The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [67]
Who Could Hang a Name on You?
So that is how you find a groove again, but discovering a groove is a different deal. That is the promethean moment in rock-’n’roll. Truly novel grooves are out there, but you can’t really make a groove out of nothing. It has to be possible for you, and you have to take it in from what you are and what you can be, but in discovering a groove, you can make it your own. Whitehead calls it the “self-creative act,” in which nothing that came before and nothing that comes later wholly explains the act. So you can’t really name it.
For rock’n’roll, there aren’t so very many possibilities. They’re constrained by the choice to rock rather than flow. Yet, the tiniest variation in terms of how the four beats are rushed or relaxed in mutual relations will make the difference between a groove that is erotic or invigorating, and one that is limpid or relaxing. Keith describes this in the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine (as I write this), in a tribute to Bob Dylan:
Before he went electric and submitted himself to that relentless discipline of a rhythm section, there was a beautiful flow in Bob’s songs that you can only get with just a voice and guitar. He can float across the bar here and there. You let certain notes hang longer, and it doesn’t matter because it all goes with the song…. I love the man—and I love that he rock and rolls too. (26th May 2011, p. 66)
Some people may think it’s sloppy, but the rhythm section of a rock band is in truth a highly structured and disciplined unit. It cannot slide around and still be any good. To rock’n’roll is to let yourself be whipped, a relentless repeating kick and slap.
The typical rock groove has a kick (bass drum) on the first and third beats of each bar, and a snare slap on the second and fourth beats. The bass guitar is at the mercy of beats one and three. His dominatrix likes to kick him around. The rhythm guitar is owned by beats two and four, and she slaps him when he gets out of line. The variations are built from there, stretching, pulling, switching, dragging those four beats apart and pushing them back together. I wouldn’t exactly say that there is a finite number of arrangements of those four beats that “work,” but I will say that all the most obvious variations are already familiar to you—that is, they’ve already been found and used many times in many songs you know.
Alright Now
Yet, Keith has contributed perhaps a dozen new grooves to the common repertoire. The groove to “Start Me Up” comes immediately to mind, as well as the “kick in” on “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”—which makes every beat seem like the start of a new measure, like it’s going one-one-one-one, at the front edge of each iteration. You want to talk about relentless driving, especially since the intro groove, before the kick-in, is all way, way back, flowing around, at the tail-end of the beat, like a primeval soup, with paramecia flitting around, barely coalescing at all. Then boom, out jumps Mick fully evolved, with no tail at all, and ready to screw anything foolish enough to move. It’s a gas (the more you read about the structure and habits of lithium, the clearer all this chemistry becomes).
The song “Honky Tonk Women” is an important contribution to grooves—it’s so much slower than most people realize, although this is a song they play at different speeds live. Frankly I think it diminishes the song—the recorded speed was the right speed, and the gin-soaked barroom queens of Memphis do not hurry, you or themselves. To play that song “right” (so that it does its proper work) is almost excruciating, the way you just keep having to hold back. You have to think about golf or something between thrusts to keep your load in. How can something that slow