Stones' Jubilee

As the Rolling Stones celebrate the 50th anniversary of their first gig, Paste identifies "You Can't Always Get What You Want" as their greatest song. Scrolling down from #50, I thought the winner would be "Gimme Shelter." I hoped it would be "Jumpin' Jack Flash."

Alone Again, Unnaturally

In mid-May, Kathy and I were in New York to see her daughter, Meaghan, and over 400 classmates receive masters degrees in social work from Columbia University. Those we met were bright, idealistic, and deeply committed to helping suffering and marginalized people. To pay for their studies, many took on a six-figure debt, all to prepare for a vocation that isn’t especially remunerative.

But at the graduation ceremony (at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side, graduates trod where Stones had rolled) and a party afterward, nobody was fretting about the future. Their devotion to mission, and the gracious community they’d built in their two years together, made me think of a class of seminarians. Commencement was a secular event, so no one said a public prayer. I imagine I joined thousands in the audience in quietly thanking God for the class of 2012 and the support they’d received from family members and friends.

Meg feels a calling to serve older people, which is a growth industry for social workers. We all know about the coming baby-boomer retirement bubble. By 2017, in the global population people over 65 will outnumber those under five for the first time in history.

This explosion of longevity is stalked by what some health experts call an epidemic of loneliness. Stephen Marche surveys the research in a recent Atlantic article. A 2010 AARP study found that over a third of Americans over 45 are chronically lonely, compared to a fifth of the same cohort ten years before. Another study reveals that about 60 million in the U.S. say they’re unhappy because of loneliness.

Marche’s article, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”, is one of many these days plotting the correlation between social media and social isolation. Marche doesn’t buy it, and I don’t, either. Our temperaments aren’t formed by our online interactions anymore than they are by cocktail parties and family reunions. We come fully formed to all settings of intense personal interaction, whether on-line or en masse, when we quickly display (and, if we’re lucky, learn) how we are with others – reticent or revved up, other- or self-directed, good listeners or relentless talkers.

But if Facebook isn’t making us lonely, what is? Why do naturally social organisms become unsociable? As a baby-boomer, I have a post-Vietnam, post–Watergate answer that has to do people’s skepticism about the focal points of authority that used to bind us together, especially governments, political parties, and religious organizations. Add a dose of western individualism, whose worst expression is selfishness, and you’re tending toward a society of mutually suspicious, self-sustaining loners who are (Marche also reveals) just as likely to share their troubles with a therapist – or social worker – as with a friend.

If you think my closing pitch will be that more active participation at St. John’s and in all our wonderful ministries is a sure-fire cure for loneliness, you’re only half right. Marche had a statistic for that, too: “Active believers who [see] God as abstract and helpful rather than a wrathful, immediate presence [are] less lonely.” Are we coming to church to have our worst suspicions, whether about ourselves or others, confirmed by a God of judgment? Or do we come with eyes, ears, minds, and hearts open to the unpredictable movement of the Holy Spirit, which promises to bind us closer to God and one another?

Sometimes when we log onto Facebook, we want to convince the world that our lives are in better shape that they really are. We’re also tempted to put on our game faces before we come face to face with God – which is ironic, since God “friended” us and “liked” us at the beginning of all things, has read all our data, and will never relinquish the copyright.

This post originally appeared in the St. John's Church newsletter, the Vaya Con Dios.

Grievous

Why has Gram Parsons' makeshift memorial in Joshua Tree National Park been removed, and why don't park service personnel acknowledge that it's been done?

As a member of the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers and a solo artist, the Florida-born Parsons mixed rock and country music, setting the stage for the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt in the '70s and the alt.-country movement in the '80 and '90s (Wilco, the Jayhawks, Uncle Tupelo, Ryan Adams, those guys). He distracted Keith Richards in France when the Rolling Stones were trying to finish "Exile On Main St." and helped launch the career of his talented backup singer, Emmylou Harris. His recording of one of his greatest songs, "Return of the Grievous Angel," is available here; hers is on a 1982 live album, "Last Date," that iTunes hasn't made available yet. You can hear and see her performing the song in July 2008 here.

After he died of a drug overdose in 1973 at the age of 26, an overzealous friend stole his body and set fire to it in Parsons' beloved Joshua Tree. Fans have been making the pilgrimage to Cap Rock every since, carving and painting crosses, poems, and other tributes. I visited in April and took the photos at right.

When I returned on Tuesday to what I was pretty sure was the spot, everything had been sandblasted away. While my photo below doesn't show it, the red cross and the legend "God Bless GP" are gone.

Thinking I just might have gone to the the wrong place, I dropped by park headquarters in Twentynine Palms to check. Two guys behind the counter, one a uniformed park ranger, insisted that the memorial was intact. The one in street clothes said he'd been there in the last two weeks and even drew me a map. Just to be sure, I returned this afternoon. I'd been right the first time. The crosses and inscriptions were gone.

The devotion of Parsons' fans notwithstanding, I can understand the feds being loath to appear to be celebrating drug overdoses and illegal cremations. Nor should people be permitted to deface publicly-owned natural wonders. As a nostalgic babyboomer, I could see making an exception in this case; I can also understand closing it down. What I can't understand is why my two friends at park HQ didn't just cop to it.

"Happy," The Rolling Stones

From "Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones." It's Keith's song, but the camera can't keep its eye off Mick Jagger.

Stones 2.0

So you're the greatest rock and roll band in the world, you've been making hit records for nine years, and you're planning a set list for a 48-show U.S. tour to promote your new album. An even mix of old and new, right?

Not if you're the Rolling Stones. In 1972, they didn't play anything more than three years old except Chuck Berry's "Bye Bye Johnny" and, on a few occasions, an encore medley with opening act Stevie Wonder that included "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." Besides that, every song was from "Let It Bleed," "Sticky Fingers," and "Exile on Main St.," the epochal new record.

The result of this audaciousness was one of the most legendary tours in rock and roll history (I'm talking about the music, not the activities chronicled in the never-officially-released documentary with the name unfit for a family blog) and the greatest concert movie I've ever seen, "Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones." It was released in a few theaters in 1974, when I saw it twice, being a fanatic. Now, alleluia, it's finally out on DVD, so everyone can see Mick Jagger whipping the stage during "Midnight Rambler" the same year Richard Nixon was whipping George McGovern.

These were the dangerous guys Elvis warned Nixon about during their famous Oval Office meeting, no question. They were also my coming-of-age Stones. My friend Andy relates more to the 1960s iteration. It's more or less all about the the second-chair guitarist to Keith Richards' concertmaster: Band co-founder Brian Jones in the early and mid-1960s, Mick Taylor (shown here) from 1969-74, and Ron Wood ever since.

Wood's always played a lot like Richards. In a song called "Had Me A Real Good Time," which came out in 1971 when he was playing with Rod Stewart and the Faces, he even quotes Richards' riff from "Honky Tonk Women." It's a separated-at-birth kind of thing. In the latter-day Stones movie "Shine A Light," they grin at each other through their cigarette smoke like goofy teenagers. Their collaboration makes the band sound looser and more homogeneous.

The mid-career, Mick Taylor Stones, the ones on the new DVD from the 1972 tour, were astonishingly tight. Taylor, then 23, added a touch of uptown gloss, playing smooth, lyrical solos against Richards' rhythm pistons. The live album "Get Yer Ya-Yas Out" from the 1969 U.S. tour, the year Taylor joined the band, has the same sophisticated, propulsive energy.

But while blues professor Taylor stared down at the fretboard of his Les Paul, Jagger and Richards never looked at him. I'm not sure what that means. It's thought that when he quit two years later, it was because he didn't get along with Richards, who recently said that he's sorry Taylor left. Maybe Keith had just watched this movie again. Every number's sizzling hot, from "Brown Sugar" to "Street Fighting Man." But the Stones have always had a quiet side, too. Jagger-Richards were alt.-country pioneers with "Dead Flowers" and "Sweet Virginia," and in these performances their harmonies are dead-on.

Jagger (wearing three different spangled jumpsuits, since the movie was filmed during three Texas shows) really catches fire about halfway through on "All Down The Line" as the Stones go full bore with their two-piece horn section, Taylor's slide guitar, Richards' Kenworth-gear chord changes, and the Watts-Wyman battery. Not surprisingly, Jagger seemed to take his work a little more seriously back then, his apogee as a composer and performer. The Stones are always good, but in 1972, they were immense.

Solomon Keith

Discussing his new autobiography, Life, on the Oct. 25 "Fresh Air," the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards tells host Terry Gross that he created most of the dense, overloaded guitar sounds on "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Street Fighting Man" (he says all the guitar sounds, but that can't be true) by playing an acoustic guitar through a cassette player. When the veteran broadcaster (to whom most guests speak with due respectfulness) asks which song he wants her to play to illustrate the technique, he replies:

I love 'em both, honey. Don't ask me to cut the babies in half.

They Built This Country On Rock And Roll

In the summer of 1990 in Czechoslovakia, eight months after the death of communism, the Rolling Stones prance on its grave, and a 16-year-old and his father exult:

The Stones stormed the stage playing “Start Me Up.” Mick Jagger’s lips were all over the screens. The faceless crowd of passive souls disappeared. People went wild, out of control. They were jumping, clapping, shouting, dancing and singing along, surprising themselves. I had never before seen such a display of genuine emotion from my countrymen.

Two and a half hours later, when the concert was over, people were crying and hugging one another. My father cried and hugged me. From that point on, no one would tell him how he should think, how he should feel. He had seen the Rolling Stones with his own eyes. And it felt so good.

Nine Songs On The 241

If your iPod's on shuffle and "Revolution 9," from the Beatles' so-called White Album, comes up, you're probably going to be tempted to skip to the next song. That I didn't do so this morning seemed to be a signal to see what I could learn from a southbound from Yorba Linda, Tuesday-before-Thanksgiving random playlist. My theory, you see, is that when your iPod has more than 10,000 songs (I have 10,005), it becomes sentient. Sometimes, like this morning, it picks nine perfect songs right in a row.

Choosing the Beatles' longest, most obscure cut was my iPod's challenge not to be MP-3 ADD -- not to skip over two, four, or ten songs while looking for the perfect one but instead to settle down and hear what the spirit of music was saying. So I gritted my teeth and listened carefully to the John Lennon-Yoko Ono sonic adventure that Paul McCartney and producer George Martin fought tooth and scale to keep off the album. I'm glad they failed. A pastiche of found sounds, from choirs to passionate moaning, "Revolution 9" matches the album's foreboding theme and tone.

As you might imagine, a minute-by-minute summary of the song is on-line, including a transcript of Lennon saying, about a minute in:

They found a shortage of grain in Hartfordshire, and every one of them knew that as time went by, they’d get a little bit older and a little bit slower…factory work…five percent in the, in the uh, the district, they were intended to pay for...

We'll revisit that Hartfordshire factory with Mick and the boys in a moment. The Beatles were actually quoted in my second song, Paul Simon's "Mother and Child Reunion," from his first solo album in 1972: "I know they say 'let it be', but it just don't turn out that way." Named for a dish in a Chinese restaurant and written about a deceased pet, the song, like the White Album, echoes with Vietnam-era urban elite discouragement, as do other songs on the album "Paul Simon" such as "Everything Put Together Falls Apart" and "Paranoia Blues." It was, after all, the year of the reelection of Richard Nixon, for whom no one Pauline Kael and probably Paul Simon knew in Manhattan would vote. A year later, as Watergate raged, Simon released the more elegiac "American Tune," set to music from J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion: "We can't be forever blessed."

A younger, equally skillful lyricist working from a smaller pallet, Belfast-born Christian folksinger Brian Houston wrote my third song, "Practical Reminder," a mid-tempo rocker from his 2005 album,"Thirteen Days In August," about an unnamed local Eleanor Rigby, an Enneagram 2 with a full-on martyr complex:

She's always loneliest when she's with other people
She just saves all of her tears until they leave
For if politeness were a virtue, then I know she's be a saint
She could deny herself for Ireland in the next Olympic games

Living a less circumscribed life was the great, deeply troubled Janis Joplin, whose powerful last album, "Pearl," was recorded with a band called Full Tilt Boogie and released a a few months after her 1970 death from a heroin overdose. FTB were journeymen musicians whom Joplin was proud to have assembled into the rock-solid, cool-rocking band she'd always wanted. She wrote the song that blasted from my Saturn's speakers this morning, "Move Over," which is well lubricated by Ken Pearson on the Hammond B-3 organ and features a powerful guitar solo by Canadian John Till, who some years before had been hired by Ronnie Hawkins after the musicians later known as the Band abandoned him for Bob Dylan.

It always seems to come back to the Band lately. The next song the mischievous iPod dished up could've been a Band song, with its country-style acoustic guitar and, I thought I heard, the hint of a mandolin. But as promised, it's back to Hardfordshire for the Rolling Stones' "Factory Girl" from 1968's "Beggars Banquet." I always thought of this Jagger-Richards song, which even has a country fiddle on it, as an invocation of an American mountain folk tune, but as a matter of fact, all that music came from England, Ireland, and Scotland to begin with. As Keith Richards said in 2003:

To me "Factory Girl" felt something like "Molly Malone", an Irish jig; one of those ancient Celtic things that emerge from time to time, or an Appalachian song.

Ancient indeed, since that was two songs in a row that had me wallowing in memories from high school. Thankfully, Lyle Lovett came along next with something newer, a genuine American country song, "Promises," from his stunning 1996 album "The Road To Ensenada." A sad, hopeless-sounding apology, it's a song St. Paul would have loved:

Promises given
And promises broken
Words stain my lips
Just like blood on my hands

And words are like poison
That sinks down inside you
And some things you do
You just don't understand

This minor-key Lovett original took me from nostalgia to discouragement to curiosity. When did he and Julia Roberts split? The year before the album came out, I see. Evidently Lovett fans have been plumbing it for clues about their breakup for years.

My musical buddy and recent pilgrimage partner Gary Baker tells me that his fellow Van Morrison fans are similarly well informed about the Belfast-born (that's twice in nine songs) living legend's love life. (There are relatively few details at Morrison's otherwise exemplary Wikipedia page.) His "Gypsy In My Soul" turned out to be the next song in my rotation. By this time I was hurtling past Rick Warren's Saddleback Church and listening to Morrison's nasal, supple tenor:

It’s just the gypsy in my soul
Make me pack up my things and go
It may seem like I’m on a roll
But it’s just the gypsy in my soul

Morrison, who used to live near members of the Band in Woodstock, appeared at their Last Waltz concert in 1976. Bob Dylan was in Woodstock as well, and in 1967, in the house called Big Pink, the Band recorded a song he wrote, "Orange Juice Blues," that was released in the 1970s on "The Basement Tapes." The ninth and last song in in my random playlist, it was playing as I rolled into the St. John's Church parking lot. Richard Manuel's beautiful, lost falsetto rang in my ears all day:

I had a hard time waking this morning
I got a lotta things on my mind
Like those friends of yours
They keep bringing me down
Just hangin' round all the time

Namesake Songs: "Like A Rolling Stone" (1965)

The Rolling Stones, performing in 1996.

Even In The Sixties, Verbs Agreed

As reported in "Rolling Stone," an excerpt from President Obama's June 2009 letter to Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary, who died last month:

Your passion for music and your ability to stir change has helped define a genre and a generation.

The Songs Were Perfect, Don't Change Them

I'm a somewhat anxious and easily distracted person, so when I have my iPod on shuffle, I usually can't listen to two or three songs in a row without thumbing for the next selection, trying to find the perfect drug. Sometimes it takes ten or 20 tries.

But if I'm feeling calm, as during a long Easter Tuesday drive to downtown LA this week, the miraculous little machine makes playlists that end up making perfect sense.

As I pulled out of Yorba Linda, it opened the set with a great morning song, the Who's "The Kids Are Alright," which I first heard on the Meaty Beaty Big And Bouncy compilation of the band's still fresh-sounding pre-Tommy hits.

Next up was John Fogerty's "Somebody Help Me," a road song about a guy (probably kind of an old guy) looking all over for his girl (or his fellow AARP member).

From Revival, the song's definitely got a groove. Fogerty's Credence Clearwater Revival was a roots band before the term existed. Among those inspiring CCR was a true original, Bo Diddley, whose "You Don't Love Me (You Don't Care)," released in 1959, has the distinctive Bo beat (famously appropriated by Buddy Holly) plus the purest-sounding harp playing that side of Cream's Jack Bruce's on "Train Time" on Wheels Of Fire a decade later. Bet Bruce learned to play harp listening to Bo's song. No guitar at all on this cut, as far as I could hear.

The Stones' "Under My Thumb" has an equally spare arrangement and one of Mick Jagger's more sneeringly misogynist lyrics. As I drove through the Puente Hills, this cut from 1966's Aftermath evoked the ongoing debate with my friend Andy about whether the pre- or post-Exile Stones are preferable. I'm in the latter camp, but this is a great song, and an ironic one for anyone who's seen "Gimme Shelter." The Stones were playing it at Altamont in 1969 when the Hells Angels started a fight that eventually led to the stabbing death of a concertgoer. As the battle swirls and Jagger sings "Baby it's alright" over and over, a song about dominance becomes a desperate, unavailing plea for calm.

But enough rock and blues, because the mighty iPod then served up Neil Young's "Old Man," one of my high school songs, from 1972's Harvest. It was inspired by the caretaker on the newly rich Young's new ranch in Canada. Funny thing about the insinuating power of music. I don't think I'd heard the studio version of this song in years. While I usually can't remember what I had for breakfast, I remembered exactly when the banjo comes in before the first chorus.

Cracker has no doubt listened to a lot of Neil Young albums -- Bo Diddley ones, too. Their "Take Me Down To The Infirmary" is so rootsy that it sounds like it could've been written in 1935:

I know the whiskey won't soothe my soul
And the morphine won't heal my heart
But if you take me down to the infirmary
I won't have to sleep or drink alone.

Much as I love Patty Larkin, her dark and dense "Normal," from Red=Luck, sort of broke the mood. But bringing the set to a close (because afterward, I started thumbing that playwheel again) was a charming song by Amy Rigby (shown here) called "Don't Ever Change," not the Beatles' version but her own, which has a Resurrection bonus in each verse and chorus:

I saw my baby sitting there at the breakfast table
His hair a mess and he forgot to shave
And I wished that he would get up, make it all better
Stop drinking so much, learn how to behave

Then the radio was playing a Chuck Berry song
And he was looking at me asking what was wrong
I made a list of the things I could say
But he gave me a wink and it all went away, I told him

Hey, I love you, you're perfect, don't ever change

Here she is, performing the song last year with Wreckless Eric.

The Stones In Winter

From Alan Light's review of superfan Bill German's new book about the the greatest old rock and roll band in the world:

The Stones themselves come off more or less as you’d expect: Jagger is mercurial and imperious; Richards is down-to-earth, wild and soulful; Wood, still slightly insecure as the “new kid” in the band, compensates by being the most social; and Charlie Watts is so private and detached that he proved constantly elusive.

Perfect Songs: "Jumpin' Jack Flash" (1968)

The Rolling Stones

Perfect Songs: "Gimme Shelter" (1969)

The Rolling Stones

Perfect Songs: "Tumbling Dice" (1972)

The Rolling Stones

Perfect Songs: "Like A Rolling Stone" (1965)

Bob Dylan & the Rolling Stones

Scorseses' Amazing Stones

This post was originally published at The New Nixon on April 8, 2008.

They say the Democrats take African-Americans for granted. They also get rock and roll. The high water mark of GOP musical hipness was Lee Atwater and Delbert McClinton at Bush 41’s January 1989 Inaugural — also attended, as I recall, by the Rolling Stones’ Ron Wood. But for Wood, Jagger, Richards, and Watts in their astonishingly good concert film “Shine A Light,” it’s all about the Clintons. Martin Scorsese filmed two shows in late 2006 at New York’s Beacon Theater. They were fundraisers for the Clinton foundation, so an immaculately coiffed Sen. Clinton got to bring her mom to meet the band, and 42 kicked off the show. Not fair!

Before they and he die, every great rock and roll band should get Scorsese to film them. No one who doesn’t love music could make such succulent movies about it, beginning with “The Last Waltz” in the late 1970s. “Shine A Light” tilts to my middle-period Stones, as opposed to the mid-1960s “Between the Buttons” and “Aftermath” favored by one of the friends my wife and I went with. Seven of the songs were from either 1972’s “Exile on Main Street” or 1978’s “Some Girls,” including the title song of the latter, Jagger’s personal romantic history, which he discerningly edited, thank goodness. Who wants to go to an NC-17 concert movie?

Many years ago I read in a review of “Exile” that “Tumbling Dice” proved why Keith Richards was indispensable. And so he is — so they all are. Helping keep them on center stage is their, and especially Mick Jagger’s, cheerful self-confidence. After torturing Scorsese for days over the set list, which he just wanted so he could set up his shots properly and make the aging rockers look good, Jagger has a minion present it to him a moment before they roar into “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” with relentless power. They sound like they’re 18, not 60.

The fans closest to the stage actually were 18. Most were singing the lyrics, so maybe they weren’t total ringers. Still, I’ll bet either Scorsese or Jagger decided to make sure the audience didn’t look like an AARP convention. The Stones had up-to-the-minute guests, too, including Christina Aguilera for a hot “Live With Me” and, on “Loving Cup,” the White Stripes’ Jack White, who was born exactly nine months after the Stones album “It’s Only Rock and Roll” was released (coincidence? Ask his parents). Singing with Jagger, Aguilera and White look awed. The Stones and bluesman Buddy Guy are a mutual admiration society on “Champagne & Reefer.” You want to talk about politically incorrect? Richards talks to the audience through billowing cigarette smoke. Is that still allowed? You want to try to tell him otherwise?

Interplay between Scorsese and an aide disclosed some concern about a back-lit Jagger also catching fire as he entered from the lobby for “Sympathy For The Devil,” in which Jagger, in one of his best lyrics, beats President Reagan to identifying the evil empire by nearly 20 years:

I stuck around St. Petersburg

When I saw it was a time for a change

Killed the czar and his ministers

Anastasia screamed in vain

Another great city’s agony was a subtext of “Shine A Light.” The second song in the movie, “Shattered,” about bankruptcy-era New York City, seemed an odd choice, as beautifully performed as it was. For a shot of Ron Wood, Scorsese boosts the guitarist’s audio track so you can hear every note as his fingers dance up the fretboard. Still, it’s not my favorite song. But I remembered it at the end, when the camera seems to swoop out the door of the Beacon Theater and pull dizzyingly back to a spot about 1000 feet above Governors Island, looking uptown at a city alive with light. You still want to cry, seeing those towers gone. Then your eye is drawn from the dark place on the screen to the full moon — which, just then, morphs into the Stones’ trademark red lips and tongue. Shine a light indeed. Keep rocking, guys. But would you play McCain’s big gig next January?