Time Essay: The Stones and the Triumph of Marsyas

(3 of 5)

With the coming of the '70s, some of the ground has begun to shift beneath the Stones. Perhaps rock will not become, as some pessimists think, the bubble-gum music of tomorrow; but the Stones' predominantly white, middle-class audience gets younger and younger (Jagger is no longer a 20-year-old playing to other 20-year-olds, but a 28-year-old playing to kids of 15) and, in any case, fewer and fewer musicians nowadays are interested in playing straight gut rock. The trend among musicians seems to be toward a more complex, melodic style that incorporates jazz fusions and extends the vocal phrases instead of locking them solidly into the beat. There are also signs that the mass concert may not be the Grail of musical ambition that it once was, that it may go the way of the three-day rock festival—into oblivion. It took the pop audience a few years to learn that giant concerts tend not to be events of ecstatic mass communion but uncomfortable affairs, jammed and hot, the music distorted, the vibes edgy. It takes a lot of dedication to stand like a parboiled wading bird on a rickety wooden seat through an hour of sound that you have already heard 20 times on your stereo at home, while straining to watch, a quarter of a mile away through the gaps in the jiggling mops of hair, a tiny gyrating mannikin whose face you cannot see but whom you know to be Jagger.

But the fans' allegiance is not to rock as music; it is to the Stones as a sociosexual event. The current tour is the Ascot of the hip, an event that cranks out the latent dandyism of every town the Stones play in and calls into action an elaborate pecking order of the In who possess tickets (to the Royal Enclosure, as it were) and the Out who do not. The point of the concert is not the sound but the presence of Mick Jagger, who is still arguably the supreme sexual object in modern Western culture.

Myth tells us that the god Apollo, whose instrument was the lyre, was challenged to a musical contest by a coarse satyr named Marsyas, who had learned to play the flute. Marsyas lost, and Apollo skinned him alive. In our day, this draconian triumph of reason over instinct has been reversed: Marsyas, the unrepressed goat-man, has won; the Rolling Stones are one of his incarnations. Unlike the Beatles—the very prototype of nice English working-class lads accepted everywhere, winning M.B.E.s from the Queen—the Stones from the start based their appeal partly on their reputation as delinquents. They were always too shaggy, too street smart; instead of creating the illusion of working within English social conventions, as the Beatles did, they simply ignored the rules. Long before Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange into a film, the Stones were acting out the fantasy of being Alex and his droogs. When, around 1965, England's subculture of Purple Hearts and winklepickers began to mutate into hashish and Moroccan caftans, it was the Stones who bore the full weight of Albion's reprobation. Three of them were busted, haled into court and subjected to a campaign of vilification from the English right-wing press. The Stones became the scapegoats of England's drug problem, and their legal vicissitudes provided London with the juiciest gossip since the Profumo scandal.