The Rolling Stones opened their latest U.S. tour on August 21 at Boston's Fenway Park, and despite high-end ticket prices too obscene to cite here, the Ameriquest-sponsored caravan will doubtless set new records for bodies shifted and dollars exchanged. But it's gotten way too easy to make jokes about corporate rock and wheelchair rock and cadaver rock. Finally, we must sheath our rapiers and accept that those things are beside the point: Great art has always been possible under dubious patronage (Ameriquest Mortgage isn't the Borgias, as far as we know), and only idiots think rock 'n' roll has no use for its geezers. If the Rolling Stones have become synonymous with lucrative mediocrity and elephantine irrelevance, place the blame where it belongs -- not on Wall Street money or the crime of aging but on the Stones themselves, for having long ago surrendered their sense of artistic vocation.
Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, and Charlie Watts are nothing if not steady workers -- they're laxative-regular in delivering albums and tours -- but with the possible exception of God, no one has coasted so long on past glories. Despite all the harps and hosannas that once greeted such static displays, compromised excursions, and outright wastes of time as Tattoo You (1981), Dirty Work (1986), Voodoo Lounge (1994), and Bridges to Babylon (1997), the Stones have produced only a few songs in the last 25 years that can even squeak in the direction of their greatest work.
“Oh!” the diehard will thunder, “but what about ‘This Song,' and ‘That Song,' and ‘The Other Song'?! And That Album was pretty solid, you must admit.” That the very finest of a quarter-century's recorded work amounts to a handful of hacky grooves, one or two LPs that didn't utterly blow, and a single irreducible classic called "Waiting on a Friend" is testament to how low the Stones have driven the expectations of their audience.
A few years have passed since their last recorded expulsion, and presumably the 2005 Stones are nothing but a few years older. So their new album, A Bigger Bang, has every right to be mere product. It has no right whatsoever to take your breath away. But it does that, more than once. How good is this album? To place it precisely means collating all known critical tiers -- even, perhaps, installing some new ones. It's not quite Great, by the Stones' old standards or anyone else's, but it's better than Good. It's just above Very Good, somewhere between Really Amazingly Quite Good and Surprisingly Almost Near-Great for a Band That Gave it Up Three Decades, Several Tours, One Knighthood, and Untold Millions Ago.
The platter consists of riff-based ravers ("Rough Justice," "Oh No, Not You Again"), emotive ballads ("Streets of Love," "This Place is Empty"), funk ("Rain Fall Down"), angular avant-rock ("She Saw Me Coming"), and even a steady, sinister blues ("Back of My Hand") that allows Mick to once again blow harmonica and blackify his enunciation ("corner" becomes "co-nahhhhh"). On paper, A Bigger Bang is the standard Stones program. Yet aside from a few throwaways and one awful anti-Bush polemic ("Sweet Neo Con"), the record is alive, rejuvenating or simply bursting its clichés from within. The Stones can make edgy music in their sleep, but for the first time in years they sound as if they're actually on the edge, not just trying to remember what it looked like.
And Mick Jagger, of all people, is the catalyst. If the album is anyone's triumph, it's his. From one of the great vocal stylists in rock, he devolved over time into one of the worst -- lazy, unimaginative, all attitude. But here his vocals are full of character and specificity, and every attitude has a twist. On "Streets of Love," he recovers his mid-'60s manner of tasting the words as he sings them, extracting their bitter essence with the subtlety of Olivier playing a Shakespearean rake. On "Rough Justice," full of barnyard sex puns, he resists cuteness and humor and cracks each double entendre like a whip. Jagger thinks it out; Jagger works to make it live; Jagger cares.
Hearing these songs for the first time, I couldn't quite believe them. They set their tones quickly, earnestly, and with dramatic precision, and they held me as they grew into real songs, entered and lived out real states of emotion and excitement. It was stunning and moving to be so stunned and moved.
Yet these songs are as saddening as they are inspiriting. Because while they speak for themselves in the present, they also evoke a past that never existed -- the past that should have followed upon the Stones' period of greatest creativity and self-discovery, the time when they defined who they were, and who they still are.
On the run of classic albums starting with Beggars Banquet (1968) and ending with Exile on Main Street (1972), the Stones not only apotheosized the sexuality and demonism of their image but presaged the fear, confusion, and determination that would take over once age crept in and youth absconded. Songs like "Gimme Shelter," "Wild Horses," "Moonlight Mile," and "Loving Cup" were built on this tension, and swelled climactically with it. Even as they rocked guiltlessly on the peak of their prowess, the Stones' wise eyes were drawn to the valleys ahead, and somewhere down there lay their future: the cold, lonesome acre of the aging rocker, the "bad boy" subdivision.
The Stones would have owned that hinterland, had they staked their claim to it. No other group of mass importance had so completely founded its music and identity on principles of sex, rebellion, violence, diabolism; on the belief that such a thrust-and-slash attitude was essential to any rock 'n' roll worth the name; and on the promise that the dusky, raunchy evils they sang of would remain forever sweaty and thrilling. Surely no other group would have so close and trenchant a perspective on what it meant to grow older and lose the security of those postadolescent myths of power.
It had to have been so easy in the beginning, when the Stones and their British Invasion cohort were all young and roaring. Easy for The Beatles to express the boyish exhilaration they felt at turning on the world, and being turned on by it; easy for The Who to sing "Hope I die before I get old" and mean it, when actually facing the choice was inconceivable; easy for The Rolling Stones to cultivate an attractively debauched image by being just what they were: naughty rock stars, wealthy punks enjoying all the swinging prerogatives of the nouveau riche. The music of The Beatles, The Who, and The Rolling Stones was great partly because it came straight from these youthful reservoirs of arrogance and heedlessness. Sociological hand-wringing aside, youth has it pretty easy: All it needs to justify itself to the world at large is stance and attitude, expressive pipelines to the heart and the body, and a really big mouth to send it all out.
But age must constantly work to justify itself anew, or it's only death deferred. What a hard, noble, and potentially transformative choice it would have been if the Stones had elected, upon the mature and epic triumph of Exile, to not tour every three years. To be millionaires instead of billionaires, perhaps, to forgo all that instant global gratification in favor of a creative band's sore throats, bleeding fingers, and tired eyes. To hunker down in the studio and make albums their focus. To cut out the monkey glands and phallic anthems and sing about loneliness, time, seasons, needs; about putting adult truths to youthful lies about sex and friendship, men and women; about the desperation and wonder of watching all the adolescent certainties fall away, to be replaced by other, deeper faiths.
The thing is, the Stones did produce this type of work in the '70s and early '80s. No consistent exploration, just a song here and there on a long line of interchangeable albums -- but enough to suggest that they could have founded a new rock style, an unprecedented sensibility, a body of mature work no other band could have come near. On the Stones' best ballads, Jagger's lyrics touched tragedy, and his voice moved at the edge of terror; Richards and the band had the force and sensitivity to ennoble his cries with grandeur. If songs like "Angie," "Winter," "Till the Next Goodbye," "Worried About You," and "Waiting on a Friend" -- along with the occasional regenerative ripper like "If You Can't Rock Me" or "When the Whip Comes Down" -- do not constitute the basis of a great third act, a magnificent maturity, then pop music is not an art form, the loins trump the soul, and we're all doing nothing but aging.
But the Stones blew it. They ceded their best themes to Pete Townshend, and The Who became rock's main mouthers of elder anomie. Jagger and Richards settled for being stars; the creation of new music ceased to be their justification, and each succeeding album became little more than the excuse for another tour. "The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World." The title became honorary long ago, about the time the Stones realized no one expected them to go on fighting for it. If they truly were that band for a few years, they could -- and should -- have pushed themselves to be more. If throughout the '60s they were second to The Beatles in mass popularity and mythic force, in the '70s they had a chance to become what The Beatles could never be: The Greatest Rock and Roll Band That Ever Went on Living.
A Bigger Bang is something you should hear, if you care at all about rock 'n' roll. But even as you listen with renewed interest and anticipation, poised for excitement, a persistent sense of loss clouds the experience. You wonder why it took the Stones so long to care again, and you choke a bit to think of the greatness they've wasted, the years they stole from themselves, all the times we never had.
Devin McKinney is the author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
