The Rolling Stones were a rather strange proposition if you were discovering music for yourself in your mid teens in their early Eighties, There was their fabulous and still incredibly dark, impressive Sixties legacy which I remember encountering at one of my first parties in Teddington. Alcohol flowing. Girls.
The illicit thrill of Rolled Gold their classic collection of unstopple run of 45s was something else. It felt like you were uncovering and on the edge of the adult without quite having the world experience or knowing how to fully surrender to it or else seize it by the collar. Me anyhow.
I had a very innocent upbringing and am still grateful for that. I didn't understand the dark roads the Stones were talkng about and walking with the likes of Paint it Black and Under My Thumb though they were mightily impressive and made you wish you could walk that walk and turn the cool girls heads even though you knew you never could. Looking back I'm relieved. A lot of the boys that I knew could were wash outs before they made it to twenty. Burned out.
The actual Stones of 1982 were a different proposition from what they'd been in the Sixties and early Seventies before Keith's blood transfysions. . They were a seedy unprepossessing proposition, had long lost their grounding and understanding of the blues and peddled a flabby, not to say flacid AOR sound that was sterile to say the least.. And frankly unattractive and verging on desperate. They couldn't get it up. Seriously. I'm sure you've heard Je Suis Un Rock Star.
Under Cover, their album that year shone the spotlight on a set of refugees that had lost their way once and for all it seemed. It was like being obliged to attend a party with your scabby and embarassing older uncles as they paraded their trophy wives and younger girlfriends, devoid of integrity or the remotest self-awareness that they were utterly laughable and ridiculous. Not to say disgusting..
They ran through songs like She Was Hot and Tie You Up (The Pain of Love). The songs turned out to be worse than their sleazy and desperate titles. The Stones were crap. Maybe you wanted to attend one of their stadium gigs to see them go through the motions and run through the classics one more time and try to make Satisfaction and Gimme Shelter and the rest real again in any way at all.
Really, they weren't worth the bother from this point on. You were much better off playing the records from the golden years when they were actually any good. The Sixties were over and there was no point in pretending otherwise except by following its best examples and living your own life.
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