Mick Jagger an intellectual?? Yes, and I’ll tell you why...
Bruce Deitrick Price
October 25, 2007
What I don’t enjoy is the smug, incessant sermonizing. Rolling Stone says we live “at a moment of profound moral crisis.” Bush, of course, is the worst president ever--Jimmy Carter and Norman Mailer second that emotion. The economy is a shambles, and all skies are gloomy. But guess when things were swell? Rolling Stone’s existential premise is that the Sixties was this noble era much superior to the dull years before and the sordid ones thereafter.
Many of the RS icons participate wholly in this vision. Neil Young says: “Young people were united in their opposition to the war. They were also discovering the music that unified them.” George McGovern says: “The young people that gathered around me were historically grounded. It was an impressive generation.” Bill Moyers says: “The Sixties taught us that you don’t have to feel guilty to love justice.” Michael Moore says: “The good news is people have not given up on the values of the Sixties.” Jackson Browne says: “Calling them the Sixties is just shorthand for an alternative way of looking at the world and being engaged.”
Okay, it was a turbulent time, with the charms that a storm can have. Kids were telling their parents to drop dead. Sex and drugs were in the air. But noble? Half the opposition to the war, much more than half, vanished the day Nixon got rid of the draft. Let me tell about those peace marches. It was the greatest singles scene ever devised. Here’s something else that ought to be factored in. The Kremlin always bragged that it could, with little notice, put a million demonstrators on the streets of the world. If you looked at the posters and flyers, the same names were always at the bottom: the Spartacus League, the Trotskyites, the Young Socialists...Let’s give credit where it’s due. Moscow got what it wanted (the New York Times, too). They won the war. But I don’t think we should pretend it was altogether noble.
I take pride in being a contrarian intellectual. When I hear ten “experts” agree on something, I tend to suspect they’re wrong. When they sermonize, I know they’re wrong. (Al Gore, take note.) So, as fine as The Fortieth Anniversary issue is, the parts that gave me the most delight were the people who refused to go with the Party Line.
For example, Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog guy, says of the Sixties, “It was a blizzard of youthful folly.” His interviewer tries to nudge him back to the correct view: “A lot of people now feel we’re living in a bleak time--the war in Iraq, global warming, the sorry reign of President Bush, the vanishing middle class.” At which Brand almost laughs: “Well, they’re either young or they don’t have very good memories. Apart from climate, where we are now is a walk in the park compared to the Great Depression, a walk in the park compared to the Second World War, a walk in the park compared to the Cold War--and what almost happened.” Wow! Isn’t that great?
Bob Dylan pleasantly surprised me. Super Editor Jann Wenner tries to control him but he won’t be controlled. Wenner asks: “What do you think of the historical moment we’re in today? We seem to be hellbent on destruction. Do you worry about global warming?” To which Dylan says: “Where’s the global warming. It’s freezing here.” Wenner prompts: “It seems a pretty frightening outlook.” Dylan replies: “I think what you’re driving at, though, is we expect politicians to solve all our problems. I don’t expert politicians to solve anybody’s problems.” Wenner: “Who is going to solve them?” Dylan: “Our own selves. We’ve got to take the world by the horns and solve our own problems.” Wenner tries to praise the Sixties but the very voice of the Sixties says: “You came up in the Fifties. There was more freethinking then. There wasn’t such mass conformity as there is today. Today, a freethinking person gets ridiculed.” The man always thinks for himself--that’s why his genius could flower.
Dylan also set the record straight this way: “Just about everybody and anybody who was around in the Fifties and Sixties had a degree of originality. That was the only way you could get in the door.” Dylan is speaking about musicians but he reminds us of an important point: before there were Hippies in the 1960s there were Beatniks in the 1950s, and if you compare the two groups, I bet you find that the Hippies were sadly uniform, while the Beatniks were your genuinely eccentric and original characters. Read “Howl.” But we never hear about “the values of the Fifties.”
And now Mick Jagger, the contrarian who most engaged my mind. His interviewer tries to steer him along the true path : “Would you agree that baby boom children after the war precipitated a significant generational break?”
To which Mick Jagger, intellectual, says: “I don’t completely agree. The first cultural break probably started as far back as the Twenties--after the First World War, when girls started wearing short dresses and didn’t wear bras. The jazz thing was quite wild, and people who had money took quite a lot of drugs. So I think there was a huge break after the First World War--culturally, musically with the Jazz Age. My mother knew those Twenties dances, which were quite wild...Around the time of the Second World War, you had the big rebellion with the clothes, with the zoot suits. In England, that became Edwardian, which was the teddy boys in the early Fifties. You had all these rebellious-youth things. I think they were all sequential. As far as clothes and fashion are concerned, making a statement vis-a-vis your parents, cultural states, that was certainly going on in the Forties, after the war.”
The lady interviewer won’t give up: “Agreed. But in the larger context, the Sixties rupture was louder, more visual, more systemic...”
Jagger shrugs: “OK, that was a very big break, the Sixties thing. But it was winding up from the days of Elvis. The Elvis period was super-rebellious. Because that kind of music was much more shocking than the music of the Beatles--the early Beatles. I don’t mean like when it became intellectually interesting, with Sgt. Pepper. The sexuality of the early Elvis years was much more shocking to a straight audience than the Beatles’ ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand,’ which was quite insipid. It had its attractions and everyone loved it, including myself. But it wasn’t very charged sexually. The wild men--Elvis, Jerry Lee--they were much more scary.”
Later, the interviewer tries yet again, and you really feel you are hearing a church’s catechism: “That era, the Sixties, when the Stones rose to world prominence, was such an extraordinary time, especially in America. With such a vantage point, why your resistance to looking back?”
Jagger says: “But it’s all been overdone and over-roasted. Of course the Sixties was an important period, but in retrospect, what were the achievements and what were the downsides? It’s open to a tremendous amount of argument.” See, that’s an intellectual talking, a guy who wants to look at all sides. Jagger knows history and isn’t buying simplified versions of complex events.
I’ll say it again, RS is an entertaining magazine; all the people interviewed are important and interesting. My objection is to half-truths becoming our national myths. I imagine many of RS’s favorite assumptions being discussed in college courses with utter solemnity--“The Sixties, man, that’s when the country was noble, now it’s all BS.” No, man. Saying that is BS. You need information, you need context, before you go buying another person’s cliches.
Young people--you want to know what the Sixties were like? This issue of RS will tell you. Take an hour or three, read the whole thing, good, bad, and in between. But especially trust the contrarians. Trust Mick.
Toward the end, Jagger speaks about his frustration with trying to write a memoir, says he’d like to find a new form. Okay, Mick, try this. Get about fifteen or twenty hot shots in all the many fields you moved in. (The more successful they are the better.) Have each one interview you about your shared interests and experiences. Let the interviewers go in any direction they want, no preconceptions. Edit their parts down to 25% of the book. You can add an Epilogue to fill in any bare spots. Call it “Mick and Friends.” Book will be almost fun and won’t take much time at all. You’ll sell millions of copies. There, all yours. All I want in return is that you mention me and Improve-Education.org in the introduction. You might say something like, “This guy accused me of being an intellectual. After all the names I’ve been called, it was kind of nice.”
Basically, Improve-Education.org is a site devoted to contrarian thinking.
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