Getting Dark with The Rolling Stones
What I love about the Rolling Stones is their darkness. Sure they sing plenty of songs about how great rock and roll is or about having sex with tons of women but it’s their darkness that attracts me to them the most. If The Beatles are the utopian vision of the 60s counterculture then the Rolling Stones represent its dark underbelly. In the early months of me getting into Classic Rock the Stones first caught my ear when I saw the film The Devil’s Advocate. Paint it Black played over the end credits and I was drawn to its darkness. Shortly thereafter the 2 disc comp 40 Licks was released and ads for it were playing on TV all the time. Through that commercial I started hearing just how many songs The Rolling Stones had. Plus I was now listening to Oldies and rock stations and the Stones were all over both of them. I asked for the collection for Christmas and once I got it I listened to it constantly.
The Rolling Stones are the longest lasting rock band of all time and probably always will be. The joke of course is that they have been old longer than you’ve been alive and I know for me that’s the truth. Despite some claims to the contrary The Rolling Stones’ music is surprisingly diverse indulging in psychedelia, baroque pop, the blues, RnB, Indian, Funk, Disco, Punk, Reggae, Metal, Folk, New Wave, soft rock, and more. The Beatles define the 60s and Led Zeppelin defines the 70s but The Rolling Stones seem to encompass all of classic rock and top 40 pop from the early 60s through the early 80s. I like how The Rolling Stones can be Blues purists one moment with a song like Little Red Rooster to jumping on the hot trends of the moment like She’s a Rainbow for 1967 Flower Power or Miss You for late 70s Disco. This push and pull between being purists and commercial whores is one of the more fascinating aspects of the group. Of course most of that push and pull comes from Keith Richards and Mick Jagger with Keith always wanting to sound like his childhood heroes Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry and Mick Jagger wanting to be the most popular and hip band in the world. Keith has his eyes in the past and Mick has them set on the present and this battle creates some of the most interesting music that is both of its time and timeless.
Through the Stones you get to also experience the change of sexual norms too as their music gets more and more explicitly sexually until they are being as vulgar as possible by Undercover in 1983. The Rolling Stones are definitely a band that helped loosen up standards and practices within music. First we can’t get no satisfaction, then we want to spend the night together, then we wonder why brown sugar tastes so good and then we are star fucker star fucker star fucker star fucker STARS! It’s actually quit shocking to think just how quickly The Rolling Stones dirtied up music and that influence has been wide reaching for decades now. Yes The Beatles changed how much music sounded with each release but The Rolling Stones showed you what you could now get away with on each new release and inspired acts to not hold back from Motley Crue to Madonna, Prince to Ke$ha and Snoop Dogg to Nikki Minaj. The sleaze the Rolling Stones peddled throughout the 60s and 70s helped normalize sex (not to be confused with romance) in music. Any music people like now that is even kind of raunchy owes a debt to The Rolling Stones. Honestly some of their music such as the title track to Some Girls is so racy that it can still shock 2021 ears.
Yet it’s that darkness that appeals to me the most with The Rolling Stones. Their 1969 Gimme Shelter song off the album Let It Bleed encompasses this darkness better than any other song and like Paint it Black it’s one of the Stones songs that even people who don’t like the Stones admit is a pretty great song. I remember in college watching the Gimme Shelter documentary which captured the Stones on their first U.S. tour in years throughout 1969. You also get to see them in the studio recording Sticky Fingers (my favorite album by them). Playing in front of ecstatic crowds you get to see how their music like The Beatles galvanized a generation.
The Stones wanted to capitalize on the success of their U.S. tour as well as the recent Woodstock festival with their own big festival concert. This of course leads to what everyone remembers about the film which is the infamous Altamont concert. The Stones not knowing any better hired the Hell’s Angels to be their security. Watching the doc it's fascinating to see the tension build and build between the audience, the band and the hell’s angels. You are trying to mentally prepare yourself for what’s to come which is the murder of a young black man by the name of Meredith Hunter who is knifed by a Hell’s Angel. Eventually the Stones realize they bite off more than they can chew and you can see the panic in their faces once they realize just how out of control things got. In a lot of ways this captures the fall of the 60s perfectly as it was a time of great change and optimism but that change came with a price by the end of the decade. The moment of the film that has stuck with me the most over the years is shortly after the murder where the Rolling Stones are trying to get through their set and there is a girl near the front of the stage. She is crying and obviously shaken by what’s happened but she is still singing along to every lyric anyway. That moment made an impression. This girl is obviously scared but she has nowhere to go and so wants to enjoy this concert so she is singing through her tears hoping this will all end soon.
The next Rolling Stone concert documentary I saw was at the end of college and it was Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light. At this point in 2008 the Stones were living legends and the film does a good job peeling back their status as the world’s greatest rock and roll band and getting to see them perform in a more intimate setting playing songs they don’t always perform or get beaten to death on radio. It’s not a film for everyone but if you are a huge fan and want to see a performance by them that stands out from their typical stadium tours then it’s worth checking out.
The 3rd documentary film I saw was also in theaters just a few years ago that was called Ole Ole A Trip Across Latin America with the Rolling Stones. In a lot of ways this is my favorite of the 3 films because I felt I learned so much just watching it. Getting to see how important the Stones’ music is to the Latin American cultures shows how large their reach and influence really is. You get to meet people who love The Rolling Stones so much it's a way of a life! It was interesting to get a view into the different countries of Latin America too. The whole film builds to their concert in Cuba, which is a big deal since besides Audioslave this was the first time a rock band was playing in Cuba. The effort to pull of the Cuba concert is daunting and up to the end no one knows for sure if this concert will happen. Of course it does happen and seeing all of Cubans show up for the show is the most emotional part of the film. You’ve got the young kids who love all things rock but you also have the old timers who never thought this was possible. Like The Paul McCartney show I went to it’s an audience that crosses all generations. Again it shows the power of music to unite people and to make people feel like they matter. I also see the concert and the film as a whole as The Rolling Stones trying to do what Altamont ultimately failed to do and try to make up for that mistake. This concert in Cuba is the opposite of what happened at Altamont back in 1969 and the fact that they were able to do this almost 50 years after 1969 is pretty damn incredible.
Eventually after being a huge fan for years I finally saw The Rolling Stones live during the summer of 2019. My mom brought to my attention that they were performing just 15 minutes away from my apartment at FedEx Field in Hyattsville Maryland and I realized that if I didn’t go to this show I would probably never see them live. So I got the nosebleed seats, which were still over 100 dollars each, but hey I was gonna finally check the Stones off my concert bucket list. My good friend Will, who accompanies me to many concerts, came along for this show too. I will say finding our seats became an epic length adventure in & of itself! The stadium was huge & we definitely got lost a few times but we finally made it to our seats. We ended up missing the opening act, which was fine by me in all honesty because we were there solely for the Stones and they did not disappoint. They put on a hell of a show, hitting most of the big hits but also pulling some solid deep cuts out too like Rocks Off and the title track to Let it Bleed. I was also happy they did song from Goat Head Soup, which is my favorite underrated album by the Stones, with an acoustic performance of Angie.
Overall it was a great show and it was my only concert that year that wasn’t a queer pop show. I went to 13 shows in 2019 & The Stones were definitely the outlier and the most expensive but it was worth it. In a lot of ways I view that concert as the end of my classic rock era which is a strong way to go out if you ask me. The Rolling Stones are pretty much immortal and while you may not love them you have to admit that their longevity and influence is practically without peer. Almost no other rock band has stuck together as long as they have and continued to be as relevant as they have for this long. In a lot of ways they are the biggest blue print for most of the rock bands that came afterwards from Aerosmith to Guns 'N Roses to Stone Temple Pilots and beyond. As a music critic once said if you don’t like the Stones you might not like Rock & Roll.
