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Peace, Peace! He is not dead, he doth not sleep—

He has awakened from the dream of life—

’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep

With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife

Invulnerable nothings.—We decay

Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief

Convulse us and consume us day by day,

And cold hopes swarm like warms within our living clay.

Jagger then skipped to Stanza 52:

The one remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die,

If thou wouldst be that which thou dost seek! 17

Unless we strive to make something of ourselves, Jagger, Shelley, and Nietzsche seem to be agreeing, we will be nothing more than “corpses,” consumed by our “fear and grief.” We must instead seek sublime beauty in a mortal life that shines brilliantly as something made, a work of art, like a “dome of many-coloured glass.”

Appreciating those among us who can give themselves over to such a vision, making art out of their lives, seems more a matter of wild exuberance rather than a matter of the self-absorbed vanity. They deserve to have a chapter about them.

II

A Rolling Stone Gathers No Illusions

5

The Head and the Groin of Rock

JOHN HUSS

Keith Richards once quipped: “the minute rock’n’roll reaches the head, forget it. Rock’n’roll starts from the neck down.” He could just as well have said “from the waist down.” Keith clearly meant to keep rock’n’roll’s primal and visceral appeal from being contaminated by—or even co-opted by—headier, brainier sensibilities.

After all, it’s only rock’n’roll. No matter how much we like it, it’s not going to come to our notional rescue. Rock’n’roll, especially in a live setting, is to be felt, not pondered. And from the context of Keith’s remark (he was justifying his opposition to The Stones’ playing the 1985 benefit concert Live Aid, where by the way he and Ron Wood eventually did perform, backing up Bob Dylan), he clearly sought to go beyond merely exalting rock’s corporeality. He wanted to stake out a noncognitive, morality-free zone for rock’n’roll music far away from entangling alliances with the likes of “No Nukes” and “Rock Against Racism.”

“Nukes may obsess your brain,” he explained, “but they don’t obsess your crotch. Rock’n’roll, it’s a few moments when you can forget about nukes and racism and all the other evils God’s kindly thrown upon us” (Victor Bokris, Keith Richards: The Biography, Da Capo, p. 344).

To Riff or Not to Riff

Richards’s remark calls to mind the famous distinction between “higher” and “lower” pleasures, with rock’n’roll ranked among the lower, alongside other mindless animal appetites such as eating and sex (let’s not get started on drugs). The distinction was famously drawn by British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) in his 1861 essay “Utilitarianism.” Mill was taking issue with English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), whose views he otherwise endorsed and defended.

Considering different sources of pleasure, Bentham had claimed that “Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin [a simple parlor game] is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.” In doing so, Bentham meant to do away with centuries of philosophical wrangling over the role of pleasure in human life. Is pleasure, as Bentham believed, the only state valuable in and of itself? Is its opposite, pain, the only intrinsic bad? Is pleasure more of an activity, as in “name your pleasure” ? Is pleasure simply the by-product of a life whose sources of happiness lay elsewhere? Or is it just one among many components—including pain—of a rich, full life? The biggest philosophical question had always been whether pleasure is the ultimate intrinsic good to which all other good things in human life could be reduced.

Bentham’s take on all this was simple. When all preconceptions