The rolling stones and the gathering moss of time

Please allow me to introduce Their Satanic majesties, men of wealth and taste, purveyors of that sordid and deranged enterprise called rock n’ roll, ladies and gentlemen... The Rolling friggin’ Stones.

Is the fabled English band formed 10,000 light years ago still relevant? Do the Stones (current lineup: vocalist Mick Jagger, guitarist Keith Richards, drummer Charlie Watts and guitarist Ron Wood) already resemble ghouls of their former selves? Especially Keith with his mummified simian look. Didn’t Elton John (wearer of Mozart wigs and Rocket Man shades; a rock n’ roll geezer himself) call Richards a "monkey with arthritis" who’s pathetically trying to look young onstage? Didn’t the Verve’s Richard Ashcroft (a self-confessed Stones fanatic) say that the Glimmer Twins, Jagger and Richards, haven’t written a damn good song for a damn long time? Is the Stones’ new release, "Forty Licks" a long time coming epitaph for "The World’s Greatest Rock Band," or is it a sign that we could expect — The Horror! The Horror! — more gigs and albums from the good, bad and ugly aural carnival that is the Rolling Stones.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Stones. A confession: Years ago, I stole a bootlegged Stones album from our neighbor in Pampanga, a fat plumber who worked in Saudi Arabia. I could’ve filched the gold lightning-magnets the dude hung around his neck whenever he went to Discoworld, but I pocketed a "Stones Slow" cassette tape instead, a collection of ballads such as Wild Horses, Angie, As Tears Go By, Fool to Cry, Indian Girl, Heart of Stone and Lady Jane, among others. I just love Mick Jagger’s bareboned and bluesy singing on Angie and Wild Horses, which sounded incongruous to the slick vocal stylings of the Tony Hadleys and Simon Le Bons of my anomalous Eighties world. (I wonder if the golden boy of Pilar Village had an idea who the thief really was.)

Many people accustomed to the sickly old horse called rock n’ roll forget that — lyrically and musically — the Jagger/Richards outfit was way ahead of its time. Those British lads got hold of the blues and bastardized it. It’s a shame that when talking about the Rolling Stones, we deal with the subtexts, the peripherals, the surrounding facts and fancies — the blasted VH1 of it all. But what about the songs?

We know all about Keith’s monolithic heroin addiction. The television sets hurtling down from hotel windows. The Marianne Faithfulls and the Anita Pallenbergs. The excesses. The arrests. The deaths. Guitarist Brian Jones found dead in a pool; "Death by Misadventure" the coroner concluded. The guy fatally stabbed by Hell’s Angels in the gig in Altamont during, ironically enough, Sympathy for the Devil. The band flirting with the devil and psychedelia with "Their Satanic Majesties Request," "Goat’s Head Soup," and Sympathy. The band flirting with brilliance with "Beggar’s Banquet," "Exile on Main Street," "Sticky Fingers," "Let it Bleed" and "Tattoo You." The band’s tacky, "Dirty Work" Eighties phase with Mick wearing lemon-yellow tights and riding a cherry picker toward more tackiness.

We’ve read and heard how supposedly outmoded the band is, since the Stones don’t wear dreadlocks or ridiculously-sized pants, or have no DJs, turntablists or songs with the words "nookie" or the F-word in them. Their peers having been carried by the undertakers of obscurity away from the limelight.

We’ve been told that they’re ancient rock stars playing night after night to the ring of cash registers — and they still can’t get no satisfaction. The greedy men with Telecasters and traveling chefs and bloated, multi-million dollar tours. The rebels who have joined the Establishment. One of them getting the title "Sir" appended to his name. The sell-outs. The hardsells. The soul-selling outfit that is the Rolling Stones.

I repeat: What about the songs?

The songs, fortunately, are what "Forty Licks" is all about. I was astounded when I saw the album at Music One. I was talking to Wolf Gemora about The Hives and Tenacious D when I glanced upon a disc with the patented red, yellow and blue tongue jutting over a white backdrop with an all-cap text: ROLLING STONES FORTY LICKS. And then I saw the list of songs.

This is the first best-of album that spans the entire 40-year career of the Stones. "Forty Licks" is a joint venture among Stones labels Virgin Records, Universal Music International (UMI), and ABKCO Records, and distributed worlwide by EMI. The first time that the band’s 1963-1970 London/Decca recordings are presented side by side with the post-ABKCO output. Mick Jagger quipped that he got all the parties to agree by "playing on their mutual sense of greed."

And greed has been good in this case. For P700, you have all the Stones you need in a convenient two-disc album (16 classic hits and four new ones).

Disc one begins with Street Figthting Man from "Beggar’s Banquet," the album that prefaced a metamorphosis of sorts for the Stones. Dig its politically-charged lines: "Said my name is called Disturbance/I’ll shout and scream, I’ll kill the king and rail at all his servants." Another cut from "Beggar’s" is included, the samba from hell, the Rolling Stones’ gloom-and-doom song, Sympathy for the Devil. In this track, Mick Jagger sings from Lucifer’s viewpoint ("I was around when Jesus Chris had his moments of doubt and pain...Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name") while evil Afro-rhythms loom in the background. Yes, two cuts from the hard-to-spot ‘68 album. Which brings me to this caveat: Why wasn’t Salt of the Earth included?

Oh well, there are other Stones classics left out in the cold (Heart of Stone, Waiting for a Friend, Torn and Frayed, etc.) but does it matter when you got stuff like Gimme Shelter and You Can’t Always Get What You Want, two of the strongest tracks from "Let it Bleed," the Stones’ tongue-in-cheek answer to the Beatles’ maudlin Let it Be.

(I remember American dailies screaming, "The Beatles Want To Hold Your Hand; The Stones Want To Pillage Your Town!")

The infectious rockers are also included — The Last Time, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, 19th Nervous Breakdown, Get Off My Cloud, Let’s Spend the Night Together, Paint it, Black (which I remember from the Nam: Tour of Duty TV series), and (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, with that big, ballsy riff. But what I like more are the quirky ballads like Wild Horses and Ruby Tuesday, as well as She’s a Rainbow with its playful piano and psychedelic strings arranged by Led Zep bassist John Paul Jones.

Disc two is more eclectic — a mesh of the classics, relatively newer fare (Mixed Emotions, Anybody Seen My Baby?) and the forgettable new songs (Don’t Stop, Keys To Your Love, Losing My Touch, and Stealing My Heart). Well, Keys To Your Love isn’t a bad Stones song. As for the old stuff, there is Start Me Up, a booty-shaking tune from "Tattoo You," followed by Brown Sugar, Jagger’s ode to beautiful dark-skinned women. I like the disco-inflected Miss You and Beast of Burden from "Some Girls." I also like the cuts from "Exile on Main Street," Happy and Tumbling Dice.

But Angie is the shit. Dim the lights and dig Keith Richards’ dirty acoustic passages as Jagger pleads, "Woh Angie don’t you weep, all your kisses still taste sweet/I hate that sadness in your eyes...Angie, Angie, you can’t say we never tried."

The album should have closed with the Stones’ anthem, It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll (But I Like It). It ends instead with Richard’s loserville ballad Losing My Touch. That’s the trouble with "Forty Licks" — it’s as if the songs were arranged by the Stones themselves while drinking bourbon, shooting junk, and playing poker inside Keith Richards’ Baboon Cage. Everything is so random, so chaotic, so Stonesy, so very rock n’ roll.

Despite this, "Forty Licks" is the definitive Stones album. For those who have the dough (particularly card-carrying capitalist pigs), the best thing is to purchase the studio albums from "Beggar’s Banquet" to "Tattoo You," since "Forty" is but a teaser to Stones aficionados. But for those of us who have to factor in nicotine, caffeine, Pale Pilsen, sisig, beerhouse peanuts, cell cards, jeepney/LRT rides into our budgets, "Forty Licks" is a great buy. As long as we have "Beggar’s Banquet," "Let it Bleed," "Sticky Fingers" and "Forty Licks" in our record collection, we are in business. For dear YS readers getting their rocks off on Creed and Coldplay, this album can be their guide to the "wonderfully wasted" Rolling Stones galaxy.

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For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations, e-mail iganja@hotmail.com