Those poor bastards.

I’m talking about the Stones, of course. They’ve got problems aplenty these days, and it’s really not their fault, so we should pat ’em on the back and give ’em a helping hand, maybe with a tablet of speed in it to get their next album or at least their current spirits out of the doldrums.

You may think I’m being condescending, but I’m not. The Stones are popstars, light years from where you and I sit in stucco puzzling out whether Goat’s Head Soup is their latest triumph or the epitaph of old men or just. .. the Stones can still put us through those kinds of changes, like when so many people gave months to (the challenge of Exile Ori Main Street, and came up winners because it paid off so monolithically.

The only question remaining in this cozy situation, then, is:

Q: What if the Stones no lotiger pay off?

A. No. 1: You desert ’em. After all, they’re justa buncha old men.

A. No. 2: What kind of friend are you? You grew up with these cats! Christ, are there no values -left in this lousy culchuh?

What’s wrong with the Stones, you say? Oh, honey. This really can’t be the end, more like one of those situations where the whole enterprise, in spite of all nostalgic emotionalism, just seems to be unreeling out into space somewhere like a kite lost in Spring. And we’re powerless to stop it.

The Stones are getting flakey; that much is obvious to anybody who’s listened to their last couple of albums or observed them recently. How much you may like their recent music is irrelevant — it’s the mood and the manifest state of the nerve that counts.

Summer before last the Stones did their biggest U.S. tour ever. Unlike ’69, everything was tightly arranged with no room for Altamonts or anything beyond minor antler-buttings. But there was something about it. You just had to look at the pictures in Life magazine or anywhere else to know that the Stones were getting a little dazed.

Mick’s dancingwas as urgent as ever — maybe more so, because these days the live Stones seem to carry a last-ditch mood of ampea-up desperation that they saved for phre effect in looser times. In 1969, Rolling Stone captioned a shot from the previous tour with something like: “You could see the evidence of the years in Mick’s face.”

Yeah, coy minco dervish Uncle Sam. He was more cute than dangerous, and the Stones didn’t seem particularly concerned about anything but a good time until those grinding too-late moments at Altamont, where Mick’s utter impotence in the face of the forces he’d unleashed — it was all too obvious: “toothers and smsters,” he pleaded in a voice as shrill and thin as Chip ’n’ Dale, “let’s all pleeeeuhze just cool out... ”

Like Betty Boop trying to quell a race riot. What the hell was this guy talking about? As soon as they pounded into “Carol” you felt like somebody’d jolted your mainvein with a hot shot overload of pure methamphetamine, and snuff was jhst another rimshot whizzing by. Hell’s Angels were smashing kids’ faces to pulp with pool cues, and even Marty Balin got decked. Verily it’s no wonder that when the Dead arrived and somebody gave them a report — “They’re even beatin’ up musicians!” — Bob Weir observed: “Just doesn’t seem right, somehow.”

Nope. It wasn’t just Altamont or the Stones, the whole peace brat society was, wrongo to the liver! The Stones had expressed it in “Gimme Shelter,” but they were even less prepared to deal with it than we were. And if you can even believe that was four years ago, you gotta ask yourself if you’re any better equipped to deal with this mess now. Because you really don’t wanna ask if the Stones are.

Death of Innocence in Woodstock Nation my ass, Altamont was the facing up. And the Stones were stuck in the middle of all of it, partly at fault, partly the confused patsies from out of town who’d tried in their own mallethanded way to do something nice for a group of people towards whom, nevertheless, they almost certainly felt more contempt than anything else. The Stones never bought all that brothers and sisters crap, but they were just beginning to be distanced in a truly uncomfortable way which they certainly brought on themselves. When Jagger raised his delicate arm in the power fist that tour he just looked silly, but when he tried to reverse the manipulative thrust of his presence at Altamont he made himself suddenly and completely pathetic for the very first time because he was a total failure. All he could do was incite, the collegiate insurrectionist with half his act down and nowhere to take it but self-immolation.

The Angels looked at him with obvious contempt on their faces: little fag. It took Keith Richard, the phased out ghost of last summer, to exert the necessary mojo, seething forward and jerkiqg the mike: “Look! Either you guys stop that shit, or you get no more music, do you understand? You, out there, I saw you doing that, and you better knock it off, man!”

It was the first time all day that anybody in a position of authority had directly and angrily demanded that the Angels cool out. Grace Slick had set the tone that morning when Balin got slugged: “People, let’s not be laying our bodies on each other unless we intend love-... ” Or, as I muttered while David Crosby was onstage: “Screw you, you asshole. You’re not my brother.” It would stand to reason that among those here only the Stones would have the guts and perception to adopt that kind of position and stick with it. Keith was pissed and moving. Jagger was sad to look at. The others were impassive. As always. Would Bill Wyman move a facial muscle while staring at a ritual disembowelment? Well, everybody gets numb. But from that moment on you never saw Jagger quite the same again. First vivid experience of the dimension of Stones weakness, and it stayed in the mind.

The last U.S. tour was all precaution, no major skirmishes, just a slow cancer. Great tour, socko, Clockwork Orange pix in the press showing where it all came from, but, but... but Keith was hardly even there, even in the pictures he was just an earthbound ghost following music down a windy street, any street, while Mick Taylor played the solos. Mick Jagger was working harder than ever before, but that was just it: you could see he was working. The whole tour carried a mood that left you with the feeling that the artificial hysteria had finally tumbled past the overload, and strained nerves were not just visible but twitching all around. Exile grew and the new songs were great, the press gushed, but people were beginning to get irritated — The World’s Greatest? Who' was to say that these guys weren’t dying?

Not Keith. Who was suddenly beginning to seem the crucial one, as Jagger flopped around in his jumpsuit and just looked more like a society creep every new picture. But Keith, Keith was obviously one of those people (like Dylan circa ’66) who look the absolute best of their entire lives when they’re clearly on the verge of death. It seemed to lend him a whole new profundity and eloquence, even though he was barely playing at all! But then again, who else was there to concentrate on now?

He looked like everything dark and tragic that the Stones trip had ever threatened: soul flattened, skin sallow, bone scraped, and behind the reflectorshaded eyes the suggestion of a diseased intelligence too cancerous even to spit imprecations anymore. Fucked up. It was beautiful.

Jones bust in France, passport miasma, more rumors: disciplined selferosion, on for six months, then abrupt shutoff for six months, then back. Lovers succumbed; they didn’t have that much control. Neither did Charlie Parker. They* all die sooner or later, and it’s always sooner.

You can say that all this text amounts to is a romanticization of the ugliest sort of unsupported myths. But that was exactly what the Stones were always supremely good for.

And maybe it won’t matter for any of us out here who just live for a record, a tour. Because the legal-governmentalimmigration-chemical tangle grinds on, and if he sticks around Keith may not be able to leave his own block without running headfirst into the sort of authority which has made sporadic and often amusing attempts to close in on the Stones and been waiting for something like this for years. Only too glad to shut you down, jive boy. Stay in your room and run the distillate of your not aborted but rather overfulfilled, exploded potentials for the rest of your life... so if he can’t tour, and Ron Wood is in... maybe he doesn’t play much guitar onstage anymore, and sure Ron Wood’s a great chunky chording boyo from the pubs, but Ron Wood is not Keith Richard, nor are the Stones anything but disintegrating shards of past glory without him standing there. I don’t even care whether he’s awake or not. Prop him up. But don’t muddy the lineup any more than it’s been already.

On the other hand, it has also been suggested that the reason the Stones are touring so extensively now is that they’re planning to break up soon, soon as they can get out after wringing a few more big bills from it. They would never say that, but they emphatically deny Keith’s departure: “It wouldn’t be the Rolling Stones without Keith Richard.” Which everybody knows. That’s why the atmosphere is getting so grim.

The others, good as they play, look more like session men all the time. Even ugliness only goes so far.

They went home then, in the fall) and you read the stories in every magazine, and they were all terrible. The stuff filtering back through the fields of rusted wire was mugh better. Like Keith at the Jamaica Goat's Head Soup sessions: according to a friend, wiped so far off the map that he picked up a bass and began trying to play a lead guitar line through it for a take. And was so gone, supposedly, that he kept on for 13 minutes before he realized he had the wrong instrument.

It was funny, and it was hearsay, and the rumor mills and professional scenemakers banter over lives: an English trade held a music biz poll asking who the people contacted thought would be the next rock person to die. Keith came in first. Lou Reed was second. Eric Clapton placed. Mick missed out.

Too bad. I think I might like him better now if he was in trouble. He seems too smug, or perhaps it’s just the rational indifference of a realist, and I don’t like his wife. Rumors of rock couples in elegant swaps didn’t help the quease. You always knew, really, that the predilections of certain of your heroes were exactly what you didn’t want to think they were when you were in school. “Memo From Turner” was cool, anyway — it appealed to your need for vicarious dips into sleaze, as well as (on a slightly different level) to the defensively twisted and even more amoral desire to kick the cat’s face in even as you baited him into his groveling rodent hardon. Great macho nihilism.

But now Jagger was overstepping even the tolerance of us television sleazoids. Not by his preferences in flesh, but the flesh merchant he hooked up with. That chickenheaded straw man of suck rock you love to hate. Can you come to terms with a genuinely deviant sensibilitity, after all the goodtime burlesque acts, or would you rather just shoot the worthless pretentious motherfucker dead and put a stop to all this utter fraudulent bullshit about what a superstar he is? Especially since the entire thing is a ruse from his musical empire to his sexual self-hype^ usual disreputable sources have it that his favorite quail is prepubescent girls.

But whoever he humps makes no difference, he’s still scum. Yeah, says the dazed reactionary fan, let’s kill faggots and get rid of all this arch Broadway/music hall shit. There’s a sense of utter despair in the atmosphere and if our heroes are gonna turn to pure crap we might as well blame somebody. Especially since it’s happened before.

Lou Reed. Done in. And brought it on himself to a large extent. Although you begin to wonder about those theories, prevalent that summer of ’72 when the Stones were on tour while Lou was in London trying to make a comeback through advanced stages of combination toxicity. The theories said that Bowie’s whole tactic was to eliminate the competition by buying them up. Either that or fucking them. Same thing. A friend \vent to London on Bowie junket, _ observed the Bowie/Reed phenomenon at fairly close hand, came back accusing Bowie of outright vampirism. I laughed.

But what is it, really, that’s so infuriating about these stories? Not an attack of defensive conservativism in the face of the homo peril. Naw, it’s the incest angle that rankles. Somebody oughta make a law that no popstars are allowed to have romantic or sexual entanglements with each other on pain of death. For movie stars it’s okay, but where’s the rock ’n’ roll equivalent of Liz and Dick? Rock people are too self-conscious to do it with any grace. Somehow it blows all the Jagger charisma to see him and Bowie dancing and lolling on each other’s laps at David’s “retirement” party while their wives made out with quiet dignity in the glare of the paraparrazi. .. grea'f pictures from that party: Bowie staring intensely at nothing, looking best; Jagger looking tattered, old used-up, uaelegarit, plain bad, definitively flakey, head bent as he stares into his wineglass and purses his lips as if about to spit a rancid sip back; Lou Reed pudgy faced, matted shock of hair, nervously glancing to the side, beginning to resemble Porky Pig.. . as good as the famed Iggy-David-Lou pic in its way, because this time everybody really looked like garbage... and other pix of Mick dancing, incredibly stiffly, with that bitch he supposedly immortalised in song on his new album. This is rock aristocracy? Do we need aristocracy? Bad companions. But maybe he’s found his level, between these creeps and Bianca’s social contacts. And the capping irony is that there is really nothing on Goat’s Head Soup as strong and Stoneslike as “Watch That Man” on Aladdin Sane. Eliminating the competition.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 72.

Nervous Breakdown

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 37.

A fan’s notes: Mr. Nice Guy’s Mick’s rep, after all that devil crapola, but somehow it’s just impossible to care much anymore. Last year he was singing about what he looks like this year. It sounded better than it looks. Just like Jagger on the Goat’s Head Soup album cover, the filmy scarf or whatever it is making him look sorta like Judy Garland in Meet Me In St. Louis... don’t like that smile, it’s just vacant... who is this guy, anyway... and inside Charlie and Bill no longer likeable, but not even interestingly unpleasant... the whole thing is just pretentious, Mick Taylor is a big asshole obviously trying to look bad, amoral, like early Lou Reed or something: four years and he’s finally pushing toward what he sees as consonance with the Stones image. But that’s not their image anymore, Mick. What is? Nothing. Nondescript fabulousness. A fade in general. The only one that looks human is Keith, and that’s only because he really looks like he’s on the edge this time, his eyes are so out of sync they don’t look like they belong on the same face. Oozing from deathly preserved charisma to bloblike distaste.

So what I say is fuck ’em. On September 28th of this year, Jagger sang “Angie” in heavy makeup and leather boy drag on the ABC-TV/ Don Kirschner Midnight Special. The night before, Mickey Rooney and Milton Berle sang some old musical cojnedy flytrap about what a hunk o’ man Flo Ziegfield^was, laced far more as transsexually elaborate. Berle’s been doing this schtick for 20 years and Mick (in spite of the “Have You See Your Mother” jacket foreplay, which was more of a joke than a move) had to wait for Alice Cooper and Bowie to make it all right. The Stones had class once, why are they trying so hard now to retain a toothhold of their outrageousness by doing things they don’t need to do at all? When what really counts, the music, is finally beginning to turn bland.

There’s no point in blaming them, though. They’re helpless. In the past ten years the Rolling Stones created an enormous situation in which they’re just a factor now. They’re ironic victims of the endless new world which it was their triumph to create, because their efforts helped make it possible for hordes of other hopefuls to move into a relatively vacant atmosphere of electricity, expectation and money. Flooding the market. Which is where both we and the Stones stand right now; up to our assds in brackish water.

When it gets like that, you’ve got to maintain a standard of surpassing brilliance just to keep up with yourself, even if the balance of your pas/ work wasn’t that brilliant. Because by the cumulative eminence of your enormous pile of past accomplishments and the mere fact that you’ve managed to sustain, you have set. an impossible standard which you’ve gotta struggle constantly to meet if only to keep yourself from being drowned in all the scunge passing through. Like the New York Dolls — new Stones album’s gotta be a classic or all the so-called arbiters of taste will jump on it and proclaim the Stones senile hasbeens and the Dolls the new true mania* Not that that matters at all, but these little clamors mount up, and every one drains a little bit of energy and momentum from the Stones.

Another danger is that no matter how excellent you continue to be, people will just get bored with you. Not anybody’s fault particularly. But the Rolling Stones, my god, how many different ways can you recycle Chuck Berry riffs? How many different phrases can you use to talk about balling before you have to resort to outright grossness? And when you reach that point (which means you have begun to lose the battle), how long do you think you will last trying to come up with new variations in grossness and obscenity until it becomes merely depressing? There’s only so much mung to go around, and most artists do their best work in a very compressed period of 3-5 years or at most 10 years. The Rolling Stones lasting 20, 30 years — what a stupid idea that would be. Nobody lasts that long — very few novelists; greatest directors don’t turn out classic movies over a 40 year period. So as the ideas peter down the general body of personal and artistic interest in the creators has gotta wane.

In other words, why don’t you guys go fertilize a forest?

Q: What can you say now that hasn’t been said yet about the Rolling Stones?

A: Turn on the radio.

Where you’ll hear a rather raggedly sung ballad that grows on you, and is certifiably the best song on Goafs Head Soup. -

Q: Still, why jump right on a ballad for the first time in history?

A: Because none of the fast songs are hit singles. They’re not much of anything, in fact, except listenable on a nice, forgettably nonoffensive level.

There is a sadness about the Stones now, because they amount to such an enormous “So what?” The sadness comes when you measure not just one album, but the whole sense they’re putting across now against what they once meant.

They were suppliers of context: a friend one? said when I played the Yardbirds for him that “It sounds like they just sat down and said, ‘Okay, you mothas, here’s what you’re going to be doing for the next five years!”

The Stones were saying the same thing in “Honky Tonk Women,” and “Brown Sugar,” and “Sympathy For The Devil.” They provided a full arsenal for lesser bands to loot at will: riffs, melodies, attitudes, approaches to lyrics, concepts in packaging and even clothes and haircuts. So in a sense they held the entire music industry together* because without at least one band charting out the new territory there’s no place for the hype to go.

Somebody’s gotta tell people what they’re gonna do tomorrow, or they may not even get out of bed. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the way it is. Eyery day a new album comes out by a new band from England or L.A. or anywhere, and the first song’s a direct “Honky Tonk Women” steal, with Allman Brothers or Winwood or some other vocal style overlaid. Second song’s a steal of Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane,” combined with Stones .guitar moves. Etc.

These records keep piling up, and most of them are garbage, but the point is that somebody’s gonna have to start providing all these brainless ditzels with some new ideas pretty soon or the whole thing’s gonna break down! How many times can you recycle “Honky Tonk Women”? Just because the Stones have abdicated their responsibilities is no reason we have to sit still for this shit!

Because there is just literally nothing; new happening. Bowie is a style collector with almost no ideas of his own, Reed’s basically Just reworking his old Velvets ideas, people like Elton John are reaching back into nostalgia but that’s a blind alley, and everybody else is playing the blues.

So unless we get the Rolling Stones off their asses IT’S THE END OF ROCK ’N’ ROLL! I’d like to just flip ’em the bird, because I’m mad at ’em, but unfortunately I’m not in a position to do that and neither are you. We are in a position to do absolutely nothing but go get these saggin junked-up jerks and punch ’em up straight again or not only will there be no more Rolling Stones records, there won’t be any New York Dolls or Lynyrd Skynyrd records to flush all those hot Stones ideas away. There won’t be nuttin’!

So I hereby issue the Rolling Stones a challenge on behalf of myself, CREEM Magazine, and yourself if you so desire: I challenge those lazy, sniveling, winded mothermissers to PRODUCE or mark off the days till their next American tour ‘cause we’re gonna bounce ’em off the walls of every arena in the Western Hemisphere!