50 Years of The Rolling Stones
Ian RankinThis year marks 50 years since the formation of The Rolling Stones and, to begin a short series of posts in their honour, we are pleased to welcome renowned novelist – and almost equally renowned Stones fan – Ian Rankin back to The Spectator Arts Blog.
When I first heard the Rolling Stones, I hated them. The album was Let It Bleed. It belonged to my sister’s boyfriend. He had paid one pound-nineteen-and-eleven for it at a record shop in Kirkcaldy. It came with a poster, and the sleeve was interesting. I’d no idea who Delia Smith was, but she’d done a good job of that cake. I was a bit of a poster fanatic – my tiny bedroom was plastered with them, including the ceiling. I got them from the weekly music paper Sounds. There was a free colour poster in the middle pages of every issue. I didn’t know who half the bands were, but the posters went on the wall. Not the Let It Bleed poster though – that was already adorning my sister’s boyfriend’s bedroom.
I put my T Rex singles to one side and tried the album. Dear me, no. Not catchy enough by half. And what were those lyrics about – Monkey Men and Midnight Ramblers and Boston Stranglers? ‘You can come all over me,’ the singer rasped. Thanks but no thanks. I was eleven and just not interested in these comings and goings. But even then I could tell there was something sleazy, pungent and transgressive about the songs. They were messages from a world apparently free of taboos as well as basic hygiene.
By the time I was 13 I had moved from Bolan to prog. I bought Goat’s Head Soup (on cassette) with some Christmas money. I liked it, even though for the first couple of years I misheard the chorus to ‘Star, Star’ and thought it suitable for family listening over a game of Scrabble. Next up were Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street and Some Girls (on vinyl), and even a bootleg, which a shop was playing over its loudspeakers when I went in one day. I enjoyed charting the group’s evolution, from R’n’B through the Sixties counterculture and into the Showband Seventies.
Lewd and occasionally crude, they were also a brilliant singles band and a prodigious gatherer of all the talents. Philip Norman’s biography The Stones filled in a lot of the gaps in my knowledge. I sat there in my bedroom, hundreds if not thousands of miles away from ‘the action’, and felt connected to this world of outlaws, vagabonds and recidivists. If they were rebels, surely I, too, was a rebel, through the act of listening to their music.
In time I began to appreciate the actual musicianship: the way Brian Jones could learn any instrument handed to him; the transformation of a few licks by Keith Richards into instant anthems; the bluesy genius of Mick Taylor; the lubricious white boy howl of Jagger.
Though I lost touch with them for a time during punk, I dusted off the old albums again in my mid-twenties. Let It Bleed had become my favourite by then, and it still is. The story of the band had always seemed to take precedence over the story of the music, but as the group faded from public view (meaning the front pages of the newspapers) the music was allowed to speak more loudly and clearly. It took me back to the musicians who had influenced them in the first place, to the blues of Mississippi and Chicago.
When I began writing the Inspector Rebus novels, I knew Rebus would be a fan. He was a no-nonsense working-class guy who’d broken a few rules in his youth. The Stones would have appealed to him more than the Beatles. ‘She Loves You’ or ‘Paint It Black’? There could be only one winner. I even started nicking the titles of Stones albums for my books – Let It Bleed (of course), Black and Blue, Beggars Banquet.
This last was a collection of short stories, and there was one in there called ‘Glimmer’ (an in-joke for Stones fans), which started with the recording of ‘Sympathy For the Devil’ and ended with Altamont. A few years after it was published, I was invited to dinner with Bill Wyman. I handed him a copy of the book and he scanned the story, shaking his head occasionally and saying ‘That didn’t happen… nor that… wasn’t like that… or that.’
This flags up that the public image of the band blinded everyone to the more mundane realities of a life spent gigging and recording. As the band notches up 50 years as a going concern, Charlie Watts will probably affirm that he’s spent five years playing drums and 45 sitting around waiting for stuff to happen. Wyman, of course, got out and seems to enjoy touring with his Rhythm Kings, focussing on blues standards and rarities.
But he still sometimes plays (and sings) ‘Honky Tonk Women’.
I’ve seen the Rolling Stones play live only once – a ‘secret’ fan club gig in London. They were majestic, but not in the least Satanic. Last year, when Keith’s autobiography was published I managed a couple of minutes in his company, though I’ve almost no idea what I said. I got my book signed though, along with a vinyl copy of Exile on Main Street. He might be cracking on a bit, but he still defines much that was great about rock’s defining decade.
My one regret in almost 40 years of listening to the band is that I didn’t purloin my sister’s boyfriend’s copy of Let It Bleed. Complete with poster (and sticker informing the purchaser of said poster), it fetches around 300 quid these days on eBay. Not a bad return on one pound-nineteen-and-elevenpence…
The Rolling Stones 50th anniversary CD singles box set is released on the 11th of April.
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Comments
April 3rd, 2011 2:21pm
wrinkled weasel
There are only two kinds of people in the world; Stones people and Beatles people. And possibly Pink Floyed people. Ok, so there are only three kinds of people in world, but the thing is, they are mutually incompatible. It is not that Beatles people do not know that Beatles were just as nasty, just as wicked as the Stones and neither is it the case that Beatles people are unmanly, like Quiche Lorraine or car fragrancers. Beatles people are politically, diametrically opposed to Stones people.
Ken Loach lives in Hampstead, but I bet he's a Stones person.
Get the drift?
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April 3rd, 2011 8:15pm
JohnBUK
"There are only two kinds of people in the world; Stones people and Beatles people."
Quite right, and I was the former. The intros by Keith were the defining feature for me, unmatched by the anyone, especially the Beatles until Mark Knopfler appeared.
I saw the Stones, at Hammersmith I think, and although the sound wasn't good the whole performance was of course electric. I have most of the early albums including Let it Bleed and still play them in the car. Entertainment!
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April 3rd, 2011 9:09pm
James
There are only two types of people in the world - those who think there are two types of peopls in the world and those that don't.
But the Stones for me anytime.
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April 3rd, 2011 11:00pm
daniel maris
There are only two types of people in the world -those who comment on the
categorisation of people into two types of people and those who don't.
The Stones were one trick ponies. A very nice pony it was, but essentially repetitive: dirty, slow cod-American rock interlaced with the odd ballad.
Compare and contrast with the fountain of multifarious creativity that was The Beatles, who - whilst starting in the same territory (dirty cod-American rock) - ended up redefining rock and pop and exploring new melodic worlds.
I don't really think there is any contest.
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April 4th, 2011 12:22am
Archie
Well I heard the Stones first record (Chuck Berry's "Come On") on Jack Jackson's programme on Radio Luxembourg in - when was it - 1962? That was it for me; from then on the Stones ruled absolutely. I laugh at the bemusement of my North American chums when I tell them that the Stones were far bigger than The Beatles here, then. I suspect it might be different now.
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April 4th, 2011 1:29am
Sherlyke McJagger
I didn't realize liking a band, or listening to music was a contest.
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April 4th, 2011 4:42am
Rob Wilson
I love them both (Beatles and Stones), but then again I'm a gemini....(schizophrenic tendancies)
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April 4th, 2011 12:04pm
Anton
I agree with the one-trick ponies comment. The Stones were my introduction to the blues and I thank them for that and thought those early records were great. Whereas the Beatles tried to imitate American soul singers and rock n' rollers and failed but came up with something great in its stead. And by the way, I never forgave Jagger for making off with and corrupting the love of my teenage years, Marianne Faithful.
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April 4th, 2011 12:42pm
Andrew Murray
Small memory slip by Ian. Goats Head Soup was not released until 1973, AFTER Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street. For me, it was the record that marked the start of the Stones' slow, and now inordinately prolonged, artistic decline.
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April 4th, 2011 1:37pm
yank
They both knocked off American music and artists. I like 'em both, but if it's "influence" you're arguing, both were influential only as some of the first in the genre of "supergroup"... a shamelessly commercialized era.
They were openly aping others, from years before. Hard to see anybody today reaching back to ape them... better to go to original source.
The whole jet-powered "invasion" thing, complete with airport ramp dismount by fully uniformed personnel, was a fortunate marketing happenstance over here, amping up those particular supergroup brands. This was truly a masterstroke of commercial genius.
Very good pop music. But no more than that.
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April 4th, 2011 3:36pm
ken barrett
Some time in early 1963 I opened my copy of New Musical Express to find a photograph and a brief article on a group I had never heard of before. One look at that photograph, and the long hair, the swagger, the attitude of the people within it, and I was completely hooked. They stood for everything I stood for. There was no one in rock 'n' roll, or anywhere, who looked like that. And they clearly didn't care. They were defiance personified. That era has long gone, and unless you were there at the time it is impossible to understand what a buttoned-down world we lived in then.
Later that year I saw the Rolling Stones on their first national tour. They were near the bottom of a bill headed by the Everly Brothers. I had been to most of the big package tours that passed through London around that time, but they were the most exciting act I had seen in my 16 years. I follow them to this day, not as keenly as I once did, admittedly, but they are part of my life.
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April 4th, 2011 5:22pm
Verity
WW - Wrong. There are "neither of the above" people.
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April 4th, 2011 8:03pm
daniel maris
Well we can all see the Rolling Stones were aping the great blues artists of the USA with a lot of their songs.
But who were The Beatles supposed to be aping with Strawberry Fields, She's Leaving Home, Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite, All You Need is Love, Penny Lane, I am a Walrus, Day in a Life, Here Comes the Sun, Something, the Abbey Road song cycle...? They were all stunningly original creations.
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April 5th, 2011 3:10am
Scott Jordan Harris
Thank you for another wonderful post, Ian. It's a great pleasure to have you back on our blog - and to read the history of your love for the Stones. I spent most of the time my classmates were listening to Parklife and What's The Story Morning Glory? listening to Exile on Main Street. I regret nothing.
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April 5th, 2011 9:28am
Yam Yam
I'll always treasure Keith Richard's put-down upon hearing that Tony Blair was one of his biggest fans.
"This man is the prime minister of Britain; and I'm his hero? Scary, man!"
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April 5th, 2011 1:54pm
yank
You're speaking of pop music, not vespers. And half of those songs are garbage, to boot. For example, all that drug induced sitar nonsense mighta got through to the hardcores, but it was just noise to the rest.
Hey, pop music is fine, Brittany Spears and the like, but it's just pop music. It's not influential today. Heck, King Crimson and Robert Fripp have been more influential on modern music, as well as the aforementioned Pink Floyd and others.
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April 5th, 2011 7:20pm
Michael Kennedy
A belated comment, due to being how had to sign on the Spectator site.
Always much preferred the Beatles. Saw Stones a couple of times in 70's. Much preferred Who.
Stones were a great band but last one I bought was Exile
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April 5th, 2011 8:13pm
Sue Gold
Wow! You did come in at a bad time Ian. Their earlier music was much more bluesy - except when they wandered off to a bit of psychedelic.
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April 12th, 2011 2:49pm
aaliyah slaughter
music shouldnt be a competition between any band, it all depends on how people express their self with their music
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