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By Root 717 0

is suggested again by the album’s cover. The Stones sit in their satanic-medieval garb surrounded by wisps of smoke, flowers, mountains, and not-so-distant planets. It’s not just that the cover looks altogether too sugar-coated and silly; it’s that the influences and inspirations for Pepperism—the artists, writers, comedians, poets, psychiatrists and philosophers—whom The Beatles looked to in crafting their album and expanding the boundaries of rock music, and who appear in the cover’s famous collage, are missing. The Stones are just alone, by themselves, and looking somewhat ridiculous without the cultural and intellectual carnival surrounding The Beatles (and even the Mothers of Invention) that created some kind of context for their neon-colored military uniforms.

You might say this is just part of The Stones’ critique of Pepperism and the new experimentalism (it’s just the tissue of a “show,” you see). But it also reveals that The Stones’ heart was never in Pepperland. Who should have surrounded them on the cover of Satanic Majesties? Their blues idols, obviously, the ones they looked to before and after 1967 in making their classic music. But an album featuring songs by The Stones, inspired by their blues idols, however good it may have turned out, would not have been the answer to Sgt. Pepper that The Stones were trying to create. An album cover featuring five interplanetary sorcerers of rock surrounded by cutouts of Muddy Waters, Screamin Jay Hawkins, and other blues artists would have been as silly as blues-inspired songs about girls on other planets, or “Hey You, Get Off of My Nebula!”

The Stones simply didn’t have the burning interest in the avant-garde arts and in the kind of musical and conceptual experimentation that made albums like Sgt. Pepper or We’re Only in It for the Money or In the Court of the Crimson King so compelling and original. Satanic Majesties is not inspired by the avant-garde, but rather by another album (namely Sgt. Pepper) that was. The Stones explored Pepperland, but always at one remove. They took the Magical Mystery Tour, but then never got off the bus to take a walk around, to imbibe the new ideas and methods of art, to let Lennon turn them on, so that they could come up with an “I am the Walrus” or “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” that was their own, and not an imitation of another band’s. “She’s a rainbow” is good, but it would never have existed without Sgt. Pepper’s inspiration (despite the fact that Lennon and McCartney sing backup on the recording).

Given how good Satanic Majesties is, and how well it holds up, none of this is to disparage The Stones. Their moment in experimental music-making still paid off for those of us who love the album and for those who remain inspired by it (such as The Brian Jonestown Massacre who release Their Satanic Majesties’ Second Request in 1996). It just didn’t have much of a payoff for The Stones themselves.

12

Beatles versus Stones: The Last Word

CRISPIN SARTWELL

When I was but a wee lad, The Beatles versus Stones thing was the greatest aesthetic debate of the generation. No doubt it rages still through the halls of nursing homes. In any case, the debate itself was a rather unfortunate turn of events. At any given moment, there are many interesting acts in popular music doing all sorts of things, and the idea that it all came down to only two was sort of silly. And no pop musician can possibly pay off on the adulation accorded, in particular, to The Beatles; in the face of their reception as transcendent, God-touched geniuses, as emblems of an entire era, as strange essences of our collective consciousness, and so on, the actual music is absurdly inadequate.

Well, that itself will tell you where I will come down on The Beatles and The Stones. But before I do, let me note that the idea of the essence of a generation or a zeitgeist pressed into the grooves of an LP is borrowed from modernist conceptions in the fine arts and elsewhere. One might think of Beethoven, or Van Gogh, or Nietzsche, Picasso, or James Joyce: more-than-human