The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [6]
The fact that they were a Stone’s throw from each other in the unassuming burb of Dartford, and schoolmates (if not quite friends) even before they hooked up in their teens, adds a bit of romance to our way of imagining their destiny. That also isn’t a bad place to start wondering. It invites speculation, for instance, on what might have been if they had been on different buses on a particular day (the point at which the collaboration really began). The world with no Rolling Stones? How could that be, and how far-reaching the consequences? I don’t know about you, but I can’t easily work out how my own life would be different with no Stones. They have been so pervasive as a presence for so long, supplying the soundtrack of my entire life and probably yours too, well, I just don’t know. Many of my ideas, especially about rock music, but about a full range of aesthetic topics, used The Stones as a model. Anyway, I don’t think I can quite believe in destiny, but cosmic entanglement I have seen first hand. So it’s hard to grasp how long the Jagger-Richards tentacles might be, but hardly any part of the world is wholly out of the reach of their collaboration.
When it comes to Mick and Keith, on the one hand, it seems sort of inevitable that two kids with such similar drives and musical tastes, and occupying almost the same space, would eventually hook up, but meeting isn’t quite enough. The circumstances of meeting needed to be such as to open rather than close the doors. Earlier encounters between Jagger and Richards had failed to produce that “moment of recognition.” In the days before The Stones formed, any number of events might have taken them in different directions. And so, in that light, it all seems quite evitable. (My computer actually recognizes that word, so I am deprived of my snarky moment of creative rebellion by the Microsoft Corporation; maybe some things are evitable, but not Microsoft, I add chalantly.)
Pretty Pairs
What makes this more than a matter of idle curiosity is that just this entangled duo turned out to be the Glimmer Twins, the most culturally important genuine collaboration in music in the second half of the twentieth century. Lennon and McCartney didn’t really collaborate on their songwriting—more of a corporation there than a co-operation, a good business deal. We could certainly take The Beatles as a whole to be a crucial collaboration, but they were not entangled for life, and at the core of that whole effort, John and Paul were mostly writing their songs individually. It’s different from the Mick-and-Keith nexus. The kind of creative collaboration that intrigues me goes all the way down and all the way up, which includes dipping into the ether and pulling out the songs together, not just individually, then taking whatever is found forward into recording, performance, and through decades of response and repetition. A song can’t “exist” more completely than do some of the Jagger-Richards classics.
When a full-bodied collaboration comes up in the domain of music, at least during the brief 120 years since the “song” became the dominant musical unit, we usually find that one half of the pair writes the music, the other writes the lyrics. The Gershwins, Rodgers-Hart (later Hammerstein), Lerner-Loewe, and, from a later day, John-Taupin or even Garcia-Hunter would be the other pairs one might mention. But fewer were full collaborations, with both members contributing both lyrics and music, and also taking the music from bottom to top. Page-Plant and Waters-Gilmour come to mind along with the Glimmer Twins as partners who also made a living sharing the stage, presenting what they had created. And these collaborations were more than songwriting, entering into every phase of the creation of commercial music.