The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [5]
Was Mick’s reply another put on? Another performance? Keith would probably insist it was, but then again he and Mick don’t always agree. On this point, the writers in this book step in. Obviously, and even despite their Sgt. Pepper-ish explorations of the late Sixties (such as “2000 Light Years from Home”) The Stones are not philosophers grappling with the meaning of life or existence in terms that are familiar from Philosophy 101 or even Dark Side of the Moon. But while Keith may be right that rock “starts from the neck down,” Mick was right to suggest that it doesn’t always stay there. It didn’t for The Stones. Many of their best songs and albums, the ones that established them as a cultural force to rival The Beatles, moved up into philosophical territory of one kind or another. Think of the politics in “Street Fighting Man,” “Sweet Black Angel” and “Sweet Neo Con,” or the existentialism buried in “Paint it, Black,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown” (a song which Pink Floyd, and certainly Syd Barrett, could have written). And what about “Sympathy for the Devil” that perfectly marries Keith’s neck-down energy to Mick’s literary sensibilities? This is no longer just about shaking your hips or getting your rocks off. It’s about the arc and meaning of human history, and Mick’s cheeky but dead-serious suggestion that everything you were taught about the metaphysics of evil in Christianity is mistaken.
Still, the bulk of The Stones’ songs, and some of their best, are simply about people, relationships, romance, and sex. They mean just to entertain, and not to provoke or shock their listeners. But even then, we’d be wrong to think there is nothing at all of neck-up importance. Think again of that concert in Prague shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and imagine telling those Czech citizens that The Rolling Stones are mere entertainers, on a par with the entertainers and folk-heros of whom Moscow approved. They’d look at you like they’d just seen Brian Jones. While the aura of glamour and celebrity may have obscured it in the West, in the Soviet-controlled East The Stone’s individualism, creativity, iconoclasm—their celebration of the pursuit of “satisfaction”—were marks of a dangerous liberal philosophy from which Moscow intended to protect its satellites with radio-jamming antennas and, if necessary, guns and tanks.
Those first chords of “Start Me Up” that night were about much more than sparks flying between a guy and a girl. These were sparks of a freedom that would allow a band like The Stones to play in public and allow people to buy their records and listen to them as much as they want, even if they think it’s only Rock and Roll. That night The Stones were a two-thousand-year echo of Socrates in Greece, condemned to death for teaching and discussing unpopular ideas and reaching unpopular conclusions. Socrates’s revenge, despite his drinking the hemlock, was his reputation and his influence that long outlasted the regime that killed him.
The Stones and their fans had similarly outlasted their oppressors. “From that point on,” Freisler wrote about his father, sobbing with joy after the last encore, “no one would tell him how he should think, how he should feel. He had seen The Rolling Stones with his own eyes. And it felt so good.” Some satisfaction, at last.
I
One Thought (to the Body)
1
The Glimmer Twins
RANDALL E. AUXIER
Sometimes it seems ordained by the gods that certain pairs of people just have to go through the proverbial threescore and ten together, the whole damn thing. You know what I’m talking about because you’ve known people, especially certain couples, who play in the sandbox, date, marry, divorce, remarry, divorce again, and still end up together. Full disengagement isn’t among the options, even when they no longer want