Time Essay: The Stones and the Triumph of Marsyas

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The Stones' new album, Exile on Main St., went to the top of the sales charts soon after the start of the tour and has stuck there since. Even the usual rock-concert freebies —to critics, columnists and the like—have been cut to a minimum. At this point of their career, the Stones need publicity about as much as the second World War did, and the logistics of moving them around America have something in common with that military operation. There are the transport arrangements, involving the precise arrival of trucks, the private jets on stand-by at closed airfields, the split-second timing of those black, secretive limousines that proclaim and conceal the Superstar; the overkill technology of the staging, with its portable hydraulic lifts, remote-control mirrors and waving arcs; even the official correspondents, Truman Capote for Rolling Stone and Terry Southern for Saturday Review. And behind it all, invisible, the accumulated thrust of one of the most prodigious image-building industries the world has ever seen.

The Rolling Stones are the last of the '60s. The Beatles have split up; Dylan will probably never give another national tour. That leaves the Stones, survivors all, in complete possession of that territory where the superstar music of what was once the "counterculture" shades imperceptibly into the booming glitter of Las Vegas stardom. The Stones are not the world's most inventive band; far from it. Their music is almost—but not yet—an anachronism: straight, blasting, raunchy 4/4 time rock 'n' roll, coiling around the hall and virtually shaking the fillings out of the listeners' teeth. The Stones are the white musicians who make black music, and their work openly derives from black rock and black blues—from Chuck Berry and Slim Harpo, from Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins, Robert Johnson. Quite apart from Keith Richard's arrangements, Mick Jagger's lyrics are based on the taut, painful, elliptical images of "classical" blues:

Well, when you're sitting back

In your rose-pink Cadillac,

Making bets on Kentucky Derby day

I'll be in my basement room

With a needle and a spoon

And another girl can take my pain away.