Old Gods Almost Dead
Stephen Davis
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Outlaws
The Difference
Dionysus Is in the House
Rolling . . .
one:
The Rollin’ Stones
* * *
two:
We Want the Stones!
* * *
three:
No Satisfaction
* * *
four:
Catch Your Dreams Before They Slip Away
* * *
five:
Che Guevara with a Band
* * *
six:
Let It Bleed
* * *
seven:
The Devil’s Right-Hand Man
* * *
eight:
The Glimmer Twins
* * *
nine:
World War III
* * *
ten:
Old Gods
Selected Sources
Acknowledgments
Index
Photo Credits
About the Author
Also by Stephen Davis
Copyright Page
* * *
For Stu Werbin and Bob Palmer
In memoriam
Owls—they whinny down the night;
Bats go zigzag by.
Ambushed in shadow beyond sight
The outlaws lie.
Old gods, tamed to silence, there
In the wet woods they lurk,
Greedy of human stuff to snare
In nets of murk.
Look up, else your eye will drown
In a moving sea of black;
Between the tree-tops, upside down,
Goes the sky-track.
Look up, else your feet will stray
Into that ambuscade
Where spider-like they trap their prey
With webs of shade.
For though creeds whirl away in dust,
Faith dies and men forget,
These aged gods of power and lust
Cling to life yet—
Old gods almost dead, malign,
Starving for unpaid dues:
Incense and fire, salt, blood and wine
And a drumming muse,
Banished to woods and a sickly moon,
Shrunk to mere bogey things,
Who spoke with thunder once at noon
To prostrate kings:
With thunder from an open sky
To warrior, virgin, priest,
Bowing in fear with a dazzled eye
Toward the dread East—
Proud gods, humbled, sunk so low,
Living with ghosts and ghouls,
And ghosts of ghosts and last year’s snow
And dead toadstools.
Robert Graves, “Outlaws”
The Difference
Our source was sitting in the sun on the terrace of a café in London’s Notting Hill on a recent spring afternoon. She’s a sophisticated Scots pixie in her fifties, wearing her white hair cropped short and no makeup, in cool black clothes with Berber silver and coral on her wrists and ears. She worked for the Rolling Stones for years and still has their home phone numbers in her book. She knows everything and everyone—the wives, ex-wives, old ladies, kids, even the grandchildren. She knows where they buried the bodies, at least some of them.
“There is this continental divide between Mick on one side, and Keith and Ronnie on the other,” she says. “And nobody—no one—can cross that invisible line and be mates with both sides. They are in separate universes. Anyone who works for the Stones and even tries . . . You don’t get called for the next tour. You’re over, baby. Dead meat. You can’t imagine what that feels like. You haven’t experienced rejection until you’ve been rejected by the Rolling Stones.
“There’s an old saying among those who have known the Stones a long time. It’s that Mick wants to be Keith, and they all want to be Charlie. Why Charlie? Because he’s genuinely hip, he’s got innate good taste, and understands restraint. Charlie kept his family together, and he never got off on the star trip that the rest of them did. He’s just Charlie Watts, and when the job’s over, he goes home and feeds his horses.
“But there’s a wall between Mick and Keith, forty years after they started that band, and no one gets through it. Anyone who tries to bridge that gap—forget it. You don’t stand a chance in hell.”
Dionysus Is in the House
July 1962, London. Cross busy Oxford Street to enter the neon world of Soho, with its strip clubs, peep shows, coffee bars, Italian restaurants, and basement music clubs. The narrow streets are full of night people and tourists, garish women, touts luring people into clubs with clever cockney street raps. The smell of espresso is in the air, the smell of sex, the smell of suicide. It is a desperately lively world—the tawdry nightlife of a central London still scarred by World War II bomb damage.
Outside the Marquee, a basement club on Oxford Street, a small mob of kids can’t get down the crowded stairs. Up the steps throbs some crude-sounding, powerful rock and roll music, crisp and black. Drum and bass back up a pounding boogie piano and wailing harmonica. A voice drawls Chicago blues with an American accent. It’s the public debut of a new West London band who call themselves the Rollin’ Stones.
Two years later, and they’ve spilled across the Atlantic. Five shaggy, shadowy young men stare out from the viscerally jarring sleeve of England’s Newest Hitmakers, their first American album. Unlike the tidy and cheeky Beatles, the sullen Rolling Stones look medieval, saw-toothed and weird, like something out of time. Like characters in an old saga. And the music: the Stones play hard-hearted, funky anthems—“The Last Time,” “It’s All Over Now”—the polar opposites of the familiar pop love songs of the time. Mick Jagger’s loose lips, indecently long hair, sharp clothes, and blatant insolence seem even more important than the music. Brian Jones’s magical cathode-ray aura, his flaxen blond hair glowing like a silver crown, transfixes a generation of young romantics. The Stones come on like a working-class gang armed with black music, rebels with a cause. They stake their claim with incendiary live shows featuring a harmony of sexual panic, fighting, riots, tear gas, violent cops, fan mania, mobbed limos, and chaotic getaways. The Stones, their audience, and the cops clash in a mass, desperate embrace that is loud, edgy, and blatantly erotic. Sex and death go hand in hand. Sirens scream and the earth moves. Dionysus is in the house.
Of course they’re not really gods, only gifted mortals upon whom modern media have conferred a kind of immortality. But the Rolling Stones story does have a pantheistic mythos to it. Their advent was uncannily prophesied by a shaman twenty years earlier and five thousand miles away. They started as a band of starving young outcasts on an improbable quest, and ended up a Plutonian offshore corporation that could generate megamillions when it mobilized for a tour. Their imagery is unforgettably Olympian: romantic heroes, senses deregulated, bathed in red-lit narcosis as they celebrated their black masses of carnal cravings and occasional human sacrifice. Rose petals flung from a wicker basket flutter down on drenched, exhausted worshipers. A priapic rock godling rides a giant throbbing phallus to climax a steamy indoor fertility rite. Twin brotherly guitarists, gaunt from constant intoxication, playing the stars from the sky like a pair of magic ravens. Tiny figures on immense, Babylonian stadium stages, magnified and projected by oracular Jumbotrons, remote as gladiators in the arena. Their lives, and deaths, echo the legends of the old gods with their operatic comings and goings, planetary mobility, and mercurial tales of love, lust, and revenge. The Rolling Stones were more than just a rock and roll band. They took the trouble to show us new worlds, and new ways of living
in them as well.
In 1963, John Lennon was asked how long the mighty, unstoppable Beatles would last. He answered five years. They lasted six. But the Rolling Stones plowed on, deploying a complex, improvisational mix of artistic integrity, steel-hearted careerism, bold appropriation, media manipulation, sexual tension, shameless hype, and quality aesthetics—an intuitive blend of instinct, luck, and calculation that kept them relevant, and improbably cool, through four decades of style revolutions, cultural changes, and technological advances.
Aside from the strength of their music and the hold it continues to have on two generations of fans, the most interesting aspect of the Rolling Stones has been the cross-pollinating interaction they had with almost every important artistic movement of the past forty years. There was a certain epic grandeur in how Brian Jones’s early Rolling Stones led a successful crusade to inoculate America with its own neglected rhythm and blues while forcing a sclerotic and diminished England to inhale a whiff of anarchic insolence. The Stones then morphed into a soul band, introducing Motown and Memphis hits to their European audience, before they brashly crashed America in 1965 as the epitome of the flash London pop group with a string of dark, ascerbic hit records, starting with the legendary “Satisfaction.” From then on, the Stones became indispensable icons of pop and intersected with, borrowed from, and reinspired some of the most important artists of the times. With the Beatles and Bob Dylan, they cornered a heroic transatlantic triad of sixties pop genius. The Stones had important links with the international Beat fathers (William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Terry Southern), Andy Warhol’s pop art demimonde in New York, the California music scene, and masters of avant-garde European cinema like Godard, Vadim, and Antonioni. When their music needed fresh inspiration, the Stones became adept at grabbing crucial new sounds at the moment they emerged aboveground: Moroccan rhythms, Brazilian samba, the glam rock of David Bowie, the New Orleans funk of the Meters, Jamaican reggae, disco, punk, hip-hop, and techno. But ultimately, Sex was what the Rolling Stones were all about. Their famous logo—scarlet lips open in invitation, lolling wet tongue, smiling white teeth—advertises oral sex like it’s their real trademark. And their taboo-breaking sadomasochism—in their music and presentations as well as their daily reality—drove audiences to frenzy, while their love stories—their famous golden muses and the sexual tension inside the band—captivated a loyal army of fans for decades.
The Stones and the other great rock bands were about climax, catharsis, narcissism, virtuosity, excess, and the transformative power of love. The Stones personified the exalted status of rock musicians as the troubadours of our age, preserving, in their often clumsy and unconscious way, the ancient popular romantic traditions of the West. The best rock concerts were the rites of crypto-religious societies that actually formed the largest mass audience in history. The amplified power of the music, its visionary themes, and its jungle rhythms opened expansive spiritual vistas for its audience far beyond the routines of everyday life. It validated the yearnings and expressed the fantasies of millions of listeners. The greatest rock stars, living in the moment of performance and on the edge of psychic derangement, rewarded in their youth beyond their wildest dreams, became their generation’s Byronic exemplars of action and experience. When they flamed out and died, like Brian Jones, they were transformed into sacrificial heroes and mythologized. Their fans made their graves into shrines.
The cultural landscape that nurtured all this is now history. Rock music has become “classic rock.” The pop music the Stones’ own kids listen to is fragmented into digital bits of subcultural info: techno, hip-hop, remixes, deejay culture, ambient soundscaping, speed garage, multi-culti world beat, and so on. The twentieth-century rock hero is obsolete in these antiheroic times. Video killed the sheer mystique of bands that kids once had to pay to see, if only to find out what they looked like, just as the excited dash to the record store has become the downloading of a computer file. The bald turntablist replaces the longhaired rock virtuoso. The ritualistic rock concert gives way to the more democratic rave.
The Rolling Stones, at this writing, are still the reigning world champions of rock, untouchable icons of their age. Any attempt at a full biography is limited by the happy fact that their story isn’t over; that the Stones might be laying waste beyond the ramparts of your town, tonight, as you read this. They will hold their heavyweight title as long as they choose, and as long as they remain in the keeping of the generation that understands their entire value, their music’s deepest meanings, and the transcendental distinction of their great songs. That understanding is what this book is all about.
Something magical happens, whether in a garage or a stadium, when the drummer sits down and starts to rock the beat. It’s the call of the orgy, the death of the square, the end of civilization. Primitive instincts kick in as the mating dance starts, and the tribal elders begin to initiate the young. Draw closer to the fire and listen as the story burns away the days, the years, and the decades. The oft-mocked creases and wrinkles of a veteran rocker’s middle age tighten into the beauty of rebel youth. The primal Bo Diddley beat—a jungle telegram of drum and bass line—throbs in the ambient, subsonic background. And away we go, back into the past, to the dusty Delta of the Mississippi River, from where the Rolling Stones drew their original, brilliant, and enduring inspiration.
Old gods almost dead—but not just yet.
Rolling . . .
* * *
Gonna Be a Rollin’ Stone
The Delta is a low, flat water world of bayous, creeks, levees, and dikes holding back the river from flooding some of the best land in the world for growing cotton and rice. The blues comes from a landscape of cotton fields, gravel roads, groves of pecan trees, kudzu vines, canebreaks, sharecroppers’ cabins, tenant farmhouses, flooded rice fields, and an immense white sky full of water and dust. When the cotton is high, it’s a hundred degrees in the shade.
One hot day in July 1941, an old Ford raised a yellow cloud of dust on the gravel road leading to Sherrod’s Plantation, near Clarksdale, Mississippi. A tall black farmer, twenty-six years old, named McKinley Morganfield became alarmed when the car turned off the road and headed for his cabin behind a row of trees. He worried the car contained Mississippi state revenue agents looking for the corn liquor still, hidden in a thicket nearby, that supplied a juke joint he ran on the side.
But inside the car was Alan Lomax, a young folklorist collecting field recordings from southern plantations and prison farms for the Library of Congress. Lomax had heard of Morganfield’s singing fame on the streets of Clarksdale, where he was known as Muddy Waters. That afternoon, after hours gaining his trust, Lomax recorded Muddy Waters for the first time, performing Robert Johnson’s “Walkin’ Blues,” which Lomax retitled “Country Blues No. 1.”
Lomax questioned Muddy closely about Robert Johnson, the flamboyant slide guitar prodigy, who was rumored to have cut a deal with the devil at a deserted gravel crossroads, trading his immortal soul for mastery of his instrument. Johnson played on street corners in Delta market towns like Clarksdale and Helena, Arkansas, where he was discovered by a talent scout in the music store where he bought his strings. He played his rawboned country blues in backwoods juke joints, fish fries, house parties, levee camps, taverns, lumber camps. He could light a fire under dancers high on corn liquor with propulsive rhythms and a tapping foot. His own songs were a mix of psychic torment and funny imagery full of salacious metaphors for sex.
Johnson’s archetypal recordings—“I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues,” “Love in Vain,” “Walkin’ Blues,” “I’m a Steady Rollin’ Man,” “Hellhound on My Trail”—became the structural template on which future musicians built the rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and eventually rock music that captured the cultural arenas of the West forty years later. Robert’s uncanny guitar often sounded like two or three people playing together, and the rhythms he tapped out with his right foot anticip
ated the R&B band arrangement. “Bach on the bottom and Mozart on top,” as Keith Richards put it.
Muddy insisted he had never actually seen Robert in person, but had been taught Robert’s songs by the older bluesman Son House. Much later, Muddy did remember seeing Robert Johnson playing on a street corner in Friar’s Point, Mississippi, with a big crowd around him. But, he said, “I got back into the car and left, because he was a dangerous man. He was really using that guitar . . . I crawled away and pulled out, because it was too heavy for me.”
Before Lomax left, he also recorded Muddy singing “I Be’s Troubled,” the emotional ancestor to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Late in 1942, Muddy left the Delta and took the country blues off to wartime Chicago, where a mass migration of black southerners working in war industries had created a cash market for down-home musicians like himself.
But Chicago showed Muddy Waters that his country style was already old-fashioned by the time he arrived.
Blues singing had originally evolved on the plantations of the Mississippi Delta in the late nineteenth century as the secular expression of the first generation of African Americans born out of slavery, but still tied to the land in agricultural peonage. As it developed early in the twentieth century and began to be heard via recordings (called race records), blues singing—slow tempos, flattened thirds and sevenths, moaning lyrics of yearning, melancholy, and remorse—remained a vivid minority music in the American South. Sometimes blues styles surfaced into the commercial mainstream of American music as a featured style or a passing fad, but its origins and its stars were ignored by the outside media until the wartime migrations of the 1940s brought the blues onto the radio and the jukeboxes.
