Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
What Paul Harvey used to call “The Rest of the Story”
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MICK JAGGER & THE ROLLING STONES
I’ve written at least a book’s worth of posts about The Rolling Stones and Mick Jagger in my own 55 year writing career. Done a lot of philosophizing and literary analysis about him. Tagged him as an unconscious genius based on all the tales of him writing what would become deathless lyrics in a limo to the studio on a recording day. Learned he was a voracious reader in his concert travels, couple books a week. Wanted to meet him, never wanted to meet him. (Kind of how I feel about Donald Trump. Both ostentatious sybarites, both recipients of a gift not entirely different from the one I received when I wrote The Boomer Bible.) But I met Jagger long before I met Trump. In a closet in the boarding school room I shared with my Russian Jewish roommate who was staying up all night reading Dostoyevsky while I was staying up all night reading Ayn Rand. Together we found an LP in our disastrous closet with obvious scratches and no album cover. It began our affiliation with the Rolling Stones. “Got Live If You Want It.”
The scratches were obvious on the surface. But the LP played on and on…
Decisions we make are important. We both became ardent Stones fans in 1968 and 1969. My Dostoevsky roommate preferred “Let It Bleed.” He inclined to “Gimme Shelter.” But I already knew “Beggar’s Banquet” was the most important album of the rock and roll era to date. For just one song. My roommate and closest friend ever was dead at the age of 40. He was the only one of my friends who recognized how important The Boomer Bible was. He volunteered to lend me large amounts of money to survive to the next book. I turned him down because I was too proud to accept help. Then he died.
The song? My only point here. Sympathy for the Devil. The titanically most prescient critique of where we were at that precise moment of time and where it would lead.
Fuck the Beatles. Jagger saw it all and told us who we were and where we were headed. The original recording…
The only one. He made history while he was mocking it. In fact, mocking history by making it. Fucking Evelyn Waugh in makeup..
Maybe you prefer it right in your face. And, yes,
that’s John Lennon in the audience, paying court
to the real King who’d outlast him by 50 years.
See. Back when he was remaking counterculture history and the only controversy was whether Mick Jagger was ugly or beautiful. Like Lucifer, he was both.
Then compounding, documenting it as a kind of scripture…
The original album title was “Who Killed the Kennedys?”
Answer buried till they spelled it above.”You’re to blame”
All of this a way of reminding you what you once knew and forgot. Lennon wrote a scripture of death called “Imagine” and died without its ever meaning anything other than superannuated teenage angst. I have seen Sympathy for the Devil as a theatrical barn burner half a dozen times in my life, and it is always a moving experience. A demigod on top of or underneath the stage in front of thousands of people challenging us to make sense — accept responsibility — for what is going on in our lives.
In the world I created, there was a band called the Shuteye Train, who woke up maybe 1,500 kids, turned them into warriors for civilization, and used their breakthrough quantum computer technology to escape into a hole they pulled in after them. They were even bigger than the Stones, but we can’t remember them because we have lost our ability to see through the multi-dimensions of time.
Am I sad about that? Only for the ones who don’t have the courage to seek and follow them into the 5-dimensional realm of time as it actually exists, not the frail plastic straw of a line that paraded as a tube when it was always so much more…
Parallel worlds exist. And most of them are funnier and more enlightening than you let yourselves see, hear, taste, smell, and feel…
Oh? Need a song? Try this one…
Yeah. The old ones, the ones who rely on wit and memory and learning, are gone. Now it’s up to the fighters. Because the enemy is implacable, ruthlessly monolithically female, and devoid of what any prior age would have called intelligence. Good night.
Still the single most important song in the rock era.50+ years later. Nobody but me can claim that…
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