMAN
The sexiest song on The Rolling Stones’ 1968 album Beggars Banquet has got to be “Parachute Woman.” The song opens with Keith Richards delivering a standard blues lick on the acoustic guitar. Two bars later the snare, electric guitar (also played by Keith, at least on the album), and bass have joined in. Then Jagger’s vocals, mumbled, coarse. Its allure is its indecipherability, its attitude of refusal to be clear, its license to be an instrument or sound among the others. The song was recorded on cassette and double tracked. The thin tape does what it can to hold all this sprawling roughness. The result is a track that is not merely unpolished—it’s dirty and flagrant.
That immediacy fits the content, too. Our pleasure is wrapped up in the familiarity of the standard blues rhythm, in the almost immaterial electric guitars haunting the edge of the tape and the understated percussion. Jagger’s pleasure is likewise wrapped up in the ease of song, as he tells us that his “heavy throbber’s itching just to lay a solid rhythm down.” The song has a job to do.
The job, of course, is getting the singer laid. “Parachute Woman,” the singer pleads, “won’t you land on me tonight?” Keith’s guitar, Charlie Watts’s drum, Wyman’s faint upright bass, Brian’s harmonica—all this music also wants to “lay a solid rhythm down,” but not because any of The Stones are particularly concerned about Mick’s sex life. Maybe it’s as simple as this: they are making a rock’n’roll song, and a rock’n’roll song does not need ornament or innovation.
This is why “Parachute Woman” speaks against a popular view of art, that it works by adding something new to the tradition that it comes from. Is the pleasure we experience in “Parachute Woman” explained by the newness of the song or its elements? It’s an original song, in the commonplace sense of the word. The credits name Keith Richards and Mick Jagger as the authors, and the musical parts, however homespun, were thought up by the rest of the band. But can we really call it new without trivializing our sense of newness? The rhythm guitar, the harmonica parts—these do not diverge in any important way from what a music historian would recognize as the song’s lineage. In the chord progression, there is no fooling around with clever harmonic surprises that The Beatles, the anti-Stones, liked so much (think: “Good Day Sunshine”).
There’s nothing unexpected in “Parachute Woman.” Even the lyrics, which are so wonderfully debauched, are just Mick Jagger’s take on generic blues and not some innovation or new style of music. The image of the parachute woman landing is a little strange, but compared to The Beatles’ trim little tunes about colorful submarines and fields of fruit, it’s earthbound and ordinary. So “Parachute Woman” is an original song in only the most superficial sense. We would have a hard time saying what it adds to its own past. I like it for other reasons. In fact, I like it because it doesn’t even try to add anything new.
As I Watch You Leaving Me, You Pack My Peace of Mind
Repeating the past is not as simple as it seems. The boys running the rock’n’roll circus knew this, and I think this knowledge stirs some of the feeling in another song on Beggars Banquet, “No Expectations.” In this song, the singer asks to be taken to the station and put on a train. Things have ended badly, and he “has no expectations to pass through here again.” Fortunes—both in love and money—have been gained and lost, and never in his “sweet short life,” has he felt