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There are times, such as “Paint It Black” when the bass actually drives the backbeat, but that is the exception rather than the rule. More often, Bill is picking up on some little opening in the bar and messing around in there. The song “Miss You” is probably his masterpiece of simply fucking around in the interstices. So he waits to see how Charlie will synchronize Keith’s energy and then spreads that around the room, as sound and as feel, and he does that without reinforcing the drums, creating a vague but highly tangible sonic atmosphere, sometimes playful, sometimes spare, sometimes bleak, sometimes brooding, sometimes outright dark. But it is the echo of the dying of your very own heartbeat.

What a Mess!

There was a development of this sound too, as Bill became more independent while also becoming a perfect master of his role in the rhythm section. The relation between the bass and the rhythm guitar in Stones history is like the way couples at first, when they are dating, finish each other’s sentences with amazement and delight, but then after twenty-five years they can have a complete conversation without finishing any sentences at all. Bill’s bass falls into an unconscious finishing of Keith’s musical thoughts sort of like that. And as the years went by, the conversation between bass and guitar became so abbreviated that one could barely tell a conversation was happening. But it was still very musical.

That’s how I would interpret what happens in the song “Shattered,” which is a sort of menacing tangle of bottom end dissonance. It isn’t made for the ear, it is made for the gonads and the solar plexus. It chases you down the street like a rabid dog. And the groove closes on itself in those lower (almost subsonic) ranges. Bill’s job is to shut the door behind the band, to clear away the musical mess in a haze of bottom-shelf, down-on-the-floor-throwing-up-sick-drunk-head-spinning-I-can’t- believe-I-did-that-again ooze. It works. But not since 1992. Ah well. Nobody gets to live forever.

And that brings us to the promise I made early on. What gets destroyed as we partake in the dreadful energy of rock? Well, ourselves, of course, in the form of our youth. Youth itself is sacrificed on the altar of rock’n’roll. You already know that, but it is time to look at it again. This is something like what Freud calls thanatos, the death wish that is being experienced beneath the organization of the energies. When you look for a tempo, you want the flow of death, but when you want to rock and roll, you want to stop your own heart every four beats and find a resurrection on the far side of the bar. And your chances of survival are pretty good, with some help from the right rhythm section, the masters of making the life force itself die a little at a time.

We can’t live forever, but let’s bring the whip down on the asses of the gods and see what happens.

11

The Stones in Pepperland

BILL MARTIN

The great philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel believed all of reality is created by the dialectical tensions within Reason. Marx thought it was all about the conflict between the classes. Other philosophers have their own formulations, all of which overlook the most important and revealing tension in the universe : The Beatles versus The Stones.

Lots of ink (and tears and blood) have been spilled over this debate and rightly so. These two bands, “the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world” and the creators of the the greatest album in all of rock, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, have no peers.

And there’s been a lot of confusion. Take the image of The Stones as “bad boys” or even as a “working class” band—as if The Beatles were not? For that matter, the four members of The Who could have taken all five Stones in a street brawl. (The Who could have taken the Beatles, too, even if George Martin was thrown into the mix! But this is silly—Ginger Baker, back in the day, could have taken the whole lot by himself .) No matter how much Mick Jagger styled himself as