The Stones and the Triumph of Marsyas

In theory, the lyrics the white boy is singing ought to enrage the audience with their racism and sexism. In theory.

Gold Coast slaveship

Bound for cotton fields,

Sold in a market

Down in New Orleans,

Scarred old slaver know

He's doin' all right,

Hear him whip the women

Just around midnight--

But 20, even ten rows back, the words can scarcely be heard. They exist not as nouns and verbs, but as a physical mass, a hot, indistinct slur like sausage meat: ground out of the famous lips, eaten by the mike, driven into banks of amplifiers and rammed out through two immense blocks of speakers high on either side of the stage. The vowels mix stickily with the air of the auditorium, already saturated by the fume of tens of thousands of packed bodies, the smoke of 50,000 cigarettes and a few pounds of weed, forming an acrid blue vault overhead.

The Rolling Stones are on the road again, and the drums, electric guitars and vast sneering voice ride into another, undifferentiated wave of sound coming at the stage from the hall --the noise of thousands of kids in vicarious heat. Where these two walls of energy meet, above the stage and its blindly waving fringe of teeny-bopper arms, they precipitate a form. It is Mick Jagger, Jumpin' Jack Flash in person, laced into a white rhinestone-studded jumpsuit and painted like a Babylonian hooker, back-lighted by amber spots and front-lighted by a Mylar mirror the size of a movie screen slung from the roof trusses, belting into the chorus:

Ah, Brown Sugah,

How come you taste so good?

Aaaah, Brown Sugah,

Just like a young girl should . . .

When the Stones open at Madison Square Garden in New York on July 24, it will be the climax of their seventh U.S. tour, which has been, in purely show-biz terms, a vast success. Every concert they have given has been packed solid, the tickets all sold weeks in advance; in San Francisco, the barter price for a $5.00 ticket was an ounce of grass and seven grams of hash, or, from scalpers, $50 cash; by Chicago, the price for a $6.50 ticket had risen to $70--accompanied by the rumor that someone had printed and sold a quarter of a million dollars' worth of fake tickets, which, mercifully, did not turn up at the gate; and in New York, it may well be around $100. The chance of getting a ticket over the counter has irrevocably gone. To frustrate scalpers, the tour managers set up a kind of electronic lottery in which supplicants sent postcards six weeks in advance, and the cards were selected at random. The news of this selection process appeared in smallish print at the bottom of the full-page ads in the New York Times, with the result that thousands of Stones fans who did not read it were still pestering the helpless box offices in early July.

The Stones' new album, Exile on Main St., went to the top of the sales charts soon after the start of the tour and has stuck there since. Even the usual rock-concert freebies --to critics, columnists and the like--have been cut to a minimum. At this point of their career, the Stones need publicity about as much as the second World War did, and the logistics of moving them around America have something in common with that military operation. There are the transport arrangements, involving the precise arrival of trucks, the private jets on stand-by at closed airfields, the split-second timing of those black, secretive limousines that proclaim and conceal the Superstar; the overkill technology of the staging, with its portable hydraulic lifts, remote-control mirrors and waving arcs; even the official correspondents, Truman Capote for Rolling Stone and Terry Southern for Saturday Review. And behind it all, invisible, the accumulated thrust of one of the most prodigious image-building industries the world has ever seen.

The Rolling Stones are the last of the '60s. The Beatles have split up; Dylan will probably never give another national tour. That leaves the Stones, survivors all, in complete possession of that territory where the superstar music of what was once the "counterculture" shades imperceptibly into the booming glitter of Las Vegas stardom. The Stones are not the world's most inventive band; far from it. Their music is almost--but not yet--an anachronism: straight, blasting, raunchy 4/4 time rock 'n' roll, coiling around the hall and virtually shaking the fillings out of the listeners' teeth. The Stones are the white musicians who make black music, and their work openly derives from black rock and black blues--from Chuck Berry and Slim Harpo, from Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins, Robert Johnson. Quite apart from Keith Richard's arrangements, Mick Jagger's lyrics are based on the taut, painful, elliptical images of "classical" blues:

Well, when you're sitting back

In your rose-pink Cadillac,

Making bets on Kentucky Derby day

I'll be in my basement room

With a needle and a spoon

And another girl can take my pain away.

With the coming of the '70s, some of the ground has begun to shift beneath the Stones. Perhaps rock will not become, as some pessimists think, the bubble-gum music of tomorrow; but the Stones' predominantly white, middle-class audience gets younger and younger (Jagger is no longer a 20-year-old playing to other 20-year-olds, but a 28-year-old playing to kids of 15) and, in any case, fewer and fewer musicians nowadays are interested in playing straight gut rock. The trend among musicians seems to be toward a more complex, melodic style that incorporates jazz fusions and extends the vocal phrases instead of locking them solidly into the beat. There are also signs that the mass concert may not be the Grail of musical ambition that it once was, that it may go the way of the three-day rock festival--into oblivion. It took the pop audience a few years to learn that giant concerts tend not to be events of ecstatic mass communion but uncomfortable affairs, jammed and hot, the music distorted, the vibes edgy. It takes a lot of dedication to stand like a parboiled wading bird on a rickety wooden seat through an hour of sound that you have already heard 20 times on your stereo at home, while straining to watch, a quarter of a mile away through the gaps in the jiggling mops of hair, a tiny gyrating mannikin whose face you cannot see but whom you know to be Jagger.

But the fans' allegiance is not to rock as music; it is to the Stones as a sociosexual event. The current tour is the Ascot of the hip, an event that cranks out the latent dandyism of every town the Stones play in and calls into action an elaborate pecking order of the In who possess tickets (to the Royal Enclosure, as it were) and the Out who do not. The point of the concert is not the sound but the presence of Mick Jagger, who is still arguably the supreme sexual object in modern Western culture.

Myth tells us that the god Apollo, whose instrument was the lyre, was challenged to a musical contest by a coarse satyr named Marsyas, who had learned to play the flute. Marsyas lost, and Apollo skinned him alive. In our day, this draconian triumph of reason over instinct has been reversed: Marsyas, the unrepressed goat-man, has won; the Rolling Stones are one of his incarnations. Unlike the Beatles--the very prototype of nice English working-class lads accepted everywhere, winning M.B.E.s from the Queen--the Stones from the start based their appeal partly on their reputation as delinquents. They were always too shaggy, too street smart; instead of creating the illusion of working within English social conventions, as the Beatles did, they simply ignored the rules. Long before Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange into a film, the Stones were acting out the fantasy of being Alex and his droogs. When, around 1965, England's subculture of Purple Hearts and winklepickers began to mutate into hashish and Moroccan caftans, it was the Stones who bore the full weight of Albion's reprobation. Three of them were busted, haled into court and subjected to a campaign of vilification from the English right-wing press. The Stones became the scapegoats of England's drug problem, and their legal vicissitudes provided London with the juiciest gossip since the Profumo scandal.

Yet it is a fact of the Stones' detachment that they have been as inaccessible to the left as to the right. One of the cherished fantasies of the '60s was the prospect of a generation sacking the Pentagon to the boom of electric guitars; but the Stones' only overt comment on this was Street Fighting Man:

Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet

oh boy

'Cause summer's here and the time is right for fighting

in the street oh boy

But what can a poor boy do

Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band

'Cause in sleepy London town

There's just no place for a street fighting man.

It was hardly a call to arms, and Jagger was much assailed for his "indecision"; indeed, an audience in Berkeley booed him for flashing both the peace sign and the clenched-fist power salute. But now that political pop is dead, the harsh, narcissistic irony of the Stones has lasted better than the maunderings of cult heroes like Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin. In a sense, the Stones have lasted well because they never believed that a millennium was just around the corner. The presiding spirit in the Stones' lyrics is neither Marcuse nor Thoreau, but William Burroughs:

Weren't you at the Coke Convention back in 1965?

You're the misbred grey executive I've seen heavily

advertised

You're the great grey man whose daughter licks

policemen's buttons clean,

You're the man who squats behind the man who works

the soft machine

Come now, gentlemen, your love is all I crave

You'll still be in the circus when I'm laughing, laughing

in my grave.

Causes are forgotten, but effects, like DDT, accumulate in the social system: Jagger's Luciferian image is now absolute, fixed. He is even credited, in some quarters, with having "destroyed" the rock festival as a form through the Stones' famous appearance at Altamont in 1969, when a Hell's Angel knifed a man in the audience. It is an illusion that rock culture died or went sour because of Altamont. That event was merely a peg for a death announcement, just as Woodstock served to announce a birth that had actually happened long before. Yet the myth of Jagger's perversity is such that his music was believed to have turned the Hell's Angels into degenerate thugs--which, of course, they already were. There are some brutes whom not even Orpheus can charm, much less Marsyas. An essential aspect of the Orphic myth is that the sweet singer could attract the maenads to pursue him, but could not stop them from tearing him to gobbets; art, a magic key to the irrational, cannot always control the emotions it unlocks. Hence the idiocy of the comparisons that get drawn between Stones concerts and Nazi rallies. Hitler was in command of his audience; Jagger not.

An essential part of Jagger's act is his vulnerability. He is a butterfly for sexual lepidopterists, strutting and jackknifing across the stage in a cloud of scarf and glitter, pinned by the spotlights. Nonresponsibility is written into his whole relationship with the audience, over which he has less control than any comparable idol in rock history; Elvis Presley, who can still tune the fans up and down like a technician twisting a dial, is the opposite. Jagger's act is to put himself out like bait and flick away just as the jaws are about to close and the audience comes breaking ravenously over the stage. No other singer alive has transformed arrogance into such a sexual turn-on: it is the essence of performance, of mask wearing and play, and the spectacle has a curiously private appearance, as though the secret history of a polymorphic, unrepressed child were being enacted by an adult. (His narcissism is such that Jagger married himself, or a close facsimile: Bianca Jagger could be his twin.)

What still confounds the audience is Jagger's ripe compound of menace and energy; he seems an ultraviolent wraith from Fetish Alley. As king bitch of rock, Jagger has no equals and no visible successors, and at least one of his songs has to be autobiographical:

/ was raised by a toothless bearded hag

I was schooled with a strap across my back

But it's all right now

In fact, it's a gas

But it's all right

I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash

It's a gas, gas, gas . . .

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