Fever (13 page)

The Stones' catalogue is full of similar contradictions. The three songs most often held up as proof of their misogyny provide excellent examples. Only “Stupid Girl” overgeneralizes about womankind; “Under My Thumb” is about revenge (“The girl that once held me down…”), and so non-gender-specific that Tina Turner easily turned the number into a torrent of female empowerment in 1968. As a result, rock's leading misogynists were essential to sustaining Turner's ongoing career, especially during the off-years between 1966's “River Deep, Mountain High” and 1970's “Proud Mary”; they invited her to open the 1969 tour that ended at Altamont. And even if “Get Off of My Cloud” was heard as a typical macho taunt at the time, it still has a classic rock 'n' roll irony that brings a little too much glee to the party to be simply pissed off. “The Last Time” is a more mean-spirited song than any of these: in the middle of lovemaking, the singer declares that this will be his last time—but he's not sure.

As blues purists, the Stones had a legacy of sexism to deal with; as white westerners (i.e., ruling-class men) their culturally conditioned romantic attitude was based at least in part on subjugating women. But the Stones heard more in the blues than this simplistic sexist reduction, and in an extraordinarily savvy and prescient way, they used sexism as a metaphor to express their experience of class discrimination.

To British ears, American blues projected racism as a metaphor for class status. When Jagger heard Robert Johnson sing about oppression, he obviously didn't identify as a black but as a working-class Brit who, even though he had gone to grammar school and won a scholarship to the London School of Economics, still dealt with prejudice about not being born into a respectable class. And Jagger was easily the most privileged member of his band.

There's a lot of confusion about this. Even though John Lennon's middle name was “Winston” (for Churchill), he's memorialized as a “working-class hero” when he himself waffled on how the charm of the Beatles lay somewhere in between their (often ironic) working-class Scouse and “grammar-school” charm (in American terms, this is analogous to saying “prep-school” manners). He sang “Working-Class Hero” with a mournful sarcasm that was lost on headline writers.

The British experience of rock is bound up in class in the same fashion that Americans' experience of it is bound up in race. In England, rock's raw sexual energy had infatuated young men who were tempted by a style beneath their “station” in society. The musical aspiration to recapture sounds that had been invented and developed by lower classes was part of rock's radical flavor in Britain, and it had a different edge there because of it. Back in America, of course, the British Invasion translated into more of a nationalistic issue: while the Tin Pan Alley establishment did all it could to sweep the new music under the rug, from holding graft hearings to destroy Alan Freed, to sending Elvis Presley off into the army, to throwing Chuck Berry into prison for sexual conduct that would make any Hollywood producer snicker, the music took hold in Britain somewhere beyond reason. Then, suddenly, in 1964, the gates of American pop were crashed by British rockers who had heard completely new ideas in a music Americans had already started to take for granted (like jazz). It was as if all the great baseball teams were suddenly streaming out of a country like Norway and capturing the World Series.

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Mick Jagger's reputation as a ladies' man in the sixties became well known through scores of publicized conquests, including the model-ingénue Marianne Faithfull, for whom Jagger and Richards wrote “As Tears Go By” (1964). In the beginning, Faithfull, with her super-model looks and overnight success, symbolized everything the Stones were after: she's the beginning of a long tradition of rock stars courting, marrying, and discarding models. Faithfull proved to be a transcendent talent, however: her solo career revived itself in later decades to become a pillar of female endurance.

But the Stones' tabloid-drive public charades, drug arrests, and Dionysian lifestyle didn't bleed into their music as much as they might like you to think. Is there a song on a Stones record that mirrors the ruthless way Keith Richards stole Brian Jones's girlfriend, model Anita Pallenberg? To be sure, Jones had “drugged and fucked himself beyond all usefulness,” as Robert Christgau put it, and was on his way out of the band. (He died in his swimming pool in 1969, eclipsing the need to oust him.) Richards was never known as a skirt-chaser; Bill Wyman, the bass player, was the most prolific groupie stud-man in the bunch (proudly compiled in his autobiography,
Stone Alone
). The most explicit entry in the Stones' misogynist myth is
Some Girls,
that fascinating dirty old man's album from 1978, which countered punk's asceticism with new levels of carnal decadence.

In song, Mick Jagger is more often quite sympathetic to women, and he draws empathic portraits of intelligent women who are just out of reach (“Angie”) or who at least bring something to the relationship that's both mysterious and challenging (“She's a Rainbow,” with its natty tagline “She comes in colors,” or “Ruby Tuesday”). Some aspects of this posture change as the Stones develop into the seventies, eighties, and nineties, but their main attitude toward women is lust tempered by ambivalence. When Jagger sings “I only made love to her once!” in “Some Girls,” he's playing the rock star plagued by paternity suits—and revealing plenty about his own self-respect. Of course, he ceded paternity suits as a theme to Michael Jackson (“Billie Jean … is not my girl”), and it's anyone's guess who had more to lose.

In song, Jagger contradicts the women-hater charge at every turn; he's as likely to be charmed and awed by women as he is to be domineering and vengeful. By comparison, Dylan is a much wider misogynist target: Jagger never wrote lines like “Can you cook and sew/Make flowers grow/Can you understand my pain?” as Dylan did in “Is Your Love in Vain” (which is unbearable unless it's ironic—and yet it's sung with a wicked sneer). “Wild Horses” isn't a song about being possessed by a maneater; it's a parable about how far down obsessive desire will take a person. “Bitch” isn't a generalization about women; it's a laundry list of love's contradictions: “Feeling drunk/Juiced up and sloppy/Ain't touched a drink all night…” It's not his lover who's a bitch; it's
love
that's a bitch.

Rather than simply seeking power over women, Jagger finds himself drawn to women he doesn't understand, involved in relationships that force him to grow beyond expectations, and learning things about himself through interacting with women that don't jibe with some assumptions about his manhood. In a twist even he might appreciate, Jagger seems to have a much more politically correct fantasy life than family life.

Likewise, when Jagger sings about manhood, he gives the lie to the macho assumptions that swirl around him. “Street Fighting Man” goes on about how “in sleepy London town there's just no place for a street fighting man…” On the surface, it's about the Stones' ambivalence toward politics; but on another level, it's about how powerless men feel within their own society, and how rock music can be an exultant expression of that powerlessness—even a redemption—but only that.

A few key early Stones songs repudiate the simplistic macho myth. As early as 1963, the band recorded a song called “Little by Little,” cowritten with Phil Spector, which introduced the halting idea of a mother's death weighing so heavily on a son that it disrupts his romantic life. “I try not to bear a grudge—a girl's gonna hitch a ride/Things ain't been the same since my mother died.” This wildly romantic notion tells you as much about Phil Spector's persona as Mick Jagger's.

But if there's one song that refutes the Stones as one-note misogynists, it's “Heart of Stone,” their hit about romantic pain and risk from 1965. This is the worldly womanizer's comeuppance, sung with the sting of humiliation. The song opens with a neat boast followed by an undertow of insecurity: “There have been so many girls that I've known/I've made so many cry and still I wonder why.” This new flame is unapproachable; and what's more, she mirrors the Don Juan's own flaws—his inability to feel, his failure at love: it's like he measures the spell she casts by his inability to “make her cry.”

What's different about her?

I don't really know.

No matter how I try

I just can't make her cry.

But she'll never break, never break, never break, never break

This heart of stone.

Later in the song he sings: “I ain't got no love, I ain't the kind to meet”—he knows he's not good enough for her, and the feelings she sets off inside him are too troubling for him to revert to conquest mode. The irony is that while he's busy protesting that she'll never break his heart, it's obvious that she already has. And if his heart is broken, it isn't made of stone like he claims.

This is a daring perspective to put forward as rock's leading sex icon, and one that not many feminists give Jagger credit for. Reverse the roles: if this were a woman singing, people would chalk it up as one more cliché about a girl who loses her self-respect in loving some lug. (This song is an intriguing cousin to the Marvelettes' “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game.”) It's a far more desolate scenario than “The Spider and the Fly” (1966), where Jagger laments the rock-star dilemma: “Don't wanna be alone but I love my girl at home,” and then picks up the “rinsed out blonde” at the bar.

Of course, the Rolling Stones courted a lot of the controversy that erupted around their idea of women, and part of their depraved charm has always been their lack of concern for the ways their shenanigans got reported. Rock may be a sexist culture, they seem to be saying, but we didn't invent it. And what makes our behavior so much more loathsome than Frank Sinatra's, Warren Beatty's, Wilt Chamberlain's or Bill Clinton's? If rock allows us new freedoms as to how we define our manhood, just how does a person integrate the ideals of free love and emergent feminism? Where do the more aggressive groupies fit into this scheme? These were the questions alive in the culture that the Stones tapped into, and their attitude was: Why shouldn't we have a good time grappling with these questions? Must rock songwriters abide by some presumed code of “petty morals”? Wherever you come out on that question, it's surely one worth asking. The point is not that the Stones weren't sexist (they certainly were—and understood its marketing frisson); they just weren't nearly as two-dimensional as their detractors claimed.

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Playing the provocateur to Jagger's stud muffin was Pete Townshend of the Who. Townshend was a born leader, but never one of rock's sex symbols. Where Presley was handsome like a Greek statue, Townshend was as common as his working-class accent and proud of it, turning his shortcomings into a bond with his audience. As a key sixties rock auteur, he wrote explicitly about gender in addition to the perils of rock stardom, the ambivalence the famous feel for their minions, the dubious verities of artistic pretension, and the significance of rock itself. In this light, Townshend's unintentional musical role in the formation of the rigid heavy-metal male cocksman (“cock rock”) is absurd.

The Who began, like so many London rockers, as enthusiastic imitators of the American blues. Their covers had as much to do with peacock strutting as the Stones' did (perhaps the only credible white rendition of James Brown's “Please Don't Go” imaginable, and a fevered blitz through Martha and the Vandellas' “Heat Wave”). But they covered another Motown song, Eddie Holland's “Leaving Here,” that pointed explicitly to what Townshend's big theme as a writer would be: how insecure men felt, especially at the daunting task of “looking after” women. “Hey people have you heard the news?/Well the girls in this town are being misused” certainly does not fit the standard feminist reading of rock misogyny.

As the group's persona developed, the Who concentrated more and more on the rock experience. Townshend wrote songs about what it feels like to be a rock star, what it means to be a rock fan, and what rock culture is all about. The members of the Who always made it clear that before they were rock stars, they were fans, first and foremost. The Who took the promise inherent in the Beatles' phenomenal popularity and made rock a unifying force for the youth generation of the 1960s—but most women will tell you they were more of a man's taste.

That's because the Who's apocalyptic stage presence turned these rock themes into metaphors for male camaraderie and the heights of feeling men can reach together. It's in large part because of the Who, along with the Rolling Stones, that rock has been mistaken for a man's medium even while expressing some of the keenest vulnerabilities of manhood in coping with their culture's gender contradictions. “I Can't Explain” is as bold a declamation of insecurity as rock would ever produce. Their other hit songs along these lines include the thwarted stutters of “My Generation,” the coy but sexually confused “I'm a Boy,” the blindly obsessive disciple of “The Seeker,” and the plaintive-to-raging confessional of how much grief men carry in “Behind Blue Eyes.”

Athletic as he was, guitar playing was something more than a sport for Townshend; it was an all-encompassing philosophy of the spirit. He was self-conscious enough to think that in order to win listeners he'd have to upstage his nose, and that was no small feat. In a field that quickly included showmen as brazen as Jimi Hendrix, he carved himself a double-sided persona: the thinking person's conceptualist who played out his intellectual frustrations physically on stage. For a time in the late sixties, the combustible theatricality of its performances made the Who rock's premier stage band, and they spawned many imitators. The group quickly became known for smashing its instruments to punctuate the surge and ferocity of its sound, which was both a liberation and a curse—it was a costly gimmick, and it plagued them for years after it helped them become famous. Townshend turned guitar playing into gyrating phallic display; his windmill power chords established an entire genre not just of posing but of songwriting (think of those triumphant strokes in “The Seeker,” “Baba O'Riley,” “We Won't Get Fooled Again,” “The Punk Meets the Godfather,” “Long Live Rock,” and “In a Hand or a Face”). Townshend's leaps, twists, and facial contortions to the music helped make the Who's music a locus of male energy in rock, complete with all the attendant bluster and awkwardness.