The Cambridge Companion To The Rolling Stones, edited by Victor Coelho and John Covach

         An academic study of the Stones is tone-deaf both to the band’s music and their mystique

North American academia is currently all over pop culture. A course on Lady Gaga (Sex, Gender and Identity) offered by the University of Virginia is one example of what’s going on; another is the recent slew of tomes on the Beatles, Dylan and even the Clash emanating from campus corridors. Most shed little light on their already well-covered subjects (Why Dylan Matters by Harvard Latin don Richard F Thomas is an exception), and this self-styled “first major academic study” of the Stones likewise comes up short. The group have had many companions down the years, but surely few as dull.

The dead hand of academic prose is one problem; the assertion that the band’s assorted documentaries are “instructive in terms of demonstrating the central influence of the Stones within the world of motion pictures” is barely readable (and a clear misjudgment).

Another poser for the profs is that pop is rarely about music alone. Attitude, vibe, haircut, mascara, madness and live performance are potent ingredients of a mystique best captured by allusive, not analytical writing. That goes double in the case of the Stones whose core mythology is Mick Jagger as ambi-sexual demon Jack Flash with Keef and Ronnie as genial guitar-toting pirates holed up with a kif pipe, a line and a lamp draped in a Tibetan prayer shawl. Try getting a module out of that. Describing Jagger’s place as frontman – a veritable dervish, as much athlete and bump’n’grind artiste as musician – we’re told that his “lithesome dancing” involves “repeated Latin pelvic thrusts”. No shit, Sherlock! Who knew? (About Mick’s Puerto Rican heritage, that is.)

The collection is on firmer ground when considering the Stones on record. There’s an entertaining look at a clutch of Stones country songs (Dead Flowers et al), a decent reassessment of their psychedelic period (Jumpin’ Jack Flash as well as Their Satanic Majesties Request) and a welcome upgrade for Brian Jones as founder, world music maverick and the group’s true dandy.

The couple of pages granted the Stones’ 60s singles are woefully inadequate. Songs such as Mother’s Little Helper and Play With Fire are more than reflections of “mod London”, they are vignettes of a society in transition, when depressed mums took up pill habits and St John’s Wood heiresses rubbed shoulders with pop stars and celebrity gangsters.

Most of the book’s firepower is directed at the central album quartet of Beggars Banquet (1968), Let It Bleed (1969), Sticky Fingers (1971) and Exile on Main Street (1972), all given sound but pedestrian readings, with much cooing over Mick Taylor’s guitar solos. Since then, the Stones have barely made a coherent album, though the Companion is excited by the disco influences on 1978’s Some Girls. There is, naturally, oodles about the blues, a subject already well represented in faculty libraries, though scant mention of the Stones’ epiphanic encounter with Muddy Waters at Chicago’s Chess Studios in 1964. Of the strong reggae flavours on 1970s albums like Black and Blue there is also no word.

Given that today’s culture wars are waged with particular vigour on North American campuses (sex, gender and identity indeed), one might also have expected a discourse on the place of women in Stones songs, the offending (to some) litany running from Stupid Girl and Under My Thumb to Brown Sugar and Some Girls, but the sole female voice among the nine here is otherwise engaged. The question why anyone would want to write a song celebrating a serial killer of women (Midnight Rambler) doesn’t arise; maybe it’s just what Richards calls “a blues opera”.

It’s difficult to understand the crossfire hurricane that propelled the Stones during their 1968-72 pomp without considering Performance (1970), a glaring omission here. True, the film and its soundtrack are not a Stones venture, yet writer Donald Cammell’s tale of faded pop star (Jagger) and East End gangster (James Fox) remains, in the words of Marianne Faithfull, a perceptive real-life Stones companion, “an allegory of libertine Chelsea with its baronial rock stars, wayward jeunesse dorée, drugs, sex and decadence… a whole era under glass”.

Shot through with esoteric ideas, Performance built on Jagger’s infatuation with his dark side, apparent since Sympathy for the Devil (or “some little twerp dancing round thinking he’s Satan”, according to Ry Cooder, a player on Let It Bleed and Performance). Jagger’s character, Turner, is an amalgam of Jones and Richards, a matrix compounded by leading lady Anita Pallenberg, Richards’s then partner (and Jones’s ex). Keith and Anita’s descent into junkiedom was among what Faithfull terms the film’s “deadly aftereffects”. Surely worth a doctoral thesis, then?

The Stones’ attitude to academia was mocking rather than hostile. Mick, Keith and Brian were all ex-grammar school boys, respectively LSE undergrad, art-school dropout and trained musician. An early interviewer was perplexed by how such fine educations could result in their moronic reputation. “There are a lot of morons in grammar schools,” shot back Mick.

This review is from the Observer

• The Cambridge Companion to the Rolling Stones, edited by Victor Coelho and John Covach, is published by Cambridge University Press (£15.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

Disponível em: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/30/cambridge-companion-to-rolling-stones-victor-coelho-john-covach-review