(Richard Neville is the editor of OZ, the British alternative culture magazine. This article was originally published in England, in INK, a weekly UPS paper)

Two weeks ago, Mick Jagger gave his first performance in public since his January “farewell England” tour. He married Bianca de Macias. This spectacular invoked most of his features common to Jagger’s previous appearances. It was violent, sexy, expensive. JAGGER WEDDING DAY ROUGH HOUSE frontpaged the Daily Mirror, billing its two burly reporters as personal bodyguards who safely steered the bridal couple through the punches and pandemonium. Always more concerned with property than people, the Sun splashed JAGGER BRIDAL CAR IN CRASH, spotlighting the wrecking of a white Bentley. British press men were shocked by the gratuitous violence — not just the random brawls and verbal cockfights, but incidents such as the French photographer who swirled his camera like a mabe and chain to clout a Stones road manager, who then sank, blood gushing.

Longtime 1 fans who were also wedding guests mhst have felt at home. Audiences were rioting at Empress Ballroom, Blackpool, back in July 1964. Two weeks after that, 200 fans fainted at Longfeat House when crowds pressed against the drash barrier. “A delightful day,” purred the Marquess of Bath at the time, “so few hospital cases?’

These episodes, like countless more, are from the Rolling Stones Blue Book, an authorized history which chronicles the carnage in a tone which can almost be considered a boast: “8 March: John Flint in Daily Mirror headlined his story STONES FAN FALLS FROM CIRCLE. He added, ‘...as the Rolling Stones played at the Palace Theater, Manchester...the girl launched herself in the circle' and landed on people beneath...it was a lucky escape. She fortunately broke only a few teeth.’” The Stones didn’t stage-manage these accidents, and yet they are paraded in the Blue Book like so many gold records.

The most famous analogue between the Stones and violence, of course, was that graphic combustion at Altamont, where a black man was slain by Hells Angels with Jagger presiding , as a jubilant ghoul.

Despite such historic echoes in terms of the packaged Jagger persona, the wedding struck many odd notes...nqne odder than: the medley of themes from the film Love Story, which, at the request of the bride, provided the wedding march. Perhaps this was a coded message to hippie gatecrashers who pressed against the fleets of Rolls Royces. Was the whole ceremony* a yippie hoax? Jagger himself dismissed it as a “a load of old balls” half an hour before mounting the altar. There were other minor anomalies. On the one hand, the uncannily dutiful tuition in Catholic dogma, on the other, those bared Bianca tits which nearly poked out the hopefully averted eyes of Abbe Baud.

Alas, the lingering tragedy of what has been dubbed “the day the stone stopped rolling” is that it was not satirical. No Magic Christian finale of churchyard smokein or public fuck-for-all. This is not to imply that Jagger was prompted into matrimony by a lightning conversion to respectability — Swapping his Sympathy for the Devil with Holy Ghost — but to state a truth; that day in St. Tropez marked the end of any further pretense of Jagger as the figurehead of a radical life-style.

The wedding was stafk public confirmation of the growing suspicion that Mick Jagger has firmly repudiated the possibilities of a counter culture of which his music is a part.

At the church of St. Anne, Jagger put his signature on a declaration of allegiance to the system, spreading his velvet arse for the ruling class, wedding himself to the lethal values of property, personal power and perpetuation Of an oppressive mythology. It was not the act of marriage (civil contracts being a justifiable compromise in an age of confusion) but — as with his music -the style of its performance. Street Fighting Man found Satisfaction in every pitiable cliche of la dolce capitalism, from snacks in the Cafe Des Arts (“favorite haunt of Brigitte Bardot, Sacha Distel, Noel Coward...”) to the 75 ft. yacht hired for £3000; the kilos of caviar washed down with champagne, two gold wedding rings from an exclusive Parisian jeweler, a charter flight laden with celebrities and sycophants, all immortalized on film by good friend and Queen’s cousin, Patrick Litchfield.

Bianca herself the perfect foil. Carved in his image, related to the notoriously corrupt Nicaraguan establishment, ex-“Parisian hostess” a clothes peg for Ives St. Laurent. Jumping Jack Cash meets the Third World, an unconscious parody of neocolonialism, especially as both squabble aloud over division of worldly goods. Jagger wins, naturally, severing French custom by retaining separate property rights; not trusting all he owns to his 'merchant Bianca.

“After trying out the drug and permissive scene,” commented Jimmy Saville of the wedding, “there’s a lot to be said for a nice normal life after all.”

Jagger’s music ought to remain impervious to the South of France, but his personality,, has always been , crucial to the music of the Rolling Stones and, more importantly, to the . audience’s interpretation of it. Neither Cliff Richard or Elvis Presley could have conceived “Get Off My Cloud” or “Satisfaction” and if by some freak quirk they had, then the niessage would never have crossed the credibility gap.

The Rolling Stones have almost studiously associated their behavior and; their music with the forces against law and order.

Throughout the 60s l*oth their behavior and music jostled for our attention, each in mutual reinforcement of the Stones’ image. The animosity of the authorities seemed in direct proportion to the fans’ affection. Jagger was so ..unpopular with the decision makers Of the community that he was sentenced to six months jail for possessing four pep pills prescribed by his doctor and legally purchased in Italy. Such was the outcry from fans and sympathizer that the Times lumbered to his defense in its famous sub-judice editorial, conceding that the real crime was “the anarchic quality of the Rolling Stones’ performances.”

MICK KELLY

In the wake of the Paris events of May *68, the Rolling Stones released “Street Fighting Man”* which was banned from airplay in America and warmed up participants at the Yippie Festival of Life in Chicago:

Yes I think the time is ripe

for violent revolution

From where I live the game they play

is compromise solution

A year later, Mick Jagger was cast as Ned Kelly, the outlaw who robbed the banks, never the poor, shot policemen and was finally hung. To those of us born in Australia, the* choice, was divinely ingenious, if sentimental, “...to the dispossessed in both town and country, Ned was a hero,” wrote Professor Manning Clark in his History of Australia. “In an age in which the Gods Of the old religions were toppling to their, ruins, Ned or the idea of Ned, was an image in which men could believe, because his life and death symbolized the experience of the native born, their unwillingness ’to accept the morality of the English, and their own groping for a new morality and a new way of life.”

“They are a lovely band of Gypsies and it is a pleasure to be alive at the same time. They have done it all and seen it all and had it all and they, have suffered and profited beyond any of their expectations I dare say, and I dare and so do Jthey, dare. They are just ordinary people you know, just like you and me, only for whatever reason and forget the price, they are."struck out for their own outright right to be and I don’t know how any of them have survived the craziness. It helps being a group of course and hinders too. Who am I if we are we and if we are, who am J? Us? And who are They, yet? The Rolling Stones are very strong, Poor Brian: he died and made that awful bit of it come true, too. Lots of us think of him still; for. all the good it does now, we think of him. Dear Jagger, he exposed the sweet gentleness of the sunny side of his nature when he set the butterflies free in the Park, just for Brian; it isn’t easy being corny -in England now that we are all so Weeding hip. Murder and drug-sniffing dogs, handcuffs and mayhem; rejections without number from more restaurants hotels and lounges than any of us have had hot dinners; lawsuits, contracts and contacts in ruins; tax demands screwed into unrecognizable torments; arrest and bawled abuse; managements who froze in terror at the pace, the speed of everything; the hatred of the old, the yearnings of the young, the striving of their peers; adoration beyond measure, revolutions without name or number and On tojs of it all, the suggestion that With it all, they were only ever Avis. So? They are mothers’ sons and they have entered 1971 able to stand and make their choices and we have said, “see yer” to them for now. Away they fly, to France and once more info the night the jetplume over Staines says, “OK Stones we will see you gain and thanks for the memory” and a pledge for all our futures is this album and the promise they will be back.

We love you Rolling Stones and if you are not now the best living band in the land then who is?

DEREK TAYLOR

GYPSY BAND

Press Release Issued in England with Sticky Fingers

Then came Performance; that confused, remarkable, .psychedelic radiealizer. One can interpret the film as a vicious assault’ on capitalism — symbolized so appositely by the bloody East End gangsterism — as well as a sermon on the potentialities of the drug culture for defusing its terror. *

And so it happened — the Jagger myth — epitomizing multi-level protest for nearly a decade, the myth which two weeks ago exploded with the champagne corks.

I The Great Mistake was the assump.t ion t hat Jag ger’s anti-authoritarianism was based on the semblance of an Idea. For in truth, he is motivated hot by any inkling of the world’s ills but only by his super-id. Mick Jagger is a rebel of convenience. If he was ever an anarchist — a point on which at least he and the Times concur g| then it was the anarchy of the child’s tantrum, the misbehaviour of a spoilt clot.

On 23 July 1965 the Blue Book reported:

ROLLING STONES FINED FOR A “PUBLIC INSULT”. The court heard of the night a Daimler car pulled into a petrol station...eight or nine boys and girls got out and Wyman asked if he could go to the lavatory, but was refused. A mechanic, Mr. Charles Keely, asked Jagger to get the group off the forecourt of the garage. He brushed him aside, saying, “We will piss anywhere man.” This was taken up by a group in a chant as one of them danced. Wyman, Jagger and Jones were seen to urinate on a wall outside the garage. The car droye off with people inside sticking their hands through the windows in a well-known gesture.

This incident Conveys vividly the exact pedigree of Mick’s style of protest. It is the beginning, middle and end of his manifesto; the sum total of his revolutionary program. Power to the people, in Mick’s terms,'is nothing more than the power to piss anywhere, man.

RADICAL IMAGERY

' When not splashing garage ♦ forecourts, Jagger’s commitment to radical activity (as distinct from enhancing his radical image) is solely verbal. “I’d do anything political I thought would work,” says Mick in a typical quote from a typical interview. , With friends, much time is spent juxtaposing personal behavior with political belief, but With people like Jagger this critical curiosity is suspended: part of a pop poet’s license. If rock music is to have any future relevance in the context of underground/left politics, then its practitioners had better start putting their money where their mouths are.

Meanwhile Jagger has fed more into the system than Edward Heath (note the ominous shared fascination with yachts). There have been impulsive token gestures of such half heartedness that they’ve barely made contact. Last year that , very wn-angry brigade, Release, were dependent on Jagger’s personal appearance at the premiere of Performance. He not only failed to materialize ^ but was also infuriated by Release bogs Caroline Coon’s tearful disappointment. “Fuck her,” he said, “I couldn’t get a plane out of Paris. Anyway, the Orly Hilton isn’t the most comfortable place in the world” He once donated about £200 to Release for which he claimed a one night stand with Caroline. “Could you lend us money for our trial?” asked Abbie Hoffman when he met Jagger in Chicago. “We got our own trials,” drawled Mick, walking away.

Not that one expects Jagger to subsidize every tinpot revolutionary but simply to try and comprehend what is happening in his own cultural constituency; to extend a little help where he can, like John Lennon. For all his blissful idiosyncrasies, false trails and cheery naivete, John Lennon has survived the gauntlet of success with his humanity intact. With timeenergy and money, Lennon has conducted many a rescue operation. There is, a breathtaking integration between his words and deeds which has enriched his art, making him the only Beatle left worth seriously listening to. Appropriately, it was. Lennon himself who recently fingered Jagger with such merciless accuracy: f-

“What do you think of the Stones today?”

I think it’s a lot of hype...I think Mick’s a joke...I would just like to list what he did and what the Stones did two months after on every fuckin’ album...he imitates Us. I would like one of you underground people to point out, you know, Satanic Majesties Request is Pepper. “We Love You”,it’s the most fucking bullshit, that’s “All You Need is Love”.

I resent the implication that the Stones are like revolutionaries and the Beatles aren’t. If the Stones were or are, the Beatles were too. But they are not in the same class music-wise or power-wise, never wete...Mick said, “Peace made money.” We didn’t make/ any money from peace.

No Mick, peace doesn’t make money, as I’m sure the Mafia friends who are said to now control your finances would agree.

At exactly the same time as Jagger was gilding his marriage bed in St. Tropez, 50,000 people marched on Washington in desperate determination to block, even for a few hours, the arteries of military aggression; They were united not only by this objective, but also by music of the kind the Rolling Stones presented. 13;400 of them bolstered by free rock groups, went on to' be arrested, many of them confined in makeshift concentration camps. (“The compound, 2000 strong at its peak, was a chilly hungry thirsty smelly unhealthy and finally unhappy place,” Ne-w-sweeek 17 May.) I wonder if Jagger spared a thought for such people, people who have almost certainly spared dreams and pocket money for him, people then in a predicament which received less attention in this country than his own wedding. They couldn’t even piss anywhere, Mick

And you can send, me dead flowers every morning

Send me dead flowers by the mail

Send me dead flowers to my wedding

And I won’t forget to put roses on your grave.