True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (69 page)

Five years after the book's initial publication, I did a
Playboy
magazine interview with Keith Richards. The Stones had, at that time, broken up. Keith and Mick were speaking only to disagree and were touring with different bands as solo acts. Keith had married the model Patti Hansen and had two little blond daughters, Theodora and Alexandra. He sat around throwing cigarettes up the air and catching them in his mouth. We'd both slowed down considerably. “It now costs Keith and me one one-hundredth of what it used to to get through an evening,” I said in the introduction.

Around this time, I saw Keith and his band the X-pensive Winos on his birthday. Sarah Dash, the black singer who'd appeared on the Winos album, sang onstage with Keith. Later I asked the four-year-old Theodora, who'd seen her father perform that night for the first time, if she enjoyed the show.

“I wanna be a black girl,” she said. Something inevitable about that, I thought.

The last time I heard the Stones, I went in like a civilian, with a ticket. Inside the entrance just past the ticket-taker a girl was passing out applications for Rolling Stones Visa and MasterCards with the tongue logo. I had a vision of NATO leasing the tongue to put on helicopters, tanks, bombs. In the sixties we believed in a myth—that music had the power to change people's lives. Today people believe in a myth—that music is just entertainment. The sixties myth was, need I say, much more interesting—but not so effective as a merchandising tool. Since it seems to have lost the final shred of moral or social significance, so that it is by no means any longer countercultural, rock and roll may turn out to be the Open Sesame to a nirvana of corporate sponsorship—catering recreational beverages, designer clothing, accessories, and weapons to centers of conflict for the greater glory of God and man.

The descendants of the Stones, those who consciously believe the Stones
were part of a valuable tradition, such as the Black Crowes, operate in a cultural ambience where everything is déjà vu. It is as if their enterprise has been trapped within quote marks. I have seen the Black Crowes, joined by members of the Dirty Dozen, when they were better than the Stones have been in over twenty years, but what surrounds them has changed. Under the present dispensation, we're all good capitalists together. There are bands with social programs, from rappers to Kevorkian Death Cycle. But the entire business of music is so fragmented that protest is irrelevant, completely contained within a packaging and distribution system that changes nothing except the income of people in the system. Meanwhile children starve, governments kill prisoners, wars continue to rage, trillions of dollars are wasted on insane self-endangering weapons. Do I think music can stop these things? No. Do I think it should try? Perhaps not directly. But consider this line that I used to hear Furry Lewis sing: “My ole mistress promised me, when she died, she'd set me free; she lived so long till her head got bald, and God had to kill her with a white oak maul.” Can't you hear the protest in that? Elvis Presley used to call “Hound Dog” (“You told me you was high-class—well, that was just a lie”) his protest song. There is at the heart of this music a deep strain of mysterious insurrection, and the music dies without it.

Mark Twain said that if you wrote well enough your work would last “forever—and by forever I mean thirty years.”
The True Adventures,
first published in the United States in 1984, has lasted slightly more than one half of forever. Whatever they are now, or may be in the future, the Rolling Stones, when they were young, put themselves in jeopardy many times because of who they were, what they were, how they lived, what they believed. During portions of those years, I was with them. Some people survived that era and some didn't.
The True Adventures
is the story of those days, when the world was younger, and meanings were, or seemed for a time to be, clearer. Almost forever ago.