The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [98]
Sam Phillips of Sun Records said of the experiment that was rock’n’roll: “Believe me the resistance on this was absolutely incredible.” If rock’s logic was allowed to spread, eventually white women would begin spreading their legs for black men. A racist white father watching his daughter dance and shout to Jerry Lee Lewis, let alone Little Richard, was psychologically akin to watching her be seduced by a dark, musclebound, and sweating-like-Patrick Ewing field hand.
The Rolling Stones and Keith Richards were the physical embodiment of racial integration. They were white, but foreign. They played blues-based music. Their hero was Muddy Waters, a black blues man. All of their musical heroes and inspirations were black, and they were playing and selling this black music, this “Brown Sugar” to southern white girls. The redneck cops had it out for ’em, but their legal pursuit of Richards was the culmination of a long history of race-relations, including the racist assumptions of black libertine sexuality, the racist psychology treating black as a marker of dirt and mud, and the mythology of pure southern womanhood needing protecting from dirty black sexuality.
Consider Richards’s own reflections on his touring through the American South:
You try going to a truck stop in 1964 or ’65 or ’66 down south or in Texas. It felt much more dangerous than anything in the city. You’d walk in and there’s the good ol’ boys and slowly you realize that you’re not going to have a very comfortable meal in there with these truckers. (Life, p. 8)
The markers which signaled Richards’s harassment by white southerners were his long hair, his extremely non-local and exotic clothing, and his British accent, but we could imagine this exact description being given by a freedom rider or any black person in the south.
Unlike Richards’s experience at white truck stops, The Stones would stroll into black juke joints, and after some hesitation, would revel in their “education” there. Richards writes:
There’d be a band, a trio playing, big black fuckers and some bitches dancing around with dollar bills in their thongs…. They get very intrigued and we get really into being there…. Lovely black ladies squeezing you between their huge tits. You walk out and there’s sweat all over you and perfume, and we all get in the car, smelling good, and the music drifts off in the background. I think some of us had died and gone to heaven. (Life, p. 9)
The Stones were in heaven in the black juke joints, tasting and smelling all that brown sugar, and getting to meet and play with Muddy Waters himself, but they were harassed at white truck stops. When they played Muddy Waters songs to white kids, they were symbolically integrating the white audience into the sweat and sex and smell of the black juke joints. Such was their crime.
That and all those drugs, but we’ll come back to that.
When The Stones toured with The Ronnettes, “the hottest girl group in the world in early 1963,” Richards fell in love with their lead, Ronnie Bennett. Now I admit this might not signify Richards’s at-home-ness with black folk (as Ronnie was a black woman), because anyone, white or black, male or female, who has seen 1960s footage of Ronnie Bennett singing “Be My Baby,” has probably fallen in love with her. I know I have. However, Richards and Ronnie got hot and heavy on that tour—to the chagrin of Ronnie’s pathologically eccentric producer and uber-jealous future husband, Phil Spector. Richards shared with her a sense of being forlorn and out of control amid their sudden success, and he sympathized with Ronnie’s plight of not being in control of her career. The animus of Richards’s