Slate has a fantastic essay purporting to be Mick Jagger responding to Keith Richards’ new book (which is supposedly really good). I’m told this is the parody section of Slate – which implies that some of Slate is not intended as parody – and there are other signs as well that this isn’t really a straight essay by Jagger himself, but the essay captures so many truths about the band that it doesn’t really matter that it’s a parody. Worth reading for the gratuitous cheap shots at Jann Wenner alone. There are too many good parts to excerpt them all, but this should give you a flavor:
And yet I was surprised when it happened. I take the point that professionalism, one’s word, rock ‘n’ roll merriment … these are fungible things in our world. It is a fair charge that I have become less tolerant in these matters over the decades. In our organization, inside this rather unusual floating circus we call home, I am forced into the role of martinet, the one who gets blamed for silly arbitrary rules. (Like, for a show in front of 60,000 people for which we are being paid some $6 or $7 million for a few hours’ work, I like to suggest to everyone that we start on time, and that we each have in place a personal plan, in whatever way suits us best, to stay conscious for the duration of the show.)
So I will take that point. All of the forgoing was just … a little outre behavior on tour. Let’s go to the next tier – again, of matters one is informed of with some regularity, this not over months, not years, but entire decades. Keith’s been arrested with a mason jar full of heroin and a shopping bag full of other drugs and drug paraphernalia and is charged with drug trafficking. That was his baggage for a weekend in Toronto.
And this really sums up in two sentences an entire era:
Society could have effectively halted the upheavals of the 1960s simply by requiring all of us to “intervene” with one another. In any event, considering half our circle was on heroin and the rest were coke fiends, I think it wouldn’t have efficacious in our circumstances.
Go read the whole thing.