Seems Like A Freeze-Out

It seems to be December, and here we are with a full issue about the Rolling Stones, talking about such seemingly dated minutae as their summer tour and Exile on Main Street. What’s this?

Well, I said one day last July, there’s only so much Rolling Stones energy, ever, and I can’t see competing with Life. Indeed. I never could see competing with life.

Can you?

There’s more to it (there always is). The Rolling Stones, our peculiar form of rock-plasma, run heavily on everyone’s conscience even when they aren’t around. The Rolling Stones matter just as much now as they did in July and if nothing else, this issue is a reminder of that fact. It is, I think unfortunately, the central fact of rock’n’roll now. There’s one group, and only one, like ’em or not, that matters all the time.

Or, again, there’s the idea that we’ve had the memories of the tour and the reality of Exile on Main Street long enough to be able to say something different about it. It is, as Lester says, a matter of inclusion/exclusion, and if the corporeal presence of the Stones has always been inclusive, the reality of its audience has always been something else again.

The reality of the audience is our reality, and at present it’s pretty fucking dismal. One of the reasons we might need a whole issue devoted to the Rolling Stones right now is that nothing else can shake the lag, the unbearable sense of defeat we all feel. Maybe it’s the election, but I doubt it; that’s just another Altamont-style allegory for something rotten to the core of rock, something truly unbearable. Something even powerful rock couldn’t carry. Which might be why there isn’t any. Right now.

I can’t tell you how disappointing this year has been. There are less than ten albums that will live out the season, I suspect, and the only one that pushes its way through — like it or not, like I said before — without equivocation is Exile. Only the Stones are capable of shaking our lassitude.

Maybe that’s why I don’t ever put Exile on myself. I am no Stones fan, in the long run, not the way most people who are Stones fans are. Other things have always overridden them, but this year, I admit, is THEIR year. More than at any other time, the Stones have ciphered out the problems and potentials of the moment and stood up as a representative of it all. Mick Jagger is less pretty because of the kind of chances the Stones are taking, but they’re taking them. That’s more than anyone else is doing.

The other reason I don’t listen to Exile a lot, I think, is that the Stones know too much. I don’t. And I’m more interested in finding out that other people — Rod Stewart, Robbie Robertson, Van Morrison — don t know too. That’s my solace, maybe, but there’s more to that angle of it, too.

This starts to sound like a death of rock sermon, and I don’t mean to suggest that rock is dying, or to sermonize, either. On the other hand ... well, there you are. This has been the Year of the Other Hand. There is always some mitigating circumstance, there is nothing that will just let you alone. Except the Stones.

What I’m trying to get at is a sense of ennui, a sense of dissipation and total lethargy that is about to overwhelm everyone. I think that it probably will overwhelm almost everyone, especially ‘60’s rockheads., We are running on something like false fuel, because the options we’ve taken have for the most part turned out to be dead ends — or at the very least, extensive detours. Rock isn’t the center of the universe anymore, and that’s almost startling.

But it’s all so confused! If you reject out of hand the presumption that rock is “dead,” because you know that rock is something more than whatever is happening at the moment — though it is only that, too — you are left with the sickening reality that rock has gone soft in the head. It’s mentally ill, the madness has finally (momentarily?) overcome it. Dylan chose the title a long time ago: “Seems Like A Freezeout.” And now is the time, if there ever was one, >yhen that phrase applies.

If all of this seems desperate, it’s only because I can’t find my own way out of a maze I wasn’t in on the beginnings of. I don’t wanna hang up my rock’n’roll shoes, either, but damned if I can be sure there are any reasons why I shouldn’t.

The Rolling Stones seem like the last reason left, at least momentarily, and that alone is reason enough to do a whole issue on them now.