It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: Kids are stupid. They have horrendous taste in music and their stories are boring and ramble on pointlessly. I was no different. So now that I’m a dad myself I don’t blame my father for his reluctance to let me chose the music for our family time. I’d say hey, you wanna listen to the new White Lion single on cassette? And he’d say yeah, no. Just no. How about Rolling Stones on the turntable? I was pretty easily swayed.
So while I was steady wasting money on 80’s hairspray metal (yesterday I got a Cinderella song stuck in my head. Oh, Tom Keiffer, how I hope you found a girl tough enough for your love.) I was getting an education in Rock and Roll from old Stones LP’s.
Because really, fuck the Beatles and Elvis too, The Rolling Stones perfected the art. They started in smart Carnabie Street suits and 20 years later were dressed like homeless court jesters. Their founder had a tribe of kids from different women and drowned in his pool while simultaneously overdosing. That is dedication. They wrote songs and dedicated albums to Satan while Ronnie James Dio was still studying pharmacy. They held a concert so dangerous that guns were pulled, a guy got knifed to death and The Grateful Dead were so terrified they left in a helicopter. They didn’t just opt out, the Dead straight evacuated.
Cause that is what rock is about; random sex, violence and general badness. It’s not about clever lyrics or musicianship. Lets take musicianship as I mentioned it. Jagger was never a particularly good singer, I can never remember the drummer and bassist’s names for a reason and Keith Richards played the guitar like he had been taught by Chuck Berry but over the telephone. As lyricists, they were just good enough to hold you’re attention. What they did though, better than anyone, from their founding in the early sixties till their unfortunate demise in 1980, was create music for people to make bad decisions to. A fucking-up soundtrack.
While I am talking some unarguably true but completely unverifiable shit, I will list some highlights for whoever is reading this to check out, vis- a -vis the aforementioned.
- 1965’s “Out Of Our Head”. Best song is Playing With Fire. Is misogyny good? No. Does it make good music? Always.
-1967’s “Their Satanic Majesties Request”. Holy shit, what a bad album. Awesome title, awesome cover, but holy Christ, what a bad album. But, fuck All You Need Is Love, right? Right?
-1968’s “Beggars Banquet”. Great album all the way through. Sympathy For the Devil. and Stray Cat Blues, ‘cause of the misogyny aspect I mentioned earlier.
1970’s live “Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out”. There is so much morphine in the guitar sounds on this record you could get your teef did.
1970-1980. Pretty much any or all of it sounds like a seedy party.
Yeah so that sums up the Rolling Stones according to me. Had the entire band not died in a freak hovercraft disaster off the coast of Argentina in June of 1980, who knows what heights they may have reached. Ha, get it? Cause they sucked from there on out. Well, fuck you too.
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