• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

‘Womanizer’ Mick, the ‘cold hard-nosed businessman’

‘Homebody’ Charlie, the ‘stoical drummer’ (well, maybe this one is true)

‘Bum note’ Ronnie, the ‘chronic boozer’ whose marriage and home life is in a shambles

‘Creative’ Brian, his genius destroyed by drugs and Mick and Keith’s lock on songwriting in The Stones

‘Innocent’ Mick Taylor, lucky to have left The Stones alive

‘Sex-obsessed’ Bill Wyman, the quiet, frustrated bass player who is also lucky to have left The Stones alive

The trouble with celebrity profiling like this is that it’s false. A name, label, or stereotype can never capture the essence of a person. In my experience, human beings simply overflow any and all stereotyping. Yet, in the popular mind, stereotypes stick like glue and they’re permanent. Once a celebrity has been slotted into a stereotype, it’s virtually impossible for that celebrity to lose it. Conversion to an ultraconservative religion might make some difference, but not necessarily.

True, The Stones have profited greatly from ‘celebrity profiling’ over the years. Andrew Loog Oldham’s simple maxim, “there is no such thing as bad press” has served them well. Near the beginning, there was the ‘urinating in public’ incident ; then, the various drug busts, the ‘sex scandals’ (Marianne Faithfull and the Mars bar) and deaths (especially those of Brian Jones and Gram Parsons), marriage breakups and affairs, the falling out of trees and the defying anti-smoking laws while playing on stage (Ron and Keith). These ‘rebels’ are master manipulators of ‘celebrity profiling’. They always manage to keep their names in the news. Remember the hubbub created a few years ago when Keith casually mentioned to a reporter that he had snorted his father’s cremated ashes?

But celebrity profiling diminishes our understanding of The Stones, especially from a philosophical point of view. Even some academic philosophers are among those who believe the conclusions of ‘celebrity profiling’ and dismiss The Stones and their music out of hand as mere entertainment and nothing more. Upon learning that I was writing about The Rolling Stones one of my colleagues said to me, “Don’t you think it’s about time those old druggies just gave up? They haven’t done anything worth listening to for years.” Clearly, my colleague hadn’t actually listened to a recent Stones album, like Voodoo Lounge, Bridges to Babylon, or A Bigger Bang. And, I suspect, all the celebrity profiling of The Stones obscured for him the fact that The Stones are not just a studio band. For me and most Stones fans, their true excellence comes in their live performance.

The Stones, more than another band of which I am aware, use studio recordings only as templates for playing live. They never play a song exactly the same way twice. They revel in a loose, improvisional style which flesh out a song’s framework in new, sometimes unexpected ways. Even old warhorses like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” or “Brown Sugar” are like gifts from the band to their fans who open them up by listening closely and being surprised by what they find inside. Their songs have plenty of creative space for further fine tuning and variation. Consequently, live performances of songs by The Stones are usually very exciting, their loose improvisational style often teetering between total disaster and rock’n’roll perfection. Keith once said that if he was jumping around on stage, either things were going extremely well or they weren’t going well at all. The beauty of it all is that it’s hard to tell the difference.

My Philosophical Experiment

Ball of Fire is a 1941 comedy starring Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper. The main action takes place in the home of a group of professors researching and updating an encyclopedia. Gary Cooper plays a professor studying contemporary slang. Barbara Stanwyck plays a gangster’s moll, who knows too much and ends up hiding out from both the police and the gangsters in the home of the professors.

One day, Stanwyck walks in on a group of the professors researching