Night Beat Part 2

Well, it is his first cross-country tour of America in eight years.

"Yeah, but to me, an audience is an audience, no matter where they are. I'm not particularly into this American thing, this Bruce Springsteen-John Cougar-'America first' thing. I feel just as strongly about the American principles as those guys do, but I personally feel that what's important is more eternal things. This American pride thing, that don't mean nothing to me. I'm more locked into what's real forever."

Quickly, Dylan seems animated. He douses one cigarette, lights another, and begins speaking at a faster clip. "Listen," he says, "I'm not saying anything bad about these guys, because I think Bruce has done a tremendous amount for real gutbucket rock & roll-and folk music, in his own way. And John Cougar's great, though the best thing on his record, I thought, was his grandmother singing. That knocked me out. But that ain't what music's about. Subjects like 'How come we don't have our jobs?' Then you're getting political. And if you want to get political, you ought to go as far out as you can."

But certainly he understands, I say, that Springsteen and Mellencamp aren't exactly trying to fan the flames of American pride. Instead, they're trying to say that if the nation loses sight of certain principles, it also forfeits its claim to greatness.

"Yeah? What are those principles? Are they biblical principles? The only principles you can find are the principles in the Bible. I mean, Proverbs has got them all."

They are such principles, I say, as justice and equality.

"Yeah, but . . . " Dylan pauses. As we've been talking, others-including Petty, guitarist Mike Campbell, the sound engineers, and the backup singers-have entered the room. Dylan stands up and starts pacing back and forth, smiling. It's hard to tell whether he is truly irked or merely spouting provocatively for the fun of it. After a moment, he continues. "To me, America means the Indians. They were here and this is their country, and all the white men are just trespa.s.sing. We've devastated the natural resources of this country, for no particular reason except to make money and buy houses and send our kids to college and s.h.i.t like that. To me, America is the Indians, period. I just don't go for nothing more. Unions, movies, Greta Garbo, Wall Street, Tin Pan Alley, or Dodgers baseball games." He laughs. "It don't mean s.h.i.t. What we did to the Indians is disgraceful. I think America, to get right, has got to start there first."

I reply that a more realistic way of getting right might be to follow the warning of one of his own songs, "Clean Cut Kid," and not send our young people off to fight in another wasteful war.

"Who sends the young people out to war?" says Dylan. "Their parents do."

But it isn't the parents who suited them up and put them on the planes and sent them off to die in Vietnam.

"Look, the parents could have said, 'Hey, we'll talk about it.' But parents aren't into that. They don't know how to deal with what they should do or shouldn't do. So they leave it to the government."

Suddenly, loudly, music blares up in the room. Perhaps somebody-maybe Petty-figures the conversation is getting a little too tense. Dylan smiles and shrugs, then pats me on the shoulder. "We can talk a little more later," he says.

For the next couple of hours, Dylan and Petty attend to detail work on the track-getting the right accent on a ride cymbal and overdubbing the gospel-derived harmonies of the four female singers who have just arrived. As always, it is fascinating to observe how acutely musical Dylan is. In one particularly inspired offhand moment, he leads the four singers-Queen Esther Morrow, Elisecia Wright, Madelyn Quebec, and Carol Dennis-through a lovely a cappella version of "White Christmas," then moves into a haunting reading of an old gospel standard, "Evening Sun." Petty and the rest of us just stare, stunned. "Man," says Petty frantically, "we've got to get this on tape."

Afterward, Dylan leads me out into a lounge area to talk some more. He leans on top of a pinball machine, a cigarette nipped between his teeth. He seems calmer, happy with the night's work. He also seems willing to finish the conversation we were having earlier, so we pick up where we left off. What would he do, I ask, if his own sons were drafted?

Dylan looks almost sad as he considers the question. After several moments, he says: "They could do what their conscience tells them to do, and I would support them. But it also depends on what the government wants your children to do. I mean, if the government wants your children to go down and raid Central American countries, there would be no moral value in that. I also don't think we should have bombed those people in Libya." Then he flashes one of those utterly guileless, disarming smiles of his. "But what I want to know," he says, "is, what's all this got to do with folk music and rock & roll?"

Quite a bit, since he, more than any other artist, raised the possibility that folk music and rock & roll could have political impact. "Right," says Dylan, "and I'm proud of that."

And the reason questions like these keep coming up is because many of us aren't so sure where he stands these days-in fact, some critics have charged that, with songs like "Slow Train" and "Union Sundown," he's even moved a bit to the right.

Dylan muses over the remark in silence for a moment. "Well, for me," he begins, "there is no right and there is no left. There's truth and there's untruth, y'know? There's honesty and there's hypocrisy. Look in the Bible: You don't see nothing about right or left. Other people might have other ideas about things, but I don't, because I'm not that smart. I hate to keep beating people over the head with the Bible, but that's the only instrument I know, the only thing that stays true."

Does it disturb him that there seem to be so many preachers these days who claim that to be a good Christian one must also be a political conservative?

"Conservative? Well, don't forget, Jesus said that it's harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to enter the eye of a needle. I mean, is that conservative? I don't know, I've heard a lot of preachers say how G.o.d wants everybody to be wealthy and healthy. Well, it doesn't say that in the Bible. You can twist anybody's words, but that's only for fools and people who follow fools. If you're entangled in the snares of this world, which everybody is . . . "

Petty comes into the room and asks Dylan to come hear the final overdubs. Dylan likes what he hears, then decides to take one more pa.s.s at the lead vocal. This time, apparently, he nails it. "Don't ever try to change me/I been in this thing too long/There's nothing you can say or do/To make me think I'm wrong," he snarls at the song's outset, and while it is hardly the most inviting line one has ever heard him sing, tonight he seems to render it with a fitting pa.s.sion.

AGAIN, 1986. Another midnight in Hollywood, and Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and the Heartbreakers are cl.u.s.tered in a cavernous room at the old Zoetrope Studios, working out a harmonica part to "License to Kill," when Dylan suddenly begins playing a different, oddly haunting piece of music. Gradually, the random tones he is blowing begin to take a familiar shape, and it becomes evident that he's playing a plaintive, bluesy variation of "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine." Keyboardist Benmont Tench is the first to recognize the melody, and quickly embellishes it with a graceful piano part; Petty catches the drift and underscores Dylan's harmonica with some strong, sharp chord strokes. Soon, the entire band, which tonight includes guitarist Al Kooper, is seizing Dylan's urge and transforming the song into a full and pa.s.sionate performance. Dylan never sings the lyrics himself but instead signals a backup singer to take the lead, and immediately "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" becomes a full-fledged, driving spiritual.

Five minutes later, the moment has pa.s.sed. According to Petty and Tench, Dylan's rehearsals are often like this: inventive versions of wondrous songs come and go and are never heard again, except in those rare times when they may be conjured onstage. In a way, an instance like this leaves one wishing that every show in the True Confessions Tour were simply another rehearsal: Dylan's impulses are so sure-handed and imaginative, they're practically matchless.

Trying to get Dylan to talk about where such moments come from-or trying to persuade him to take them to the stage-is, as one might expect, not that easy. "I'm not sure if people really want to hear that sort of thing from me," he says, smiling ingenuously. Then he perches himself on an equipment case and puts his hands into his pockets, looking momentarily uncomfortable. Quickly, his face brightens. "Hey," he says, pulling a tape from his pocket, "wanna hear the best alb.u.m of the year?" He holds a ca.s.sette of AKA Grafitti Man, an alb.u.m by poet John Trudell and guitarist Jesse Ed Davis. "Only people like Lou Reed and John Doe can dream about doing work like this. Most don't have enough talent."

Dylan has his sound engineer cue the tape to a song about Elvis Presley. It is a long, stirring track about the threat that so many originally perceived in Presley's manner and the promise so many others discovered in his music. "We heard Elvis's song for the first time/Then we made up our own mind," recites Trudell at one point, followed by a lovely, blue guitar solo from Davis that quotes "Love Me Tender." Dylan grins at the line, then shakes his head with delight. "Man," he says, "that's about all anybody ever needs to say about Elvis Presley."

I wonder if Dylan realizes that the line could also have been written about him-that millions of us heard his songs, and that those songs not only inspired our own but, in some deep-felt place, almost seemed to be our own. But before there is even time to raise the question, Dylan has put on his coat and is on his way across the room.

IT IS NOW twelve years later, 1998, and Bob Dylan-presently in his late fifties-is still an active figure in rock & roll. Over the last several years he has been busier than at any time since the mid-1960s, releasing several collections of new recordings-even at one point writing and singing with the first major group he has ever joined (the Traveling Wilburys, including George Harrison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and the late Roy Orbison).

Yet despite this activity, and despite the enduring influence of his 1960s work, until 1997 the modern pop world had lost much of its fascination with Dylan. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, artists like Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Madonna, Public Enemy, Metallica, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Beck, Pearl Jam, U2, Courtney Love, Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G., and Master P all produced (more or less) vital work that has transformed what popular music is about and what it might accomplish, and some of that work affected the culture at large, fueling ongoing social and political debate. Dylan hadn't made music to equal that effect for many years, nor had he really tried to. At best, he tried occasionally to render work that tapped into pop's commercial and technological vogues (such as Empire Burlesque and 1989's Oh Mercy), or he mounted tours designed to interact with the ma.s.sive audiences that his backing bands attracted (such as his 1980s ventures with the Grateful Dead and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers). More typically, he produced records that many observers regarded as haphazard and uncommitted (like Knocked Out Loaded, Down in the Groove, and 1990's Under the Red Sky-though to my tastes, they are among his best latter-day records and hold up wonderfully). In the early 1990s, he also released a mesmerizing set recorded for MTV, Bob Dylan Unplugged, plus two all-acoustic alb.u.ms of folk material by other artists, Good as I Been to You and the exceptional World Gone Wrong. The latter two records feature some of the most deeply felt, spectral singing of Dylan's entire career-the equal of his best vocals on Blonde on Blonde, The Bas.e.m.e.nt Tapes, John Wesley Harding, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, and Blood on the Tracks. (They also feature his all-time best liner notes. "STACK A LEE," he writes "is Frank Hutchinson's version. what does the song say exactly? it says no man gains immortality through public acclaim." Later he writes: "LONE PILGRIM is from an old Doc Watson record. what attracts me to the song is how the lunacy of trying to fool the self is set aside at some given point. salvation & the needs of mankind are prominent & hegemony takes a breathing spell.") Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong remind me of something Dylan said during our first conversation, back in 1985. We had been talking about the music of Bruce Springsteen and Dylan said: "Bruce knows where he comes from-he has taken what everybody else has done and made his own thing out of it-and that's great. But somebody will come along after Bruce, say ten or twenty years from now, and maybe they'll be looking to Bruce as their primary model and somehow miss the fact that his music came from Elvis Presley and Woody Guthrie. In other words, all they're gonna get is Bruce; they're not gonna get what Bruce got.

"If you copy somebody-and there's nothing wrong with that-the top rule should be to go back and copy the guy that was there first. It's like all the people who copied me over the years, too many of them just got me, they didn't get what I got." Over thirty years after Bob Dylan's first alb.u.m (which was also a testament to his folk sources), Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong worked as reminders of what the singer "got"-and still gets-from American folk music's timeless mysteries and depths.

In addition, by 1997 Dylan had been touring almost incessantly for over a generation. Beyond his stylistic, political, philosophical, and personal changes, beyond the sheer weight of his legend, Dylan continued to play music simply because, in any season, on almost any given night, it is what he would prefer to be doing; it wasn't just a career action, but instead, a necessary way of living-as if he had returned to the restless troubadour life that he effectively renounced following his motorcycle accident. And yet Dylan's reclamation amounted to one of the best-kept secrets in modern music. In the early and mid-1990s, in a period when popular music achieved an all-time saturation effect in the media-when numerous network and cable entertainment outlets pumped the sounds and looks and news of pop into our homes on an around-the-clock basis-Bob Dylan worked underneath the pop radar level at the same moment that he was, once again, making some of the most remarkable music of the time. In a low-key yet determined way, Dylan invested himself in his music's sustaining power perhaps more than ever before. Whereas in his tours with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and the Grateful Dead, Dylan sometimes seemed to be casting about for a clear sense of his purpose and whereas in his tours with the G. E. Smith band, he semed to want to tear through his songs as if finally to flatten them, in the mid-1990s, Dylan once again played as an itinerant bandleader in firm control of his art's textures, depths, and contexts-and at the same time willing to see to what lengths he might push it all to. Accompanied by mandolin and steel guitar player Bucky Baxter, ba.s.sist Tony Garnier, organist Brendan O'Brien, guitarist John Jackson, and drummer Winston Watson (O'Brien later departed, Jackson was replaced by Larry Campbell, and Watson was replaced by David Kemper), Dylan once more was playing his songs as if they were living moments-new possibilities waiting to be found, explored, explained, even questioned, rather than as if they were simply time-old obligations to be endured, then escaped.

On his best nights onstage, Dylan might take a song like "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" or "Desolation Row" and turn it upside down, filling it with new energy and craziness. Moments later, he may turn around and deliver a folk ballad like "One Too Many Mornings" with a heart-stopping grace, in a voice as sweet as the voice with which he first recorded it, over thirty years ago, or he could produce "John Brown" (for my money, his best antiwar song) and render it with a truly breathtaking force. In May 1998, I saw Dylan take the stage at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion and cleave into "Absolutely Sweet Marie" (from the 1966 alb.u.m Blonde on Blonde) with new rage, new thoughts, new rhythms, and a new melodic fancy. It was plain that Dylan and his current band had achieved an impressive brand of musical kinship, much like the quick-witted empathy that the singer once shared with the Band during their concert sprees of the 1960s and 1970s. But in the late 1990s, Bob Dylan played "Tangled Up in Blue"-the Blood on the Tracks song about what lies past lost fellowship and ruined faith-with more ferocity and openness than any other song in his set. Night after night, he would push into a stinging flurry of acoustic guitar riffs and strums in midperformance, as if trying to break the song wide open and find its last meanings, and the audience would react as if they were hearing something of their own story in the turmoil of the music, and the lyric's account of flight and renewal.

But as I say, these nightly triumphs went undernoted until the middle of 1997. Popular music magazines did not doc.u.ment Bob Dylan's amazing resurgence. In fact, with their increasing dependence on the flawed science of demographics (which so often determines the content and cover-story decisions of many of today's magazines), most pop media simply didn't know how to write about a renewal that wasn't trumpeted and orchestrated by a publicity stratagem. (Two notable exceptions: a series of mid-1990s articles written by Paul Williams in the reborn Crawdaddy! and Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic.) It took two events to bring popular attention back to Dylan. The first happened in late May 1997, when Bob Dylan entered a Manhattan hospital after suffering severe chest pains. Early reports claimed that the singer had been struck by a heart attack (it turned out that Dylan had incurred histoplasmosis, a severe but treatable fungal heart infection), and the day's evening news and cable entertainment programs treated the illness as prelude to an obituary. Dylan didn't die, of course, but he was. .h.i.t harder with the illness than he let be known at the time. Still, the episode served as an admonition of sorts: Bob Dylan had changed the world, and the world had all but forgotten him.

The second turnaround event was an affirmation of Dylan's songwriting and singing talent. In late 1997, Dylan released his first alb.u.m of new songs in over six years, Time Out of Mind-a work that proved as devastating as it did captivating. In the song "Love Sick" in the alb.u.m's opening moments, a guitar uncoils and rustles and Dylan starts an announcement in a torn but dauntless voice: "I'm walking"-he pauses, as if looking over his shoulder, counting the footsteps in his own shadow, then continues-"through streets that are dead." And for the next seventy-plus minutes, we walk with him through one of the most transfixing storyscapes in recent music or literature.

Though some critics saw Time Out of Mind as a report on personal romantic dissolution-like Blood on the Tracks twenty-two years earlier-Time's intensity is broader and more complex than that. It is, in part, an a.s.sembly of songs about what remains after love's wreckage: Dylan sings "Love Sick" in the voice of an older man, talking to himself about the last love he could afford to lose, wanting to let go of his hopes so he can also let go of his hates, and d.a.m.ning himself for not being able to abandon his memory. For singing this haunted by abandonment, you have to seek the lingering ghosts of Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Hank Williams, and Frank Sinatra. But Time Out of Mind goes beyond that. By the point of the alb.u.m's sixteen-minute closing epic of fatigue, humor, and gentle and mad reverie, "Highlands," Dylan has been on the track of departure for so long that he arrives someplace new-someplace not quite like any other place he has taken himself or us before. Is it a place of rejuvenation? That seems too easy a claim, though this much is sure: Time Out of Mind keeps company with hard fates, and for all the darkness and hurt it divulges, its final effect is hard-boiled exhilaration. It is the work of a man looking at a new frontier-not the hopeful frontier seen through the eyes of an ambitious youth, but the unmapped frontier that lies beyond loss and disillusion.

Time Out of Mind is an end-of-the-century work from one of the few artists with the voice to give us one. And, like Dylan's best post-1970s songs-including "The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar," "Man in the Long Black Coat," "Under the Red Sky," "Dark Eyes," "Every Grain of Sand," "Death Is Not the End," "Blind Willie McTell," and "Dignity"-Time's songs aren't that much of a deviation from such earlier touchstones as "Like a Rolling Stone" and "I Shall Be Released." That is, they are the testament of a man who isn't aiming to change the world so much as he's simply trying to find a way to abide all the heartbreaks and disenchantment that result from living in a morally centerless time. In the end, that stance may be no less courageous than the fiery iconoclasm that Dylan once proudly brandished.

IT IS TEMPTING, of course, to read some of Dylan's recent music as a key to his current life and sensibility-but then that has long been the case. That's because, in the aftermath of his motorcycle accident, Dylan became an intensely private man. He did not divulge much about the details of his life or the changing nature of his beliefs, and so when he made records like Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, and New Morning-records that extolled the value of marriage and family as the redemptive meaning of life, and that countless critics cited as Dylan's withdrawal from "significance"-many fans a.s.sumed that these works also signified the truths of Dylan's own private life. Later, in the mid-1970s, when Dylan's marriage began to come apart, and he made Blood on the Tracks and Desire-with those records' accounts of romantic loss and disenchantment-his songs seemed to be confessions of his suffering, and the pain appeared to suit his artistic talents better than domestic bliss had. Well, maybe . . . but also maybe not. The truth is, there is still virtually nothing that is publicly known about the history of Bob Dylan's marriage to Sara Lowndes-how it came together, how it survived for a time, or how and why it ultimately failed.

Since that period, there is even less that is known about Dylan, beyond a few simple facts: namely, that he has never remarried and has apparently never found a love to take the place of his wife, except, perhaps, his love for G.o.d (though there were rumors in early 1998 that Dylan may have secretly remarried-maybe even more than once), and he reportedly maintains an attentive and close relationship with his children. Past that, Dylan's personal life pretty much remains hidden; in fact, it is one of the best-guarded private lives that any famous celebrity has ever managed to achieve. Dylan's friends do not disclose much about his secrets-except, that is, when they leak his unreleased recordings-and Dylan himself likes discussing these matters even less than he likes discussing the meanings of his songs.

Which only causes one to wonder: Are Dylan's songs truly the key to Dylan? Does his life still pour into his work? And is he a happy man-or have his history and vision instead robbed him of the chance for peace and happiness forever, as some critics surmised with Time Out of Mind?

There are, of course, no definitive answers to questions like these, and maybe they aren't even the right questions to be asking. Then again, with Dylan it isn't always easy to know just what are the right questions to ask. During those recording sessions for Knocked Out Loaded, back in 1986, I once or twice tried broaching some of these topics with him. One night, at about 2 A.M., Dylan was leaning in a hallway in an L.A. recording studio, talking about 1965, when he toured England and made the film Don't Look Back. Though it was a peak period in his popularity and creativity, it was also a time of intense pressure and unhappiness-a time not long prior to his bizarre, early-morning limousine ride with John Lennon. "That was before I got married and had kids of my own," he told me. "Having children: That's the great equalizer, you know? Because you don't care so much about yourself anymore. I know that's been true in my case. I'm not sure I'd always been that good to people before that time, or that good to myself."

I asked him: Did he think he was a happier man these days than twenty years before?

"Oh man, I've never even thought about that," Dylan said, laughing. "Happiness is not on my list of priorities. I just deal with day-to-day things. If I'm happy, I'm happy-and if I'm not, I don't know the difference."

He fell silent for a few moments, and stared at his hands. "You know," he said, "these are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It's not happiness or unhappiness, it's either blessed or unblessed. As the Bible says, "Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the unG.o.dly.' Now, that must be a happy man. Knowing that you are the person you were put on this earth to be-that's much more important than just being happy.

"Anyway, happiness is just a balloon-it's just temporary stuff. Anybody can be happy, and if you're not happy, they got a lot of drugs that can make you happy. But trust me: Life is not a bowl of cherries."

I asked him if, in that case, he felt he was a blessed man.

"Oh yeah," he said, nodding his head and smiling broadly. "Yeah, I do. But not because I'm a big rock & roll star." And then he laughed, and excused himself to go back to his recording session.

That was about as far as we got with that line of questioning.

A couple of nights later, I saw Dylan during another post-midnight visit. "I'm thinking about calling this alb.u.m Knocked Out Loaded, Dylan said. He repeated the phrase once, then laughed. "Is that any good, you think, Knocked Out Loaded?"

Dylan was in that alb.u.m's final stages, and he wanted to play me the tape of a song called "Brownsville Girl," that he had co-written with playwright Sam Shepard and had just finished recording. It was a long, storylike song, and it opened with the singer intoning a half-talked, half-sung remembrance about the time he saw the film The Gunfighter, starring Gregory Peck: the tale of a fast-gun outlaw trying to forsake his glorious, on-the-run life when another fast-gun kid comes along and shoots him in the back. The man singing the song sits in a dark theater, watching the gunslinger's death over and over. As he watches it, he is thinking about how the dying cowboy briefly found a better meaning of life to aspire to-a life of family and love and peace-but in the end, couldn't escape his past. And then the singer begins thinking about all the love he has held in his own life, and all the hope he has lost, all the ideals and lovers he gave up for his own life on the run-and by the time the song is over, the singer can't tell if he is the man he is watching in the movie, or if he is simply stuck in his own memory. It was hard to tell where Dylan ends and Shepard begins in the lyrics, but when "Brownsville Girl" came crashing to its end, it was quite easy to hear whom the song really belongs to. I've only known of one man who could put across a performance that gripping and unexpected, and he was sitting there right in front of me, concentrating hard on the tale, as if he too were hearing the song's wondrous involutions for the first time-as if it were the first time Bob Dylan was hearing about the life he has led and can never leave behind.

I didn't really know what to say, so I said nothing. Dylan lit a cigarette and took a seat on a nearby sofa and started talking. "You know, sometimes I think about people like T-Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters-these people who played into their sixties. If I'm here at eighty, I'll be doing the same thing I'm doing now. This is all I want to do-it's all I can do. . . . I think I've always aimed my songs at people who I imagined, maybe falsely so, had the same experiences that I've had, who have kind of been through what I'd been through. But I guess a lot of people just haven't."

He watched his cigarette burn for a moment, and then offered a smile. "See," he said, "I've always been just about being an individual, with an individual point of view. If I've been about anything, it's probably that, and to let some people know that it's possible to do the impossible.

"And that's really all. If I've ever had anything to tell anybody, it's that: You can do the impossible. Anything is possible. And that's it. No more."

On that night, as on so many nights before and since, I realized that it has indeed been something special to be around during a time when Bob Dylan has been one of our foremost American artists. I thought back to my youth and how Dylan's music had helped inspire my values and also helped nurture my spirit through several seasons of difficult and exciting changes. I was not alone in these responses, of course. Dylan managed to speak to and for the best visions and boldest ideals of an entire emerging generation, and he also spoke to our sense of scary and liberating isolation: the sense that we were now living on our own, with "no direction home," and that we would have to devise our own rules and our own integrity to make it through all the change. In the process, Dylan not only heroically defined the moment, he also invented rock & roll's future: He staked out a voice and style that countless other budding visionaries, including Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Elvis Costello, Sinead O'Connor, Beck, Elliott Smith, and more than a few rap artists would later seek to emulate and make their own. And because he did this so affectingly, it became easy to take him and his work personally, to believe that he was still tied to our dreams and our hopes for p.r.o.nouncements that might yet deliver us. Tom Petty's drummer, Stan Lynch, once told me: "I saw many people who were genuinely moved by Dylan, who felt they had to make some connection with him, that this was an important thing in their life. They wanted to be near him and tell him they're all right, because they probably feel that Bob was telling them that it was going to be all right when they weren't all right, as if Bob knew they weren't doing so well at the time.

"They forget one important thing: Bob doesn't know them; they just know him. But that's all right. That's not shortsightedness on their part. That's just the essence of what people do when you talk to them at a vulnerable time in their lives. It doesn't matter that he was talking to them by way of a record; he was still talking to them."

Or, as Bruce Springsteen once noted, in some remarks directed to Dylan on the occasion of Dylan's induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, "When I was fifteen and I heard "Like a Rolling Stone' for the first time, I heard a guy like I've never heard before or since. A guy that had the guts to take on the whole world and made me feel like I had 'em too. . . . To steal a line from one of your songs, whether you like it or not, 'You was the brother that I never had.' "

It's an understandable sentiment; to some of us, the epiphanies of youth count as deeply as the bonds of family. But as Dylan himself once told an interviewer: "People come up to me on the street all the time, acting like I'm some long-lost brother-like they know me. Well, I'm not their brother, and I think I can prove that."

It may be the only thing that he has left to prove-that he is not, after all, his brother's keeper-though in a sense, it hardly matters. The truth is, Dylan is still attempting to sort out the confusion of the day in the most honest and committed way that he knows. That is probably about as much as you can ask of somebody who has already done a tremendous amount to deepen our consciousness and our time.

In 1998, as I finish these words, Bob Dylan remains what he has been for over thirty-five years: a vital American artist. He has shifted our past and opened wide our future. We should be proud to claim him as our own.

the rolling stones' journey into fear.

It may seem hard to fathom these days-watching Mick Jagger and Keith Richards' aged incarnations of their former terror-bringing selves-but there was a time when the Rolling Stones seemed the unmistakable apotheosis of rock & roll: superlative purveyors of blues and rhythm & blues who dramatized first the pop rebelliousness, then the moral disdain and political uncertainty, of an entire social movement. Later, when that uncertainty turned into frustration, and the frustration into malignancy, the Rolling Stones also mirrored the dissolution of their generation.

Maybe a better way of putting this is to state that the Rolling Stones said as much about the shared social condition of our lives as anyone else in rock & roll; in fact, they may have been pop's last real unifying force. By that I mean the Stones became a focal point for rock at a critical juncture: The Beatles had disintegrated in pain, Bob Dylan had seemingly traded his world-altering iconoclasm for family security, and the late 1960s psychedelic rock movement had turned hollow, even harmful. Then: There were the Rolling Stones again, back from a fitful term of drugs and death (actually, that term wasn't quite yet over for the band), singing songs boasting collusion in evil and revolt, touting themselves as "The World's Greatest Rock & Roll Band," and providing the music and performances to support either claim. n.o.body since then has won such widespread a.s.sent, or seemed to define for so many what rock & roll should mean and look and feel like. This isn't to say that other artists didn't have as much impact on rock & roll (certainly the s.e.x Pistols and Nirvana-plus many rap artists-transformed rock's meanings, and large parts of its audience as well). Nor is it to say that other artists didn't prove better sellers than the Stones. Still, the Rolling Stones were perhaps the last thing that the rock & roll world at large seemed to agree on, and all the disagreements since then either amount to what one believes we've gained or what we've lost.

Which is to say that, in certain respects, the last twenty years or so haven't really proved that favorable for the Stones-or at least for their place in that later span of history. Following the 1960s, the group hit a long, limp stride, relying on their reputation to buoy them when their music couldn't. More important, the reference points of rock changed ineradicably: Punk bands like the s.e.x Pistols and the Clash had stolen the moment and sought to indict the Stones as an outmoded fetish, as well as symbols of inflated privilege and decadence. The charge wasn't far off the mark: The Rolling Stones had backed off from every notion of rebellion save an arrogant conviction in their own rank-a belief that allowed them not to flout authority so much as own it. The punks. .h.i.t the Stones hard-alongside such songs as "Anarchy in the U.K." and "Guns on the Roof," the Stones' "Street Fighting Man" sounded like an anthem of equivocation-and though the group hit back a little with 1978's Some Girls, it wasn't enough to regain their cutting edge. The group still sold, still carried the weight of myth and sensation, but that's all that can be said of their story now for far too many years.

Still, the journey that brought the Stones to their own dissolution was rich, remarkable, and genuinely brave (though perhaps also mean and foolhardy). Along the way, the band became a measure of when rock music and its culture succeeded most and then failed bitterly; indeed, at that time, the Rolling Stones were the best definition rock & roll had of a center-a center that could not hold. In the years that followed, that center became scattered-as if hit by a shotgun blast. Other times, it seemed replaced by a void. Either way, it may be that n.o.body can ever define it again in quite the same way as the Rolling Stones once did, long ago, in frightened, ecstatic, and audacious times.

IN THE EARLY and mid-1960s, the Rolling Stones earned what was likely the most important designation of their career: Simply, they were a great white blues and rhythm & blues band. Unlike Elvis Presley, the Stones didn't help reinvent or transmogrify black music. Instead, with The Rolling Stones, Now!, Out of Our Heads, 12 x 5, and December's Children, they sought to a.s.similate or adopt Chicago blues and Chuck Berry-style rock & roll-which isn't, as some detractors suggested, the same as purloining or exploiting that music. For the most part, the Rolling Stones were upwardly mobile young men, enamored with black music's emotional artistry, though not so much the music's emotions-at least not the deep-rooted agony and fear (and release from agony and fear) that permeated American blues. (For the Stones, that deepening would come later.) In the mid-1960s, the Rolling Stones came closer to stylizing their own feelings in brittle, tense, keen-edged rock & roll singles like "19th Nervous Breakdown," "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadows," "Get Off of My Cloud," "The Last Time," and "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"-the latter among the 1960s' most defining pop songs. Not surprisingly, the emotions conveyed in these songs were those of disdain and rancor, arrogance and ennui.

My best remembrances of seeing the band-that is, except in the film Gimme Shelter-are from this period, during their 1965 U.S. tour, at an appearance in Portland, Oregon. I recall Brian Jones, squatting on his haunches, playing dulcimer embellishments on "Lady Jane," then picking up a teardrop-shaped guitar, clutching it high and tight to his chest during "The Last Time," standing insanely close to the stage's edge, inviting more real danger than even Mick Jagger did. I remember Jagger in an off-white suit, a bright blue ruffled shirt, barefoot and messy-haired, pulled up into a mock-toreador's stance, coaxing the audience with the shimmies of his tambourine, getting upbraided by a policeman down front who had to hold off the rushing kids, then kicking trash in the cop's startled face, waving him off with a scornful flick of the wrist, as if to dismiss, forever, any last threats of authority. I'd never seen anything that flirted so wildly and ably with ma.s.s chaos, and I'd never seen anything so magnificent. Later, I read something by critic Jon Landau that explained that show: "Violence. The Rolling Stones are violence. Their music penetrates the raw nerve endings of their listeners and finds its way into the groove marked "release of frustration.' Their violence has always been a surrogate for the larger violence their audience is so capable of."

By 1966 and 1967, the Rolling Stones had come into their own. With Aftermath, Between the b.u.t.tons, and Flowers, the band made some of their most inventive music: part blues-based, part surreal pop, frequently eloquent, occasionally drug-steeped, and always best when it cut between affectations with the fleet, fiery glint of rock & roll. The band's 1967 work, Their Satanic Majesties Request, was at one extreme an overblown response to the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the pervasive pop psychedelia of that season. In another way, Satanic Majesties was a work that tapped or mocked the effete creative sensibility of that period as effectively as The Velvet Underground and Nico. At the time-and especially in the years that followed-Satanic Majesties was dismissed as an ambitious mess. Today, to my ears, it plays wonderfully, and beneath its occasional concessions to that season's notions of simple altruism, beats a dark, dark heart.

But it was with Beggar's Banquet (1968) and Let It Bleed (1969)-alb.u.ms more or less of a piece-that the Rolling Stones made their most intelligent, committed, and forcible music. These were, in large measure, records about social disorder and moral vacillation, and more than before or since, the band seemed to say something about the moods and idealism coming apart all around them. The timing couldn't have been better. By 1968-a year in which Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot to death in Memphis; and the broken hopes of millions of people erupted in costly, long-term violence (climaxing at the Chicago Democratic National Convention, at which police brutally bludgeoned American youth)-rock & roll had become a field of hard options and opposing arguments. The Beatles seemed dazed and wary by their role as youth leaders. On one hand, they recorded two versions of "Revolution," in which they opted in, and then out, of the notion of violent revolt; then, on the flip side, they issued "Hey Jude," their greatest anthem of community and forbearance. By contrast, the Stones faced the contradictions of their position more directly. In "Salt of the Earth" (from Beggar's Banquet), Jagger extolled the working-cla.s.s ma.s.ses only to admit his hopeless distance from any real involvement with such people ("When I search a faceless crowd/A swirling ma.s.s of gray and black and white/They don't look real to me/In fact they look so strange"), and in "Street Fighting Man" (banned in several U.S. cities for fear that it might incite further political riots), the Stones admitted to both a desire for violent confrontation and a longing for equivocation ("Hey! Think the time is right for a palace rev-OH-loo-tion/But where I live the game to play is compromise SO-loo-tion"). For that matter, the Rolling Stones were asking some of the toughest questions around ("I shouted out, "Who killed the Kennedys?' " sang Jagger in "Sympathy for the Devil"), and they didn't hesitate to deliver hard answers ("Well after all, it was you and me"). In addition, the group had suffered its own loss when Brian Jones left the band in June 1969, and was found dead in his swimming pool a month later.

The pa.s.sion and persuasion of that music carried over to the Rolling Stones' historic 1969 U.S. tour, but so did the risk, culminating in the Altamont debacle that left four people dead, including one black man, Meredith Hunter, stabbed to death in front of the stage by h.e.l.l's Angels while the group played an uneasy set.

LET'S STOP the story there, because in a way, that's where the story does stop. The Rolling Stones would go on to make some good-to-great work, including Exile on Main Street (a 1972 alb.u.m of dense, brutal music that worked beyond rebellion, or more accurately, worked against rebellion in the sense that it cultivated dissipation); Some Girls, in 1978 (as R & B-informed as their early records, as prideful as Aftermath); and 1981's Tattoo You, with the band's last great single, "Start Me Up." I'd even be willing to add Dirty Work (1986) to the list-if only because, for once, the group's music was revolving around notions of anger, emptiness, and rejection that seemed candidly self-derived and mutually directed-plus 1995's live alb.u.m Stripped, because it features some of the best singing of Jagger's career: He finally sounds like an aged blues-jazz-pop pro, as mean, witty, and weathered as latter-day Frank Sinatra. (It really makes you wish Sinatra had covered Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," or Jagger and Richards' own "The Spider and the Fly"; like Jagger, Sinatra would have torn the songs open anew.) But after Exile on Main Street, the Rolling Stones would never again make music that defined our times, that helped us or even hurt us. They would never again make music that mattered much outside the needs and contexts of their own career-and even then it's hard to imagine that records as inconsiderable as Goat's Head Soup, It's Only Rock 'n' Roll, Black and Blue, and Emotional Rescue mattered even to the Stones.

SO, WHAT HAPPENED? What flattened one of the smartest, most fearsome bands that rock & roll has ever known? For a chance at an answer, let's consider what two different kinds of historians have to say. The first historians to consider is a pair of authors, Stanley Booth and Philip Norman, each of whom in 1984 published essential books about the band. Both books-Booth's Dance with the Devil (later ret.i.tled The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones) and Norman's Symphony for the Devil-managed to rehabilitate the spirit of the Stones' peak period better than even a replaying of the group's music might, which is no small accomplishment. On the surface, such works of remembrance might seem superfluous at best. Rock & roll, after all, is an art-and-entertainment form bound in immediacy and performance, and it isn't easy for a retrospect to add much to our understanding of that music's impact or meaning. (Which is to say that no work of criticism or biography can possibly replace-or perhaps even truly deepen-the experience of first hearing "Sympathy for the Devil," "Street Fighting Man," "Gimme Shelter," "Midnight Rambler," "Brown Sugar," and "Casino Boogie" and understanding that well-defined visions of murder, revolt, chaos, rape, racism, and profligacy had just become notions to dance to.) Still, Booth and Norman's narratives succeeded because the authors understood not merely the Stones' token tough-guys stance, but because they comprehended the quite real nihilism that consumed the band's ideals and creativity (and, at times, their physical health), and how the journey into that nihilism mirrored the dissipation of pop culture at large. In both books, it is the disintegration and death of the group's founding member, guitarist Brian Jones, in July of 1969, and the debacle a few months later of the Altamont free concert, that spells the effective end of the Stones' journey.

Of the two works, Stanley Booth's does the more impa.s.sioned job of putting across the Rolling Stones' remarkable rise to deterioration. A powerfully adept stylist with a seemingly inborn comprehension of blues music and blues sensibility (he also wrote about Elvis Presley, Bukka White, Howlin' Wolf, and B. B. King, among others), Booth attached himself as a journalist to the Rolling Stones' odyssey in England, during one of Brian Jones' star-crossed drug-possession trials, and then finagled his way onto the group's epochal (and fateful) 1969 tour to compose this book.

Some years later, resolved to overcome some of the emotional and drug problems which had derived, in no small part, from his a.s.sociation with the band, Booth finally pulled free of the Stones' sway to tell his tale-a tale that is as big and funny and bitter and shattering as the failure of an entire generation. True to his original intent, Booth's account sticks to the time frame of that single tour, interspersed with chapters detailing early band history. While one can't help but feel Booth has a much larger, probably more incriminating tale he could reveal, his implicit dismissal of everything in the Rolling Stones' history after the horror of Altamont is perhaps the most truthful and succinct summation possible of the consequence of the band's last twenty-eight years of touring and record-making: Simply, they are of little consequence whatsoever.

More important, of course, Booth's narrow focus on the Stones' late-1960s epic lends his insider's view a certain grim effect. He recounts the story of the band's trek to Altamont in parallel motion with a chronicle of their early ascent and its sad climax-the decay, dismissal, and subsequent death of Brian Jones-until by the book's end, there seems a certain inevitable connection between the two events, as if whims, ambitions, insights, and indulgences such as the Stones' couldn't help but demand human cost.

But Booth never draws his characters as mere exploiters or spoilers. He insists, and rightly, that at their best the Rolling Stones aimed to meet, understand, provoke, and rattle the spirit of their times with more inquiring intelligence than most of their contemporaries. "The Stones and their audience," Booth writes at one point, "were following decent impulses toward a wilderness where are no laws, toward the rough beast that knows no gentle night, nor aught obeys but his foul appet.i.te."

In Jagger, particularly, we find a disdainful and intelligent blues fancier who meant to confront the moral and political questions of the late 1960s without forfeiting his taste for pop privilege. It is a contradictory approach, of course-one that cannot work. But to Jagger's eternal credit, with such overpowering, nondoctrinaire, and darkly compa.s.sionate songs as "Salt of the Earth" and "Gimme Shelter," he raised political pop to a summit that wouldn't be equaled (or topped) until the music of the s.e.x Pistols and the Clash. At the same time, with "Sympathy for the Devil," Jagger questioned the nature of personal and social evil with such flair that many listeners bought the song's surface allure of infamy and missed its underlying plaint. At Altamont, Jagger came face to face with the fatal outcome of his labors, and his music, manner, and singing were never the same after. Helping provide the context for murder can do that for you.

By the end of his tale, Booth has found his voice and momentum with a pitch and pa.s.sion I've rarely seen equaled in pop journalism. He pulls us into the mad, deadly center of Altamont with the awful, compelling tone of someone who understood exactly the meaning of what he saw there on that day-on that occasion which was the worst in rock's public history, which helped kill off whatever thin idealism that 1960s youth might still have claimed. "You felt," writes Booth, "that in the next seconds or minutes you could die, and there was nothing you could do to prevent it, to improve the odds for survival. A bad dream, but we were all in it." Compared to Booth's account, all other recapitulations of Altamont-even the Maysles Brothers' excellent doc.u.mentary, Gimme Shelter-seem secondary. Reading Booth's narrative, you can hardly wonder that it took him nearly fifteen years to face the task of remembering. I, too, would try to defer reiterating such fear and slaughter, even if it meant deferring my craft.

Compared to Booth's work, Philip Norman's Symphony for the Devil reads simply like a scrupulous history-which is exactly what it is. Indeed, Norman-who wrote Shout!, the beautifully factual account of the Beatles' career which somehow seemed to miss altogether the spirit of that band's music-does an immensely more able job of recounting the Rolling Stones' familial and sociological origins and detailing the resounding impact the band had on the British pop scene. In addition, such necessary extras as early producer-manager Andrew Loog Oldham and Jagger's protege-paramour, Marianne Faithfull, receive a full-fleshed, good-humored treatment here, while the always fascinating, perpetually heartbreaking Brian Jones undergoes a more critical (though no less compa.s.sionate) examination.

Both books finally reach much the same deduction: that the Rolling Stones came as close to the truth about pop's real sociopolitical effect-and spiritual cost-as anybody during that naive-but-dread-filled term of 1969, and that such insights probably stunned the band into a long season of grandiose irrelevance. So Mick Jagger became a sometimes silly peac.o.c.k, and Keith Richards became a rather pampered excuse for an outlaw; so Bill Wyman was, for a time, an irreclaimable womanizer, and Charlie Watts remained the finest and kindest drummer in rock & roll; so guitarist Mick Taylor saw death coming down the same long slide that claimed Brian Jones and stepped out of the band, and his replacement, Ron Wood, seemed merely a spirited prop, meant to a.s.sure Jagger and Richards that the band still had a hard-tempered, exciting presence onstage. Why, then, do the Rolling Stones keep going-when loving fans like Booth and Norman figured out that their real dream died that one cold day twenty-eight years ago, knifed to death before their eyes, as they pondered the meaning and freedom of responsibility, and the connections between ideals of loving community and violent revolt?

Norman more or less says the Rolling Stones keep on because their image is too immunizing-from a brutal world that promised to shove a knife right down their throats just for asking the right questions at the right time-ever to let go of. Booth doesn't pretend to say why, because he realizes it means turning the questions on ourselves, on the terrible corrosion of our own beliefs about what rock & roll might accomplish, and about everything it failed to change. He comes to this resigned but hardly uncaring place with the knowledge of one who once stared into the pa.s.sageway to h.e.l.l and finally found a way to move beyond the terror of that vision, and for that reason his book outdistances anything the Stones have wrought since Let It Bleed. Also for that reason, Booth's is clearly the work to choose between the two volumes-that is, if you only have so much taste for tales of generational decline. Because Booth brings us closer to all the Rolling Stones' failures and deaths, he ultimately makes us feel more alive-and hopefully, more frightened.

OUR NEXT HISTORIAN is Mick Jagger himself. After all, it's only fair.

I've been reluctant to include any question-and-answer format interviews in this volume, since, to be truthful, when that form of writing succeeds it is as much the work of the person being interviewed as it is of the person asking the questions. That is, the interviewee more or less makes the article succeed or fail by the nature of his or her own thoughtfulness and articulation. Jagger's interview is the one exception I'm happy to make, though, believe me, getting Mick Jagger to talk at length about the Rolling Stones' history was neither an easy or fun endeavor. I spoke to him on three occasions in London in the summer of 1987, for Rolling Stone's twentieth anniversary issue. We talked once in a pub, once in a large Indian restaurant that Jagger had reserved for just the two of us (he was clearly delighted when I offered to pick up the tab), and once at the Rolling Stones' offices near King's Row. After each conversation, I genuinely had a painful headache. Jagger was certainly gracious, but the man had been interviewed for over a generation by that time, and he was quite practiced at the art of evasion. Sometimes I had to pose questions in several forms-or try to back into them-before he would divulge much. Later, when I transcribed and edited the interview, I was startled to see how much he did have to say about some matters, and not surprised to see how much he held back in other areas. Along with Lou Reed, Joe Strummer, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and only a few others, Jagger is among the smartest people I've had the chance to interview, though more than any of the others, Mick cost me a small fortune in Tylenol.

This interview originally appeared-in greater length-in Rolling Stone, November 5, 1987, and appears in this collection by kind permission of Straight Arrow Press.

We hear a great deal of talk these days about how inventive and magical and bold the sixties were. In fact, it's not uncommon to hear people speak of those times as if they were somehow better than any time that has come since. Do you share that perspective?

Every time is special, surely, unto itself. But to actually say it was better in 1964 or '65-I find that a bit strange. I mean, maybe it was a bit better, because you were, like, twenty years old back then, and you looked better, and you didn't have any responsibilities. You splashed around the beach and didn't have a mortgage and five children to look after. Given all that, it might appear better, though the truth may be that you were having a hard time back then, because you were strung out on too many acid trips or something. You forget about all that. I'm not talking about my own personal experience. I'm talking about people that actually, um, nostalgize. Is that a verb? It should be.

But yes, things were very different then than they are now. And they're never going to be the same.

I mean, there are two views of the sixties: one, that it was just a big hype; the other, that it was a wonderful-I hate to use the horrible word renaissance, but I suppose I can't think of a better one-that it was a wonderful renaissance of artistic endeavor and thought. But the underside to it all, of course, was the war in Vietnam and various other colonial-type wars. Also, all the political unrest of the times, particularly in Europe. I realize that most people tend to think that all the political unrest took place in America, but I really think it was on a much smaller scale there than you realize. To be honest, I don't think real political change ever took place at all in the United States. I mean, there were all the protest movements and so on, and I suppose there was some philosophical change, but in terms of deep political change, I don't think it ever really happened.

That's one of the ironies about all the current nostalgia for the sixties: Although we seem to believe that those times awakened our best ideals, I'm not convinced that we've carried them over to the present day with any lasting practical political or social impact.

Nor am I. On the other hand, one can't ignore all the social undercurrents of the time-how people became more tolerant of certain kinds of ideas and looks, and how that tended to influence general social thought. For example, look at the changes in civil rights. It's just tolerance of other people's ideas and the way they look and think. Perhaps that was the one political change in the United States that really took hold. It may not be perfect, but in the area of different minority groups achieving the political weight they deserve-or in the acceptance of feminist thought-at least there's been some improvement. But perhaps none of that alters the political power structure.

Looking back at the early and mid-sixties, the political climate in both the United States and Britain seemed relatively liberal-at least, compared with the political climate in both countries today. Do you think that atmosphere helped contribute to the sort of cultural explosion that rock & roll became during that decade?

No, I don't really think so. By the time the Labour party came into power in Britain in 1964, youth culture was already a fait accompli. That is, youth had already benefited from the prosperous inflationary period of the early sixties-that whole period of teenage consumerism that Colin MacInnes wrote about in books like Absolute Beginners. I mean, in the early sixties the cult of youth was already well on its way. In Britain, youth was already largely economically independent, and it just got more that way as things went on. So when the Labour government came in, they had no choice but to run with youth culture as an idea, because they couldn't afford to put it down. They wanted to be seen as trendy-all socialist governments want to be seen as trendy. They want to be seen as the friend of the young, because the young are the ones that are going to vote for them. You know, [former prime minister] Harold Wilson used to invite black singers to 10 Downing Street to try to look trendy.

Meanwhile, the government's policy really was to stop all this going on, because youth culture was entrepreneurial-not really socialist at all. Also, much of what was going on in youth culture wasn't really considered the nice thing to do.

At the time, it seemed that if there were any real leaders, they were artists like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Did you ever feel that you and the Beatles were helping to break the culture open?

It was more a sense of sharing a joke that these people were taking it all so seriously.

To be honest, we never set out to make cultural changes, though as they were coming, one was dealing with them on a natural basis. We were making certain statements and so on, but I don't recall actually intellectualizing those things-at least early on. Initially, I think the driving force was just to be famous, get lots of girls, and earn a lot of money. That, and the idea of just getting our music across as best we could.

And I think that's perhaps where that att.i.tude of defiance really came from: those times when you'd come up against somebody who would say, "No, you can't do that. You can't go on television, you can't do this." But that had all been done before, really, back with Elvis on the "Ed Sullivan Show" and all that. What was happening with us wasn't anything new.

But n.o.body had really talked about the idea of Elvis Presley wielding political power. By the mid-sixties people were talking about artists like the Stones, Beatles, and Bob Dylan as having genuine political and cultural consequence.

What I'm saying is, I don't think any of us set out with a political conscience. I mean, I exclude Dylan, because he definitely had a political consciousness. And there might have been a seminal conscience in both our groups, but I think it really only applied itself to the actual ma.s.s culture at hand. You know, questions like "What do you think of people wearing their hair long?" or "What do you think about your clothes-aren't they a bit scruffy?" That was the real thrust of it all at the beginning. I think it was more social than it was political. You know, you'd go into a restaurant without a tie and get thrown out. It was really pathetic.

But wasn't there something implicitly defiant or contemptuous about the band's stance? For example, that famous incident in which the band got arrested for p.i.s.sing against a garage.

I didn't take that as a social event. It was just bulls.h.i.t, really. And I bet Andrew Loog Oldham [the Stones' manager in the sixties] paid ten quid to the garage man to ring the police [laughs]. That was the level it was on.

Yet with songs like "Satisfaction," "Mother's Little Helper," and "19th Nervous Breakdown," it certainly seemed that the Rolling Stones had something of their own to say-something a bit tougher and more questioning than one was accustomed to hearing in typical songs of teenage love and unrest.

As you got older during that time, you know, you got a bit more mature. Still, you've got to remember that for every one song that took some serious social view-like, say, "Mother's Little Helper"-there were loads of others that were just teenage bulls.h.i.t. From the Stones, from the Beatles, from everyone. I mean, perhaps what we did in this period was to enlarge the subject material of popular music to include topics outside the typical "moon in June/I've got a new motorbike" teenage genre. We said you can write a song about anything you want. And that was really a big thing-it's certainly one of the big legacies in the songwriting area that we left, along with other artists.