Time Essay: The Stones and the Triumph of Marsyas

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Yet it is a fact of the Stones' detachment that they have been as inaccessible to the left as to the right. One of the cherished fantasies of the '60s was the prospect of a generation sacking the Pentagon to the boom of electric guitars; but the Stones' only overt comment on this was Street Fighting Man:

Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet

oh boy

'Cause summer's here and the time is right for fighting

in the street oh boy

But what can a poor boy do

Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band

'Cause in sleepy London town

There's just no place for a street fighting man.

It was hardly a call to arms, and Jagger was much assailed for his "indecision"; indeed, an audience in Berkeley booed him for flashing both the peace sign and the clenched-fist power salute. But now that political pop is dead, the harsh, narcissistic irony of the Stones has lasted better than the maunderings of cult heroes like Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin. In a sense, the Stones have lasted well because they never believed that a millennium was just around the corner. The presiding spirit in the Stones' lyrics is neither Marcuse nor Thoreau, but William Burroughs:

Weren't you at the Coke Convention back in 1965?

You're the misbred grey executive I've seen heavily

advertised

You're the great grey man whose daughter licks

policemen's buttons clean,

You're the man who squats behind the man who works

the soft machine

Come now, gentlemen, your love is all I crave

You'll still be in the circus when I'm laughing, laughing

in my grave.

Causes are forgotten, but effects, like DDT, accumulate in the social system: Jagger's Luciferian image is now absolute, fixed. He is even credited, in some quarters, with having "destroyed" the rock festival as a form through the Stones' famous appearance at Altamont in 1969, when a Hell's Angel knifed a man in the audience. It is an illusion that rock culture died or went sour because of Altamont. That event was merely a peg for a death announcement, just as Woodstock served to announce a birth that had actually happened long before. Yet the myth of Jagger's perversity is such that his music was believed to have turned the Hell's Angels into degenerate thugs—which, of course, they already were. There are some brutes whom not even Orpheus can charm, much less Marsyas. An essential aspect of the Orphic myth is that the sweet singer could attract the maenads to pursue him, but could not stop them from tearing him to gobbets; art, a magic key to the irrational, cannot always control the emotions it unlocks. Hence the idiocy of the comparisons that get drawn between Stones concerts and Nazi rallies. Hitler was in command of his audience; Jagger not.