The Dirty War On The Rock Stars Included Rolling Stones

[Paul Rigby]

A different take on the RS:

Rock's fake rebels :The Rolling Stones were always more reactionary than revolutionary, as Keith Richards proves

Dorian Lynskey
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 17 October 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2010/oc...ing-stones

Like many national landmarks, Keith Richards is regarded fondly because he never really changes. You see him and you think: ah yes, that's what rock'n'roll stars do. Even as he increasingly resembles a character from Jim Henson's Creature Shop, the 66-year-old guitarist can be relied on to maintain such long-cherished habits as smoking, drinking and being amusingly rude about Mick Jagger. Decades removed from when he was considered a threat to the morals of the nation's youth, his hellraising exploits seem cosy. These days it is not his lifestyle that has the capacity to raise eyebrows but his politics.

On Friday he told an interviewer that he had sent Tony Blair a letter of encouragement to "stick to his guns" over Iraq, back when most musicians were either opposing the war or maintaining a discreet silence. On Saturday, in an extract from his new memoir Life, he wrote about his love for Anita Pallenberg, and her physical abuse by his bandmate Brian Jones. "If I were Brian," he reflected, "I would have been a little bit sweeter and kept the bitch." The real villain of the piece is Jones, who died in 1969, but the language still startles.

Richards' attitudes towards women seem to have been preserved in aspic around the time England last won the World Cup. You could get away with a lot in a pop song back then. If anyone today released songs like the Hollies' Stop Stop Stop, a chirpy ditty about molesting a belly dancer, or Gary Puckett's creepy No 1 smash Young Girl, the Top 10 would start to look like the sex offenders register. Yet even by the standards of the time, the Rolling Stones were foul to women, from the putdowns and power games of Under My Thumb and Stupid Girl (which Richards attributed to being surrounded by "too many dumb chicks") to the lurid fantasies of Midnight Rambler and Brown Sugar.

Unlike, say, the Beatles' Run for Your Life, the misogyny was not an unfortunate, swiftly regretted blip. The Stones' unpleasantness was integral to their uncanny power. In an era when many young people saw rock stars as potential heroes of the revolution, the Rolling Stones appealed to less altruistic desires: sex and money. If the Beatles were rock's questing superego, then the Stones were the slavering id.

In the fervid atmosphere of the late 60s, not everybody recognized to what extent this was true. Because the Stones' songs sometimes sounded like revolution (largely thanks to the dark drama of Richards' guitar playing), many critics leapt to false conclusions. When Jagger briefly dabbled in politics during 1968, attending an anti-war demonstration in Grosvenor Square and telling the Sunday Mirror that "there should be no such thing as private property", some activists got carried away with the idea that the Stones were insurrectionists: Tariq Ali's radical magazine Black Dwarf even printed the lyrics to Street Fighting Man next to a few lines from Engels. How wrong they were.

In 1970, the critic George Melly concluded that rock'n'roll was "a fake revolt with no programme much beyond the legalization of pot." I doubt Richards quibbled with that verdict. "Politics is what we were trying to get away from," he said at the time. True enough, Jagger dropped his radical rhetoric, and moved on to the big obsession of rock's next decade: making as much money as humanly possible. John Pasche's 1970 illustration of the singer's tongue and lips became the perfect example of band-as-brand. In their bald misogyny, the Stones might have seemed like throwbacks, but in their commercial empire-building they were pioneers.

So we shouldn't be surprised by Richards' reactionary words. While Jagger has often told people what they want to hear, Richards tells the truth of the Rolling Stones. He represents the side of rock music that is amoral, hedonistic, self-serving and red in tooth and claw, offering in place of noble aspirations a guiltier, more primal thrill: the licence not to give a damn.

Dorian Lynskey's book on music and politics, 33 Revolutions Per Minute, will appear in March 2011