Limping along, two months late as usual, but I’ve only just read the CREEM special issue, and I’ve got my own Stones’ stories to tell.

Everyone’s agreed (CREEM and Rolling Stone, Nik Cohn and Lillian Roxon) to the Rolling Stones are the greatest rock and roll band ever. I agree, too. Problem is to say why. In the history of rock there are more “signifiRftt” people: Chuck Berry defined the genre, musically and lyrically; Elvis led the creemmg of America; the Beatles popped English ears. Bob Dylan and Cream, the Grateful Dead and the Pink Floyd, Jirm Hendrix were all, m their various ways, more influential, for audiences, than the RoJling stones.

$o far, still agreed. I go further. I Ijto^^uk'the Stones mi* as the'best ^objective” standards*, The^H aren’t amazingty amazang musicians. Keith Richard is ok, other guitarists are better, jagger is a lot of things (later, the top three. Jagger/Richard words aie not as important as. say, Pete Townshcnd’s and their tunes aren’t exactly catdby/Fve, never seen but neither have a lot of other people and it’s not that spectacle that makes them so important. It’s not even their records. Gems, yes. but a lot of straw. 1 can survive, faith intact, with only four albums (the first. Between the Buttons, Beggars’ Banquet, Let It Bleed) and a handful forty-fives. “Satisfaction” is hoi the'greatest single ever made.

A snag. Stones’ greatness hides in the internal relationships of rock culture. There is not a single object — song, performance, musician, show, lyric, record, style — that I could put before^ outsider and say: “This is the Stones, dig it,” and have them understand. I remembei reading some bktCkj musici^|-'(Albert King?) in a Melody Maker blind date, firs comment on a Stones trade was “nice band ’til the singer ruined it.” Everyone else in the rock hall of fame has had their moment of high UI$U~1 adoration. The St~..n~s (see Truman Capote, •et~.) have. re~ mained rncomprehens~b~e No 4isse~ tiOn~no The Stones can’t be cut qu from tor mofc* ,

Clues and careers. They started out | (the Charlle and Bill years) as a purist (blues, r’n’b, Alexis Korner) local (south London suburbs) cult. A community baft# of sorts, but at a time when J everyone in-England had their local cult and when^MlIlly, they were all suspect - we, too, were discovering Chuck Berry and Howling Wolf, the Stones had one advantage. They didn’t have to 'go" to Lond0ii5'#!|iake it. They were there already and they never lost their local fans They enshrined them on “Ready* Steady, Go”

The Stones’ pop image (the Andrew Loog Oldham years) was created (see Sk Cohn) but never MHM component was the rivalry with the Beatles,had to make a choice - Beatles or Stones - and fight for it. To choose the Stones was to choose something more aware than the Beatles, riskier and more mod, The surprise of their first appearance on 1 “Thank Your Lucky Stars” wasn’t long hair ieah^btit-thwack' “Stones cuts” or “Stones jackets.” They didn’t try hard. Students rather than workers. No chirpy smiles. No stairways to heaven*

Even when they became big (always one obligatory step behind the Beatles) the Stones were a special relationship. They achieved things the Beatles didn t. First thing, they tickled the English ** clitoris. The old rockers had only turned men on to their possibilities, and female idols, from Cliff Richard to Paul McCartney, were cuddly. The Stones were the first group to give girls other, sUnkter Ideas. They excited boys, too. The Beatles had nude pop respectable for - thesort of clever bourgeois kid , who'd been into tradand folk and CND but it was the Stones who brought along the rock’n’roll excitement. They became the dance band. I’ve never been to a' student party where the first Stones’ album wasn’t played, and they were an equal inspiiation for a generation of pubs. Lefcnon and McCartney may have written all those standards but it was Jagger and Richard who inspired all the incompetents who couldn't sing m harmony but sure could blow a mouth organ. The Beatles go their MBE’s but the Stones got their rocks off.

1966 and iich white rock and rollers had to, stop pretending 'iheyVli&a^ people. The Stones, whose relationship with their audience had been more direct than that of any other English group, felt this problem most acutely. Their first solution (the Brian Jones years) was to become hippies. Drug busts and mandolins and (I still find it hard to believe) weekends with the Maharishi. Butterflies and doomsh’boom. Trouble with this was that hippie culture was fake and the Stones were honest. The arrests were real enough but the interviews in the Times were not. The Stones weren’t about to move to Notting Hill and their music suffered. Mutual bewilderment.

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The second solution was to dump Brian Jones and become the world’s greatest rock and roll band. Secrets and the Mick and Keith years. The Stones’ problem was to keep their clean, white suits and their clean, white audience, to become the only British group which got steadily bigger between 1964 and 1972, to glitter in the sun just by not selling out to anybody. At each stage of their career, the Stones had been special for their people. Charlie and Bill were good old boys. Andrew Loog Oldham was a fixer, Brian a Cheltenham dropout. Mick and Keith were petit bourgeois bohemians. Their reward for their audience was contempt.

The world outlook of the petit bourgeoisie, as a class, is paranoid. Their property is threatened by the working class, their profits by bigger capitalists. The world outlook of the rebel petit bourgeois (Mick and Keith) is contemptuous, rejecting both working class aspirations to material respectability and bourgeois aspirations to cultural respectability. The Stones have never spent their money in the comfy ways of other English groups — no cozy homes and wives and stock brokers (though that’d probably have done Charlie and Bill). No pools wins. They refused to play the usual games on their Sunday night at the London Palladium. No showbiz making good. But no clever dicks, either. No cultural pretensions (poor Brian). No poetry, no grand theory, no charity. No meanings, no means. Rock and roll is the end itself. Mick and Keith are bohemians and make no separation between their “act” and their “real” life. John Lennon is trying to put his “political” perceptions of the “real” world into his music; the Stones have always made their artistic vision the basis of their world vision.

The result is a totally aesthetic reaction to the social conditions of late capitalism, to the beggars’ banquet:

Waiting for a girl and her knees are much too fat Waiting for a girl who wears scarves ’stead of hats Waiting for a girl — her zip’s broke down the back Waiting for a factory girl

(Factory Girl)

Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy ’Cos summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street boy. But what can a poor boy do? Except sing for a rock and roll band

(Street Fighting Man)

The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody.

(Oscar Wilde)

When I search this faceless crowd A swirling mass [inaudible] They don’t look real to me, In fact they look so strange Let’s drink to the hard-working people ...

(Salt of the Earth)

Truth is beauty and the Stones are the greatest rock and roll band ever because they’re the only band ever who’ve really believed this in rock and roll terms. The values of their music — sensuality, energy, flash — which they sniff out of the understains of capitalism (Exiles on Main Street) are their only values. The stunning authority of their music, which no outsider to rock culture can spot, lies in its commitment, in a degree of conviction that no other band has ever matched. I don’t know if Jagger is sexist; I do know that he is the only singer for whom I feel intense sexual jealousy. For eight years, now, the Stones have been living the rock myth that we have been vicariously sucking off. If your reaction to the Stones music these days is, like mine, less exhiliration than boredom and slight distaste then that must be your reaction to the presence of the rock. Rock music as a means to anything (wealth, art, nirvana) tends to be bad music. Rock music as an end in itself is only better as long as we believe in it.

The wasted look came over his face again. I thought he must be dying, and I was very sad and looked away and went about my business.

(Richard Elman on Keith Richard)