Rockin' The U.S.A.

THE LONDON HIPSTERS had temporarily lost their way in 1962. The American rockers--Chuck Berry. Little Richard and Co.--had faded; the Chicago blues of Muddy Waters mysteriously had never caught on. The Beatles hadn't broken yet. "Trad" (traditional) jazz was what the middle class dudes convinced themselves they enjoyed. It was a mushy, updated version of Dixieland, believe it or not--very dull, very smooth. "Trad" didn't suite Mick Jagger or his friends Keith Richards and Brian Jones.

The singer and two guitarists belonged to a tiny circle of stubborn white blues players headed by Alexis Komer, himself a guitarist and leader of band called Blues Incorporated. Komer, though a talented musician, was destined to leave his mark as a matchmaker, not a performer. By letting punks like Jagger, Richards and Jones sit in with Blues Inc., he gave them an opportunity to prove they were as good as they said they were.

On July 12, 1962, a group called The Rolling Stones debuted at the Marquee Club. Some weeks later, another former Komer employee, drummer Charlie Watts, signed on with the new band, and they added bassist Bill Wyman because he had the biggest amp in town.

Named for a Muddy Waters song, the Stones departed almost immediately from the static scene in which they were born. They travelled, figuratively at first and later in person, to the United States, where they sought the gritty texture and bitter taste of the music played by American Blacks. "Blues" or "rhythm and blues"--the labels were imprecise and unimportant. When the pace picked up and the beat straightened out, it became "rock and roll." Jagger, Richards and Jones thought they would bring the real thing back to Britain. Once they got moving, they ended up bringing it back to this country as well-changed, of course, and unlike anything heard before on either side of the Atlantic.

Two decade later the Stones are still making their regular pilgrimages to the U.S. of A., though most of the fascination with them now is over their gray hair, not their ingenuity. Still Life, the live travelog of the successful 1981 tour, is yet another in a series of tributes to the group's spiritual homeland. (See review below.) As always, the music bears a mixture of sentiments: raucous enthusiasm tempered by ironic self-knowledge. The Stones appreciated the distance between themselves and the songs they sang from the start: Mick Jagger was not the first Mannish Boy, after all.

THE ACT originally took shape at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, where the Stones spent the first half of 1963 playing cover versions of their favorite American blues and rock tunes. Many of these songs were never recorded, and according to the more reputable historians of the group, including Bill Wyman, they were often little more than copies of the masters. Gradually, the band members gained more confidence. Watts added a shuffle beat where once there was only a straight eight-count. Richards and Jones tried with two guitars what Chuck Berry did with one, and a new, more powerful sound jumped from their amps. "A definition-in-action of rock and roll," critic Robert Palmer called the double-barrelled guitar attack which remained a Stones trademark even after Jones' death and two generations of replacements.

Jagger worked the hardest of all to play off the American traditions and create something new. Listen to the first Stones single, a standard Berry track called "Come On," and you can pick up the taunting combination of Cockney chop and Southern drawl--both self-consciously nurtured--which the singer has toyed with since then.

After a maiden British tour with Bo Diddley, the Stones released their first album in 1964. It countered the early Beatles' cheerful harmonies with a rough-edged interpretation of what Jagger. Richards and Jones imagined America sounded like. Dominated by covers of American hits. The Rolling Stones, prepared critics and fans for the Stones first big single, "Not Fade Away," an aging Buddy Holly rattler which Richards souped up Chicago style.

With the lads from Liverpool off conquering the States, the Stones blasted the likes of Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Swinging Blue Jeans out of England's Top Ten. At the not-so-subtle prompting of producer Andrew Oldham, the press created an image for the group: semi-civilized sex demons, interested only in violating white-skinned virgins and avoiding baths and haircuts. In March 1964, Melody Maker ran a headline which must have made the behind-the-scenes mastermind smile very broadly: "Would You Let Your Daughter Go With a Rolling Stone?" Said Oldham at the time and repeatedly through the years: "For the Stones, bad news is good news."

More English tours followed, and the Stones visited the U.S. twice that year, enjoying only spotty success the first time (they had no songs in the American Top 50 yet) but bulldozing their way through sold-out concerts on the second excursion. They followed an intinerary similar to that of the first British Invaders--including legendary performances on the Ed Sullivan Show--but Stonemania in this country was quite a different phenomenon from that of the Beatles.

John. Paul, George and Ringo created havoc because wherever they went; teenage girls were likely to collapse in great numbers or infiltrate hotels on search-and-scream missions. Mick Jagger was leading what appeared to be an outright insurrection. The Stones incited legitimate riots by 1965 and rarely got though more than four or five songs. Their fans either rushed the stage and destroyed their equipment or had so intimidated the hapless policemen sent to protect the performers that the power would be shut down.

The collision between the Stones and the States had an impact on the music as well. Convening here with their idols--Berry, Waters, Diddley. Howlin Wolf--they received new encouragement to use the American classics as a foundation as they moved onto orginal work. While Richards honed his barebones, metallic mixture of rock and R & B. Jagger discovered that the old stories about screwing and getting screwed over could be retold--with more of a snarl, if that seemed right, or even a touch of parody, to show that the whole business didn't mean much to the Stones in the first place.

THE STORY that Keith Richards dreamed up "Satisfaction" while skidding around in some fast car is too good to be true. It was that song that launched the Stones into their most vital stage, from 1965 to 1972. "Satisfaction" was also a song about America, specifically, about fast women and grabbing for success. The drugs soon entered this fast-moving world, and the bad little boys began growing into the reputations carved out for them as early as 1963. Eventually, the dope, smack, uppers and downers, the busts and jail sentences, piled up to form a wall even the Stones could not scale. They stayed home from 1967-69, recording ever more varied and inventive albums--Between the Buttons, Beggar's Banquet. Let it Bleed, but remained largely invisible to the outside world.

The rock society meanwhile was turning its attention to politics, and some Americans wanted to ascribe one or another leftist philosophy to the Stones. Again "Satisfaction" became the focus of discussion--the first Jagger-Richards song about youth discontent with the status quo, the analysts pronounced in retrospect. As the Stones withdrew culturally into the psychedelic-drug world that would ultimately cost them Brian Jones, they were labelled leaders-in-exile of the revolt. "Street Fightin Man" was dubbed an "anthem."

The progression would have made some sense: heirs to the traditions of American native music become heroes of the Now Generation and join the battle against the corruption that is the Establishment. But the Stones wanted nothing to do with that particular aspect of the American scene. In a rare discussion on the subject, Jagger told the West German magazine Der Spiegel. "Oh no, I don't sing of revolution . . . 'But what can a poor boy do, except sing in a rock and roll band'--what else can I do besides sing? The song itself is the only thing that has to do with street fighting." As for the growing cult which bowed to the Stones as the high priests of rock satanism a la "Sympathy for the Devil," well, the Stones didn't really take responsibility for that either. "All this stuff about my leading and perverting them," complained Jagger," . . . we just sort of went along together, didn't we?"

The Stones tried to break out of their stupor after Jones' death in 1969 by returning to their roots in this country. The result was the bloody Altamont concert, an event which might have finished the group but which actually snapped them out of their self-destructive cycle of drug crises and inspired them to perform the songs they had produced in the studio. They escaped England and America for Southern France and from there re-emerged in the 1970s with not just one fresh look and sound, but a whole series of them.

THE STONES proved themselves eager to adapt--to changing musical styles, to writing and playing without Jones, to using the small army of part-time musicians they began carting around, and to making music which was no longer startling but was till by and large the best the genre had to offer. As a American listeners distracted themselves with disco, reggae, and new wave, the Stones decided to keep up rather than call it quits. There was something a little silly about the group that had redefined rock and roll 10 years earlier stringing itself along from year to year with a mix-and-match repertoire, but the Stones knew that. They had predicted it in 1972 with the highly complex Exile on Main St., where for the first time they raised the dominant theme of the decade for themselves: Still getting off, but getting old and looking back; how much longer can this last?

David Dalton, Stones analyst par excellance, looked back at the outset of the 1981 tour: "Like remote planets revolving in space, the Stones throughout the seventies continued to exert a magnetic pull known in physics as action at a distance. Their own removal from action infused their albums with a diffuse electric, reflective, anomalous and prolix sound."

Finally the Stones returned. They cut down, new wave-style, on Some Girls, stayed spare on Emotional Rescue and blasted back into the past with Tattoo You, certainly the best rock and roll album ever put out by a bunch of guys in their forties. They are now back to where they started, reviving Eddie Cochran and Smokey Robinson on Still Life and shamelessly churning through "Under My Thumb" and "Let's Spend the Night Together" while millions upon millions bellow their approval. In their latest incarnation as rock archivists, the Stones are once again leading the U.S. back to its own great heritage. And by this time, part of what they're bringing home and introducing to a new generation is wholly their own.

Several of the quotations recounted above are taken from David Dalton's book. The Rolling Stones, the First Twenty Years.