Time Essay: The Stones and the Triumph of Marsyas

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In theory, the lyrics the white boy is singing ought to enrage the audience with their racism and sexism. In theory.

Gold Coast slaveship

Bound for cotton fields,

Sold in a market

Down in New Orleans,

Scarred old slaver know

He's doin' all right,

Hear him whip the women

Just around midnight—

But 20, even ten rows back, the words can scarcely be heard. They exist not as nouns and verbs, but as a physical mass, a hot, indistinct slur like sausage meat: ground out of the famous lips, eaten by the mike, driven into banks of amplifiers and rammed out through two immense blocks of speakers high on either side of the stage. The vowels mix stickily with the air of the auditorium, already saturated by the fume of tens of thousands of packed bodies, the smoke of 50,000 cigarettes and a few pounds of weed, forming an acrid blue vault overhead.

The Rolling Stones are on the road again, and the drums, electric guitars and vast sneering voice ride into another, undifferentiated wave of sound coming at the stage from the hall —the noise of thousands of kids in vicarious heat. Where these two walls of energy meet, above the stage and its blindly waving fringe of teeny-bopper arms, they precipitate a form. It is Mick Jagger, Jumpin' Jack Flash in person, laced into a white rhinestone-studded jumpsuit and painted like a Babylonian hooker, back-lighted by amber spots and front-lighted by a Mylar mirror the size of a movie screen slung from the roof trusses, belting into the chorus:

Ah, Brown Sugah,

How come you taste so good?

Aaaah, Brown Sugah,

Just like a young girl should . . .

When the Stones open at Madison Square Garden in New York on July 24, it will be the climax of their seventh U.S. tour, which has been, in purely show-biz terms, a vast success. Every concert they have given has been packed solid, the tickets all sold weeks in advance; in San Francisco, the barter price for a $5.00 ticket was an ounce of grass and seven grams of hash, or, from scalpers, $50 cash; by Chicago, the price for a $6.50 ticket had risen to $70—accompanied by the rumor that someone had printed and sold a quarter of a million dollars' worth of fake tickets, which, mercifully, did not turn up at the gate; and in New York, it may well be around $100. The chance of getting a ticket over the counter has irrevocably gone. To frustrate scalpers, the tour managers set up a kind of electronic lottery in which supplicants sent postcards six weeks in advance, and the cards were selected at random. The news of this selection process appeared in smallish print at the bottom of the full-page ads in the New York Times, with the result that thousands of Stones fans who did not read it were still pestering the helpless box offices in early July.