Fifty Years of Stones

Known as “the world’s greatest rock and roll band,” the Rolling Stones have been the bad boys of rock ‘n’ roll for five decades.  The Beatles on Ed Sullivan started the British Invasion, but the Stones elevated it.  They were the antithesis of The Beatles.  While The Beatles were cute and beloved by teenagers and their mothers, the Stones were wild, edgy and somewhat threatening.  Where The Beatles tried to avoid controversy, the Rolling Stones seemed to revel in it.  When the Rolling Stones arrived for their first tour in the US, headlines read, “Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Rolling Stone?”  The Stones brooding blues-rock music and aggressive lyrics, paired with lead singer Mick Jagger’s charisma and sexually charged onstage act pushed cultural boundaries and forever changed popular music.

Legendary rock band the Rolling Stones recently celebrated their 50th anniversary.  Currently composed of Ronnie Wood, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts, the band played their first concert 50 years ago at London's Marquee Club on July 12, 1962.  In honor of this momentous occasion, I decided to put together a little post detailing the bands most infamous, controversial and memorable moments.

The perfect example of the bands iconic style

Pop Stars and Drugs
Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and former guitarist Brain Jones began to be hounded by authorities over their recreational drug use in early 1967, after News of the World ran a three-part feature entitled "Pop Stars and Drugs: Facts That Will Shock You."  The series described alleged LSD parties hosted by The Moody Blues and attended by top stars including The Who's Pete Townshend and Cream's Ginger Baker, and alleged admissions of drug use by leading pop musicians.  The first article targeted Donovan (who was raided and charged soon after;) the second installment (published on February 5) targeted the Rolling Stones.  A reporter who contributed to the story spent an evening at the exclusive London club Blaise's, where a member of the Rolling Stones allegedly took several Benzedrine tablets, displayed a piece of hashish and invited his companions back to his flat for a "smoke."  The article claimed that this was Mick Jagger.  However, it turned out to be a case of mistaken identity—the reporter had in fact been eavesdropping on Brian Jones.  On the night the article was published Jagger appeared on the Eamonn Andrews chat show and announced that he was filing a writ for libel against the paper.

Keith Richards and Marianne Faithful

Marianne Mars Bar
In their few million years on Earth, the Rolling Stones have inspired a bottomless pit of myths and legends.  However, nothing quite matches the infamous case of the pornographic Mars Bar.  Marianne Faithfull was a folk singer with aristocratic roots in the Habsburg family dynasty when she met the members of England's newest hitmakers through their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham.  Her first pop hit was a version of the Stones' 'As Tears Go By,' and she was soon a key figure on the Swinging London scene. Though she married in 1965, she was determined to call one of the Stones her own.  On a getaway weekend with friends at Keith Richards' estate in Sussex, England, Richards and Mick Jagger were arrested in a police raid.  During the bust, Faithfull, who had just emerged from a bath, was wrapped in an orange fur bedspread.  She later acknowledged briefly flashing the police for her own amusement.  Sometime before the trial, a rumor began to spread that the police had barged in and caught Jagger with his head between Faithfull's legs, munching on a curiously placed Mars Bar.  Its genesis most likely stemmed from the police report, which apparently featured details of Richards' secret stash of sweets.  Faithfull dismissed the story of the abused chocolate bar in her 1994 autobiography. "The Mars Bar was a very effective piece of demonizing," she wrote. "It was far too jaded for any of us even to have conceived of.  It's a dirty old man's fantasy -- some old fart who goes to a dominatrix every Thursday afternoon to get spanked.  A cop's idea of what people do on acid!"  Still, the rumor persists.  Meanwhile, Mars Bars are now marketed in Europe with the slogan "Pleasure you can't measure" (yes, I'm being serious.)

The Rolling Stones performing at Altamont Speedway

The Long Story of Altamont Speedway and the Death of Meredith Hunter
Headlined and organized by the Rolling Stones, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival also featured Santana, Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, with the Rolling Stones taking the stage as the final act.  The Grateful Dead were also scheduled to perform, but declined to play shortly before their scheduled appearance due to the increasing violence at the venue.  Approximately 300,000 people attended the concert, and some anticipated that it would be a "Woodstock West."  The event is best known for having been marred by considerable violence, including one homicide and three accidental deaths: two caused by a hit-and-run car accident and one by drowning in an irrigation canal.  Four births were reported during the event, as well.  The Hells Angels were hired as security for the event, on the recommendation of the Grateful Dead (who had previously used the Angels for security at performances without incident), for $500 worth of beer — a story that has been denied by parties who were directly involved.  Although peaceful at first, over the course of the day the mood of both the crowd and the Angels became progressively agitated, intoxicated and violent.  The Angels had been drinking their free beer all day in front of the stage, and most were drunk.  Fueled by LSD and amphetamines, the crowd had also become antagonistic and unpredictable, attacking each other, the Angels, and the performers.  By the time the Rolling Stones took stage in the early evening, the mood had taken a decidedly ugly turn as numerous fights had erupted between Angels and crowd members and within the crowd itself.  The Angels proceeded to arm themselves with sawn-off pool cues and motorcycle chains to drive the crowd further back from the stage.  During the third song of the Stones' set, "Sympathy for the Devil," a fight erupted in the front of the crowd.  After a lengthy pause and an appeal for calm, the band restarted the song and continued their set with no incident.  That is, until the start of "Under My Thumb."  Some of the Hells Angels got into a scuffle with Meredith Hunter, age 18, when he attempted to get onstage with other fans.  One of the Hells Angels grabbed Hunter's head, punched him, and chased him back into the crowd.  At that point, Hunter returned to the stage where Hunter's girlfriend Patty Bredahoff found him and tearfully begged him to calm down and move further back in the crowd with her.  However, he was reportedly enraged, irrational and so high he could barely walk.  Video footage shows Hunter drawing a long-barreled revolver from his jacket, and Hells Angel Alan Passaro, armed with a knife, running at Hunter from the side, grabbing the gun with his left hand and stabbing him with his right.  Passaro is reported to have stabbed Hunter five times in the upper back. Witnesses also reported Hunter was stomped on by several Hells Angels while he was on the ground.  The Rolling Stones were aware of the skirmish, but not the stabbing, and felt that had they abandoned the show, the crowd may have become even more unruly.  The Altamont concert is often contrasted with the Woodstock festival that took place less than four months earlier.  While Woodstock represented "peace and love," Altamont came to be viewed as the end of the hippie era and the conclusion of late-1960s American youth culture.  "Altamont became, whether fairly or not, a symbol for the death of the Woodstock Nation."

Keith Richards

New Blood for Keith

The tale goes that Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards underwent a radical blood replacement treatment in order to clean up after a particularly bad period of heroin use (not one of the many light, breezy heroin addictions you hear of.)  The treatment involved a kind premature enbalming, where the old, polluted blood was taken out of the body and replaced with new, clean blood.  Among the many rock icons, it is hard to imagine someone who embodies the spirit of sex, drugs and rock n' roll more than Keith Richards.  So when the story that he had undergone treatment before the Stones 1973 European tour first surfaced, it did not help that he himself told a journalist that the rumours were in fact true.  "I was just fooling around,” he admitted, years later. “I was fucking sick of answering that question.”  In reality, it seems it was true that he did undergo some haemodialysis, which can filter some impurities from the blood.  Richard’s tendency for toying with the media has since been realized.  However, the media learned the hard way, after much of the world press printed stories of him mixing his fathers ashes with cocaine and snorting it.  Richards came forward soon after, and it has since been regarded as a joke by the rock legend.  It seems that if the guitarist does have any vampiric tendencies, he sure as hell didn't smoke his fathers ashes.  However, the myths will continue to add up while he appears to be one of the dead, yet continues to have a fuller night life than most.

The Rolling Stones Iconic Tongue Logo

Mick Jagger's Pouty Pucker

A Rolling Stones Fan Museum in Lüchow, Germany angered many locals over the design of their urinals, which were based on the band's famous lips logo.  Apparently, some people just weren't comfortable doing their business into a giant, open mouth.  While the lips-and-tongue design was reportedly based on frontman Mick Jagger's pouty pucker, the controversy over the urinals stems from the fact that the tongue is excluded from the design.  Without it, according to opposers, the piece becomes misogynistic.  Many feminists believed that the piece discriminated against women, and that, had the fixtures sported a tongue, the connection to Jagger would have been unmistakable.  Apparently, without it, it becomes a woman's mouth, not a man's mouth.  Museum founder Ulrich Schroeder, meanwhile, denied that it was specifically a man or woman's mouth, and has no plans on altering the men's room set-up.

The remaining Rolling Stones (from left to right,) Ronnie Wood, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Charlie Watts

Regardless of the controversy they faced, the Rolling Stones continue to create fantastic music and have opened doors for generations of rock and pop musicians.  They are truly rock legends, and I have no doubt they will continue to create and perform.  

Congrats, Stones.  Here's to many more years of disturbing sex acts, blood transfusions, and fantastic music.