Dissing the Stones

Well, 50 years of the Rolling Stones does seem like an awful lot, even for Stones fans.

When the group first appeared, they were the flip side of all the neat and clipped British groups that, once you got past the need of a haircut, you could take home to mother. It wasn't just the Beatles. There were all these other groups like the Dave Clark Five and Gerry and the Pacemakers (not a reference to automated heartbeats) and Chad and Jeremy, and they all wore suits and they were all on the British Sound bandwagon, and it was all rather fun. Cute, in its way. But the Stones were not cute. Call them what you will, they never looked as if you could bring them home to mother, and more to the point, you couldn't bring home their music. They started out playing a rough R&B blend that matured into a unique Stones sound around the time of "Street Fighting Man" and they eventually started billing themselves as the World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band. They billed themselves as the World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band for long enough for all of them to become grandparents.

Stones fans, owning a clutch of amazing albums from a period of a few years beginning in the late 60s, have had to go through a lot of aging themselves, and if they've continued buying new Stones releases, a little bit of a disappointment. Let's face it. Real rock really is a young person's game. There's some good old rockers out there, don't get me wrong, but nobody starts out as an old rocker. And if you look at the Stones today, they actually look older than most. Time isn't kind to former junkies:

Their original appeal, as the New York Times pointed out in 1972, was as a scandalous symbol of "generational independence"; now that we baby-boomers are too rickety to do much dancing, the Stones serve as a precious relic of our teenage days. Encouraged by them, we can all grow old disgracefully.

Peter Conrad writes a review: The Rolling Stones: Fifty Years by Christopher Sandford, and he manages to dish enough dirt on one page to make that whole 50 years of Stones just fly by. The thing is, he sort of nails it. The music still stands, though, the old stuff that is. I meant it when I cited "Street Fighting Man": go back and listen to the original.

Rock and roll was never better. Can the Stones help it if it's not 1968 anymore?
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