I AM WRITING THESE WORDS on Sunday, March 25, 2012, at 5:05 P.M. in the barroom of the Memory Motel in Montauk, Long Island (the place immortalized on one of the best songs from Black and Blue). I came here seeking inspiration for some final thoughts and wisdom to share with you about the fifty-year odyssey of the Rolling Stones.
Montauk has its annual St. Patrick’s Day parade on the last Sunday in March, and the post-parade party is in full swing. The place is packed wall-to-wall with inebriated young people clad in every shade of green and the music blaring from multiple speakers is SO loud and SO un-Stones-like that I think I might have wasted a trip out here.
Then out of the corner of my eye in a hidden corner of the bar, I glimpse a wall seemingly festooned with Stones memorabilia. I inch my way toward that oasis, and sure enough there is a treasure trove of photos, newspaper articles, album covers, gold records, and, the pièce de résistance, a large framed print of the tongue logo autographed by Mick, Keith, and Ronnie. Here they are! These are the memories at the Memory Motel! The tangible ones, anyway. The mental ones are left to the imagination: the music created, the songs heard, the love made, are all in the eye and/or mind of the beholder.
Paul Simon once famously wrote, “Preserve your memories. They’re all that’s left you.” Recordable media have raised the level of preserving memories to an art form in and of itself. All manner of books, films, albums, CDs, videos, and websites have chronicled almost every minute of the Stones’ existence. I suppose these accounts (including this one, I hope) will be around for at least the next fifty years to answer any lingering questions about the twentieth/twenty-first century musical group called the Rolling Stones.
And, perhaps the biggest question of them all will be: Will the Stones still matter on their one hundredth anniversary in July of 2062? My answer is, “Unequivocally yes!” As long as there are humans on earth who are still interested in music, then so too will there be great curiosity about the Rolling Stones.
Fifty years ago, rock ’n’ roll was still in its infancy. The ’60s had barely begun. The Beatles were toiling away in relative obscurity. Dylan was still “Hammond’s Folly” at Columbia Records. Bruce Springsteen was twelve years old! John F. Kennedy was the president of the United States. Television was still black and white. And Elvis was just out of the army making G.I. Blues in Hollywood instead of barnstorming the country state by state proclaiming, “Have you heard the news? There’s good rockin’ tonight!”
This was the pop cultural cauldron in which the Stones began to brew.
I’m astonished how quickly the 1963 headline WOULD YOU LET YOUR SISTER GO WITH A ROLLING STONE? turned into WOULD YOU LET YOUR GRANNY GO WITH A ROLLING STONE?
So let me wrap this up with some predictions and speculation about what is yet to come.
The Stones have set the standards and raised the bar at every level of their evolution. They will certainly not go out with a whimper. One final stab at proving to the world—and maybe even proving to themselves—that they were, still are, and always will be the Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band in the World!
Totally in character, they will ignore the actual date of their own fiftieth anniversary. They will let the media nerds and fans (including you and me) do the celebrating for them. Then, when they are ready, they will seriously begin to put together that Farewell Tour (probably in 2013—the year in which both Mick and Keith will turn seventy years of age). They will invite Bill Wyman to join them—and he will. They will invite Mick Taylor to join them—and, of course, you know he will. They will hit the road and take this show to every corner of the earth, but particularly to the USA, where rock ’n’ roll was born, and where the Rolling Stones have lived and reigned for most of their fifty years.
We started this book with July 12, 1962. To bring things full circle, let’s give the final words to Keith Richards:
KEITH RICHARDS: I mean, for me, the beginning of the ’60s was when I got to be eighteen and nineteen, so in a way, it was a magical time, because I actually managed to turn my little juvenile fantasies into a way of life. I mean, I never dreamt that I would be able to do it, so it was magical in that sense, in that I’m still here playin’ rock ’n’ roll, and makin’ a livin’ at it, which is what I wanted to do. And I thought that would be impossible—that that was something that happened to stars. Even when we got our first record out, we all looked at each other with a little bit of dismay, you know? Because there was no precedent at that time; nobody lasted. You shot up there, and you were gone. There was no possible way you could believe that it was gonna last for anything more than another two years. So for us, it was like, “Oh, man, this is great, makin’ records—but that means it’s the beginning of the end,” you know?
I, for one, prefer to think that then (and even now!) it was just the end of the beginning.
