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them—public drunkenness, if not public urination, and back in the days when smoking was allowed, arenas filled with pot-smoke filtering light to and from the stage. But Richards does not seem to be describing these relatively minor disruptions of the public peace. These were not their sins. Their sin was rock itself. The state of Arkansas had even tried to draft legislation outlawing rock’n’roll. In his description of these events, Richards describes the Stones as if they needed an extirpation befitting Socrates, another famous corruptor of the youth.

What was rock’s original sin? Well, the term rock’n’roll was originally slang for sex, a sexual metaphor extended from the back and forth rocking of a ship at sea. This gets us closer to the heart of the matter. Rock music emphasizes rhythm, as opposed to harmony, and that rhythm signals other, more libidinal, rhythms. We may need to recall that just a few years prior to Richards’s arrest, networks broadcasting Elvis Presley’s performances on television were not allowed to show him below the waist. Moms knew the tingle they felt when they saw those Tennessee hips rock, and they did not want their daughters sharing in that dark energy. Consider the utter frenzy and deafening scream of the women when they heard those other four, nerdy Brits with long hair sing and strum just ten years prior to Richards’s Arkansas detaining. The Beatles’ lyrics were less sexualized than The Stones’, but the women were still passing out at the sight of John Lennon, for crying out loud.

Listening to rock music in the years running up to the 1975 incident was like eating from the tree of knowledge. It was a sexual awakening of epic proportions. Rock was the soundtrack of the sexual revolution. When the state of Arkansas tried to make rock illegal, it was trying to outlaw horniness. When Fats Domino “found his thrill on blueberry hill,” we know what just what thrill he found. In fact, even Richie Cunningham was corrupted by the sexuality of rock’n’roll, as he sang “I found my thrill,” whenever he snagged a date. Those were “Happy Days,” but only insofar as rock music had not found its way into too many girls’ pants—at least not too many white girls’ pants.

Muddy Water and Brown Sugar

Highlighting the internal relation between rock music and sexuality just skims the surface of the rock’s transgression. Rock music originated, not far from that Arkansas courthouse in Fordyce, in the Deep South, and it came from black folk. The most immediate origins of rock lay in “race music,” a name for jazz, swing, boogie-woogie, jump blues, and rhythm’n’blues. But more than that, rock was the product of a collision of cultures, of white southerners’ country and Appalachian folk and black southerners’ gospel and blues. Rock’n’roll was the artistic embodiment of the greatest fear of the white powers of the South—racial integration.

Rock music helped initiate and propel a revolutionary social transformation. Often live music concerts in the South would separate the audience into white and black sides of the room using only a rope. But when the music and dancing began, the ranks would begin mixing. Rock music helped integrate the south, and this was dangerous. Rock was in fact breaking the law. It was breaking Jim Crow. Footage in the BBC/PBS documentary “Rock and Roll” shows a Citizens’ Council chairmen, standing in front of a sign that read “WE SERVE WHITE CUSTOMERS ONLY,” who tells us: “We set up a twenty-man committee to do away with the vulgar, animalistic nigger rock and roll bop.” And a member of the Alabama White Citizens Council said: “The obscenity and vulgarity of the rock and roll music is obviously a means by which the white man and his children can be driven to the level with the nigger. It is obviously nigger music.”

Still image from the BBC/PBS documentary “Rock and Roll” originally broadcast in 1995

But only when we combine the two transgressions do we begin to understand the psychology behind the fear of rock music and the consequent desire by southern police to lock up Keith Richards.