The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [96]
There was definitely something transgressive about rocking out to “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” but at age nine, the sinfulness of rock music mostly eluded me. What was so bad about rock? Why did the church-going types fear it so much?
Reading Keith Richard’s autobiographical account of his run-in with the law in Fordyce, Arkansas, in 1975 helps crystallize the dark energy coursing through the veins of rock music. Richards reflects on just how imprudent his July 4th trek through the Bible Belt was. Traveling from Memphis to Dallas to play a show at the Cotton Bowl, The Rolling Stones, against the advice of their attorney, drove through Arkansas and stopped at the 4-Dice restaurant for a bite to eat. Not “fancying” the clientele or the food, Richards spent forty minutes in the loo getting high and “carrying on.” The staff called the police. When Richards and two friends began to drive away from the 4-Dice, the police pulled them over immediately—and not to get an autograph.
I guess they broke the law.
But had they? Richards had been getting high in a public restaurant, but the cops did not charge them with anything resembling that offense. Instead, the police made them drive to a car park beneath city hall, eventually holding them in a loose “protective custody” in the police chief ’s office. The local authorities alerted the media of their catch, and national news reporters began to gather around the courthouse.
The car Richards drove, along with his friend Freddie Sessler, and their head of their security, Jim Callaghan, was stuffed with drugs like a Hefty bag teeming with autumn leaves. Plastic bags filled with coke, grass, peyote, and mescaline were hidden in the door panels. Freddie had a locked brief case full of pure, “fluffy, pharmaceutical cocaine,” which was in the trunk alongside around sixty bottles of regionally distilled (but legally sold) corn whiskey. Freddie had Christmas-tree barbiturates on his person, and Richards was wearing a ridiculous-sounding denim cap whose pockets were filled with dope.
On the ride to the garage below city hall the car spewed drugs from its windows like a rotating sprinkler. But again, they were not charged with anything akin to this wrongdoing. They were up against the law in a bad way, and they knew why. They were initially charged with the possession of a “concealed weapon,” (a hunting knife laying on the backseat), and “reckless driving” (their tires had spun up gravel on their apparently hasty twenty yard departure from the restaurant). Why hold Keith Richards in custody on trumped-up-sounding charges such as these? And why had they tipped off the wire services that they had Richards in detention?
What’s the Law against Rock and Roll?
Understanding why the local Arkansas cops nabbed Keith Richards will help us recognize rock music’s sin and how the fear of that sin is embodied in Richards’s legal run-in with the Arkansas fuzz. Richards sets the stage for his Arkansas arrest in his autobiography, Life:
Rolling Stones on the police menu across the United States. Every copper wanted to bust us by any means available, to get promoted and patriotically rid America of these little fairy Englishmen. It was 1975, a time of brutality and confrontation. Open season on the Stones had been declared since our last tour, the tour of ’72, known as the STP. The State Department had noted riots (true), civil disobedience, (also true), illicit sex (whatever that is), and violence across the United States. All the fault of us, mere minstrels. We had been exciting the youth to rebellion, we were corrupting America, and they had ruled never to let us travel in the United States again…. We … were the most dangerous rock-and-roll band in the world. (p. 3)
Those of us who go to rock concerts know the general disruption and unrest that accompanies