Hanspeter Künzler - 50 Years the Rolling Stones: 1967-1971: Essential Anthology on the Rolling Stones and Rock n roll History

Preface:

It is as easy to take the Rolling Stones for granted as it is theBeatles, television, toasters or motorcars. Easy, to forget justhow huge their impact was not just on the music of their time, buton society as a whole. Nothing illustrates this impact and thechanges it wrought better than a trawl through the contemporarypress. The outrage! The ecstasy! The incomprehension! The horror!The joy! It's all in there - all printed in black on thoroughlyanalogue white paper. This book does not just tell the story of theRolling Stones from the hindsight perspective of a conventionalbiographer. It tells their story with the words and the pictures oftheir own times. Each yearly chapter of this book is introduced bya short essay, which aims to place the events in the life of theRolling Stones in a more general social context. 12 July 1962. Manhasn't set foot on the moon yet. Computers are still in theirinfancy and so large they take up the space of a fine villa. Mobilephones and the Internet are no more than a glimmer in the eye ofscience fiction writers. Synthesizers do not exist yet and theBeatles are still several months away from their first hit single.On 12 July 1962, the Rolling Stones played their very first show.It wasn't quite the group of people yet whom the world wouldcome to know as "The Rolling Stones", and the band wasstill missing a "g" in their name, quaintly callingthemselves the Rollin' Stones. Still. The group ofexcited young blues fanatics who took to the stage of the Marqueeclub in London that night Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, BrianJones, Ian Stewart, Dick Taylor, Mick Avory had no inkling of thebeast their performance would unleash. No idea that the stickyboards of the Marquee stage were their springboard into history.Fifty years later, the Rolling Stones, astonishingly, are stillwith us. A marriage lasting fifty years is an extraordinaryachievement. A group of friends enjoying each other's companyafter so long is a rare and beautiful occurrence. For arock'n'roll band to stick it out for five decades is amiraculous feat that very nearly defies comprehension. No otherband has survived unbroken for so long with the core of itsmembership still intact. No other band, too, has so successfullyreinvented itself so many times, or experienced such a wild notto say soap-operatic - trajectory of commercial success, personaltragedy, hedonistic self-indulgence, ill-health, internecine war,and, above all, artistic triumph. It is safe to say that withoutthe Rolling Stones, the course of recent music history would havebeen very different. It is doubtful, for instance, that even theBeatles would have been so successful if the Rolling Stones had notbeen there to play off against. If the Beatles were the sun of popmusic, the Rolling Stones were the moon. They were the dark SouthPole to the Beatles' sunny North. Stretched out between themwas a whole new planet of possibilities. It is the aim of this bookboth to give an impression of the massive difficulties the RollingStones had to surmount to arrive where they are today, and to showhow much the world around them has changed with them, and thanks tothem. The two volumes of this book are divided up into fiftychapters, one for each year. Each chapter contains a large andrepresentative selection of excerpts from contemporary newspapersand magazines. They are documents of their time, and as such wehave left them untouched. Only the most glaring and irritatingspelling errors were corrected, otherwise the documents were leftas they were. The most obvious will be a discrepancy in thespelling of the name of Keith (or even Keef) Richard(s). Early onin the career of the Rolling Stones, their then manager Andrew LoogOldham convinced Richards to drop the "s" from his namefor image reasons. The guitarist reclaimed the "s" in thelate 1970s at a time he reconnected with his long estranged fatherand discovered in him a soul mate. Both spellings were subsequentlyused without any great consistency. It's not justrock'n'roll (but we still like it)! Hanspeter Kuenzler,London, June 2012

1967 - Trials,Fights and Brian

On 2 January, Ian Stewart got married. On 4 January, the Speakeasy,a late night club for music people, was opened in Margaret Streetat the back of Oxford Circus (the Who wrote a song about it,"Speakeasy"). On 5 January, Jimi Hendrix appeared on thetelevision show Top of the Pops and performed "HeyJoe". On 11 January, he played a showcase at the BagO'Nails club in Soho with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, BrianEpstein, the Who's Pete Townshend and John Entwistle, the SmallFaces, Donovan, the Animals, Georgie Fame, several members of theHollies, Eric Clapton and Bill Wyman all in attendance. In Vietnam,an intensive new war campaign against the Viet Cong was launched byAmerican and South Vietnamese forces. On 12 January, the RollingStones released their latest single, "Let's Spend theNight Together". If it is possible that the band by that stagewere so wrapped up in their own world, that they truly failed tograsp just how provocative such a title would be in the eyes ofmany people, their manager, at least, seemed to have an inklingthat they might encounter some turbulence as a result. Upon hissuggestion, the single was released as a so-called double-A-side.This meant that DJs who found the title offensive were"officially" entitled to turn the record over and play"Ruby Tuesday" instead. Both tracks, "Let'sSpend the Night Together" and "Ruby Tuesday",continued the development towards the new stylistic diversity andemotional depth the Rolling Stones had embarked on withAftermath. The first A-side was an orgiastic call tosexual arms, served up on a hard-edged bed of driving, riff-basedrock'n'roll. The other A-side, a paean to KeithRichards's free-spirited ex-partner Linda Keith, showed theband from a remarkably tender, lyrical and lusciously melodic side.Predictably, "Let's Spend the Night Together" broughtheadline writers and outraged guardians of the nation's moralsout in force. Their anger turned into rage on 22 January when nineand a quarter million television viewers became witnesses of yetanother blatant act of nice-people-baiting. On that day, theRolling Stones were guests on the vastly popular variety showSunday Night at the London Palladium. The tradition ofthis family show dictated that at the end, all participating actsassembled on a revolving platform to put on their best cheesySunday grin and wave goodbye. The Rolling Stones had no intentionof following the rules. Mick Jagger told the show's apoplecticproducer to "fuck off", with Keith Richards adding thatit was just "this kind of shit" they had been fightingagainst "for five years". Oddly, their manager sided withthe producer, causing a major row which ended only when Oldham tookflight. No less an authority than the Archbishop of Canterbury feltcompelled to condemn the group for their "decadent"behaviour. The conservative daily newspapers - the DailyExpress, the Times and a host of others - professedthemselves disgusted by the Rolling Stones' mockery ofsomething that all decent people regarded as fine entertainment. AsKeith Richards, Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg flew off to Munichto visit director Volker Schlndorff on the set of A Degree ofMurder (Pallenberg starred in the film, Jones composed thesoundtrack), Marianne Faithfull merrily added her own contributionto the controversy by proclaiming on the BBC that "marijuanawas perfectly safe, you know", and that LSD was"perhaps" more important than Christianity. "I'dlike to see the whole structure of society collapse," sheadded for good measure. With the new drug laws in place, and thedebate about the pros and cons of drug use raging, it was only amatter of time before the Sunday gossip paper, News of theWorld, would at last discover pop stars and drugs as a sourceof circulation-boosting tales of scandal. Thus, on 29 January, thepaper published part one of a series of stories about drugs in themusic business. Donovan was once again the first to have hislifestyle examined in detail. This was followed up one week laterwith a lurid expos of the LSD parties the Moody Blues regularlyheld, apparently, in their house in Roehampton (Decca label matesof the Rolling Stones, the Moodies started off as a rhythm &blues band before mixing classical music with rock and releasingtheir influential, bestselling album