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That the Rolling Stones are now rather mainstream and respectable is like seeing Republicans in leathers and driving Harleys. It happens in plain sight, but it totally contradicts the impressions and attitudes acquired in one's formative years, and so it's hard to believe.
The Stones will play in Denver Saturday night, but I won't be there. The last Stones concert I attended was at Hughes Stadium in Fort Collins in the summer of 1975, just before our first child was born. We also owned a newspaper then, and in retrospect, that concert might have represented a transition.
We went with my old friend Rex Ewing, who was worried
about getting back to LaSalle in time to tend his horses.
Martha and I were worried about our newspaper, as well as
the prospect that she might go into labor during the
170-mile drive back to Kremmling. The daily concerns of
adult life seemed to overwhelm even the greatest rock
'n' roll band in the world,
and it's been pretty much
that way ever since.
But it was fun while it lasted. When I was in high school, musical attachments were such that you could get in a fight by announcing you preferred the raunchy Rolling Stones to the sweet little Beatles.
Most of that differentiation was the contrivance of publicists at the time, although we kids didn't know that. Once the Beatles were positioned as adorable and harmless moptops singing about love, a clever London entrepreneur named Andrew Loog Oldham figured there would be a niche for an opposite image -- thuggish louts projecting menace while singing about lust and alienation.
Oldham was quite successful in his image-building. When
I was in college, one frequent topic of conversation at
parties was Whose parents had the most violent reaction
to the Rolling Stones?
There were tales of the TV
getting unplugged when the Stones performed on Ed Sullivan,
of 45s and LPs getting smashed by parental hammers, of
stereos getting pulled out of bedrooms.
My own parents were country-music fans, so they didn't single out the Rolling Stones. As they saw it, all rock 'n' roll was inferior to Hank Williams, and doubtless they figured my collection of Stones records was just some adolescent phase that would fade away.
But it didn't. In the fall of 1969, rumors circulated that the Rolling Stones, now that they didn't have Brian Jones and all his legal problems, were going on a U.S. tour and they would play in Colorado.
Then the wild tale was confirmed, with hip FM deejays telling us that the Stones would be playing at Moby Gym in Fort Collins on Nov. 7. Of course I desperately wanted to go, but I was in Greeley, which was something of a backwater in those days -- no place in town sold tickets. I drove to Fort Collins and Denver to learn that every outlet was sold out, and resigned myself to missing a show by the band I most wanted to see.
Just a couple of days before the concert, a guy walked into the college newspaper office and said he wanted to put in a classified ad -- he had two extra Stones tickets to sell for their face value of $6 apiece. I almost leaped over the desk to catch him and his tickets ahead of everybody else.
We had great seats for a great show. Many bands worry
that their opening acts will upstage them, so the warm-ups
are bad. Not the Stones -- that night it was Terry Reid,
then a promising young British rocker, followed by blues
legend B.B. King, and then the opening riff of Jumpin'
Jack Flash.
Every so often, I run into someone who was
also there, and we can talk about it for hours.
I had always presumed it was a law of nature that kids would rebel against their parents' musical taste, so I was quite surprised when our daughters were teenagers. Instead of making fun of Dad's Lame Music Collection, they did something even more annoying -- I'd have to go their rooms to find my Stones tunes. They even went, all on their own, to a 1994 Stones concert in Denver.
That was nearly nine years ago, an eternity in pop culture, and the Stones have been at it for more than 40 years -- they first performed as the Rollin' Stones on July 12, 1962, at the Marquee Club in London.
A few years ago, Keith Richards was asked if he would
ever retire. Why in the world would you stop doing what
you like to do?
he replied. If we ever do a tour and
nobody turns up, then I go back to the top of the stairs
where I started. I'll just play to myself.
They're still playing, despite all the drugs and arrests
and internal disputes. They haven't made a decent album
since Exile on Main Street,
but there's a good song
every so often, and it appears they've proved one thing: If
you stick with anything long enough, mainstream
respectability eventually follows.
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