Juiced Up And Sloppy

Some Enchanted Place is only at the ten thousand word mark, so you’re going to have to buy another book in the interim. I suggest my friend Gerard’s latest project, Let It Bleed.

The Rolling Stones. Hmm. Watch carefully children. Nothing up my sleeve…

Keith Richards can’t play the guitar. Charlie Watts can’t play a fill. Bill Wyman is a bass owner, not a bass player. Mick Taylor couldn’t hold his liquor, and looks like he’d rather be wearing a tuxedo and playing behind Cliff Richard. What Mick Jagger is doing onstage is what people do to distract you from the fact they don’t have an ounce of grace or rhythm, or any other compelling reason to look at them. I used to refer to it as “Doing nothing frantically.” Smearing yourself with Elmer’s Glue and then running through Carly Simon’s closet is not style. None of them, least of all the lead singer, can sing one little bit.

Why would any of that matter? For a period of maybe half a decade– perhaps a little more — they were the most important thing in pop music, and for good reason. I was alive in 1969, and believe you me they served as a most compelling soundtrack for the disintegration of the sixties, then immediately and ably transitioned into an excellent drugged-out Magi, present at the birth of the decade of international delirium tremens that followed.

I know at this point they look like your mothers after they’ve been at your grandmother’s beauty parlor all day, and haven’t done anything worth mentioning for thirty-odd years, but they used to get the juke box ambulatory at one point. Just ask Gerard. He’s old, showed up when it counted, and can write.