The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [75]
Please Pass the Pepper
I call their achievement “Pepperism.” Rock music was always wild and experimental, and politically provocative, but there came a moment in the middle Sixties, spurred on by larger cultural factors and the influence of developments in other genres of music (from Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor in jazz, to John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and others in Western classical music, to increasing awareness of music from India, Sub-Saharan Africa), when rock expanded and broke with its founding framework of the blues. With Sgt. Pepper, The Beatles did as much as anyone to establish the idea that, if, when writing music there is a question of either doing something more conventional and relying on established blues forms, or doing something more experimental and drawing from beyond rock music, then the time for experimentation had come. For a brief period, not coincidentally having as its epicenter the great year 1968, experimentation was the main trend in rock. After that, everything had changed. Sgt. Pepper captured and concentrated the aesthetic and spirit of its musical and historical moment in a way that affected the whole field of everything in rock music that came after it—and even everything that came before it.
If you’re reading this book, you know that there was a reaction to this. It marched under the banner of “that ain’t rock-’n’roll.” I call this movement “blues orthodoxy” and wrote about it at length in Music of Yes (pages 110 and 188 for instance). Around this point, The Beatles and The Stones really can and should be seen as rivals. Each was making a case—a very different case—for what rock music is and should be.
Yet this way of looking at the eternal cosmic tension overlooks a very important fact: at one point, in 1967, The Stones and The Beatles were on the same page about what rock music should be. The result was Their Satanic Majesties Request, an album on which the bad boys were trying very much to follow the Fab Four.
It’s Only Their Satanic Majesties Request, But …
One reason Majesties is overlooked is that few people see it as a great album or even a good one. Stones fans, surprisingly often, are not even aware of it, despite its amazingly cool 3-D cover. For that matter, The Stones themselves seem sometimes eager to forget they ever made it. In the nearly 550 pages of Life, Keith Richards has very little to say about it, and nothing that’s complementary:
Much of that year [1967] we struggled haphazardly to make Their Satanic Majesties Request. None of us wanted to make it, but it was time for another Stones album, and Sgt. Pepper’s was coming out, so we thought basically we were doing a put-on. (p.229)
A little further on, he says the album “was all a bit of flimflam to me.”
Yet this flimflam helps focus the debate about The Beatles versus The Stones. The album reveals that there is something to the “bad boys” question, after all. But it doesn’t have to do with street fighting. For while one of the Beatles was willing to talk loosely about his band being more popular than Jesus, The Beatles weren’t so brazen as to invoke Satan himself in their album titles. Even if the “sins” of The Stones were more on the order of simple debauchery and hedonism run amok, there was something of a dark side with The Stones that was never part of The Beatles’ ethos.
Second, the album seals the case that The Stones were always less innovative and perfectionist than The Beatles. Lennon and McCartney were writing their own music before Jagger and Richards got started, and though they evolved, The Stones simply never caught up. The very fact that The Stones were attempting to make a Beatles album, and not just any Beatles album but specifically Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, is enough to establish that the album, “put-on” or not, was going to be a kind of failure.