I confess to downloading the Stones app and peering at it a few times. We have 'Exhibitionism', the career-spanning, let's outdo Bowie travelling exhibition of the Stones' sanctified toenail clippings. We have an entire online shopping mall of graceless merchandise. We have the music and, on a good night, the Stones are still as good as it gets live. They'd also been well and truly stiffed by their olders and supposed betters - philosophically, financially but at least not sexually.īut, of course, it's a mistake to think that the Mick 'n' Keef persona, perfected over decades, has anything to do with who they truly are today as men in their early 70s. Today, when Jagger comes across as an affable buzzard and Keith as chuckling Uncle Keef, we can perhaps assume that their horrible treatment of Brian and indifference to the havoc they left in their wake at Altamont was simply because they weren't far off being callow youths.
More recently, Paul Trynka's Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones and Joel Selvin's Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels and the Inside Story of Rock's Darkest Day, both excellent and required reading for Stones obsessives, remind us that Jagger and Richards, though not the other boyz, were nasty little shits back then. '100 Years Ago' on Goats Head Soup, with its preposterous attempt by Jagger to be William Blake and Don Covay at the same time, is a peculiar gem. Listening to one of my Stones spotify playlists the other day, I was rocked by 'Dance Little Sister' off It's Only Rock and Roll. Mind you, I'm constantly being surprised by how good some of the music from their supposedly crap mid-70s to late ´80s period actually is. We're the ones weaned on them, who carried our secret love through punk and beyond, as the fire seemed to go out of their music, on record at least. For those of us who grew up in the 1960s and `70s, the Stones were always a mix of the best rock and roll had to offer and the deeply disappointing.