Stone cold uncertainty
The passing of drummer Charlie Watts re-kindles questions about the relationship of his band to the chaotic capers and darker literary influences that marked their history in the 1960s and 1970s
THE DEATH of Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones drummer, brings to a close that enduring rhythmic pulse which drove the band forward for almost 60 years. But, mentioning beats, to what extent did the great London five-piece convene with the Beat writers and the broader world of maverick literature?
Their very good friends and biggest rivals the Beatles made frequent connections with that community of US writers, referencing them and mixing with them. As I revealed in an essay of last year, it was a meeting with young British Beat poet Royston Ellis that led to the adoption of the distinctive spelling of the Merseyside group’s name in 1960.
Later, their innovative Apple label actually created an outlet to record and release readings of poetry by the leading Beat figures, with Barry Miles – a close associate of both Ginsberg and McCartney – leading the project. Sadly, financial difficulties eventually scuppered most of the plans.
If the Stones could not identify such direct links with those groundbreaking American novelists and poets – their band name was drawn from a song of their musical hero bluesman Muddy Waters – they still, over the decades, did forge various overlaps of their own.
Initially, their image as ‘bad boys’ – a media-driven counter to the ‘boys’ next door’ image of the Beatles – was played up by their publicity-hungry manager Andrew Loog Oldham. He cleverly made connections between a recently released science-fiction novel called A Clockwork Orange, by Manchester author Anthony Burgess, published in 1962.
A doomish dystopia set in an English urban near-future, it featured the Droogs, a gang of violent youths terrorising their city streets in scabrous words and evil deeds. Loog Oldham smartly, and certainly controversially, elided the two worlds – fictional subcultural marauders and the dangerous new stars of the pop scene – by utilising some of Burgess’ invented language, called Nadsat, on an early 1964 Stones album sleeve.
It would not be too long before the sex and drugs pose that accompanied the early years of the Rolling Stones’ rise would become all too real, with the arrest of Jagger and Richards – referred to as Richard during this period – at a West Sussex country house following a 1967 raid on a party which appeared to have featured both narcotics and an alleged orgy.
Police charges and a subsequent court case would see the group’s principal songwriters sentenced to jail, only for their punishment to be overturned on appeal. So jubilant were the Stones and the Beatles at this legal twist that they quickly entered the recording studio together to record the song ‘We Love You’ and, who should be part of the vocal ensemble but Allen Ginsberg himself, a clear sign that the countercultural guru was held in high regard by British rock royalty.
Sprung from their prison, Jagger and Richards hardly managed to avoid the heat of tabloid headlines for long. In 1969, sacked guitarist Brian Jones would die under mysterious circumstances and, at the end of that same year, the Stones would become ever-associated with the murderous events of the Altamont Festival, initially dubbed Woodstock West, which drew down the curtain on the optimistic possibilities of the decade.
Intriguingly, Jagger would soon involve himself in a dark movie drama. Although he had been considered, at one point, for a lead role in the movie version of A Clockwork Orange, when there were uncertainties over the director and casting, the singer never did, in the end, take on the main part of Alex, later grabbed by Malcolm McDowell in the 1971 Stanley Kubrick adaptation of the novel.
However, when Performance, based on Donald Cammell’s crime novel, was being prepared for the big screen, Jagger was chosen for the role of the mysterious and reclusive rock star Turner. Although the noir thriller makes no specific reference to William S. Burroughs, the Beat writer’s shadow is cast across the work. Burroughs’ determined interest in the cut-up as an artistic method was thought to have had a significant impact on the editing techniques applied to the piece.
Nicholas Roeg, the film’s cinematographer, consulted Burroughs in advance of the production and Anita Pallenberg, Keith Richards’ then girlfriend and a featured player in the movie, was also said to be obsessed by the creative aura of the novelist. Furthermore, Jagger recorded a song for the soundtrack entitled ‘Memo from Turner’, which contains the lyric ‘the man who works the soft machine’, which is felt to be a reference to Burroughs’ own volume The Soft Machine.
This would not be the end of the Rolling Stones’ links to moviemaking and the Beats for, in 1972, the band engaged the acclaimed underground photographer Robert Frank to not only help create the striking monochrome collage that features on the cover of the classic double album Exile on Main Street, but also film the epic US tour of that year.
Frank had impeccable Beat credentials: he had worked with Jack Kerouac on the 1958 social documentary photographic collection The Americans (the writer wrote the introduction) and the following year was co-director with Alfred Leslie of the classic short flick Pull My Daisy, again penned by Kerouac and starring many of the Beat circle, Ginsberg and Gregory Corso included.
The group’s old friend controversy was again not very far away, however, because Frank proceeded to produce an account of the North American live itinerary which, in its warts and all fashion, was so charged with toxic material – scenes of sex and drug abuse, alongside the usual excesses of a rock‘n’roll tour of the day – that the cinéma vérité documentary, later generally referred to as Cocksucker Blues, has never enjoyed a public screening.
Our final Stones and Beat encounter retains its strange, even outlaw, aspect. In 1978, Burroughs had quite recently returned to live in New York City after a long period of exile in North Africa, Paris and London. A major symposium on the novelist been planned for Manhattan and Keith Richards was one of the key guests the organisers planned to involve.
However, after a notorious heroin bust at Toronto Airport in Canada, Richards decided to withdraw from the Nova Convention for fear of being too closely linked to a celebrated drug user like Burroughs. The three-day event would eventually see Frank Zappa replace the absent Stone in the bill, much to the irritation of Patti Smith, a long-time admirer of ‘Keef’. The wifer event lineup was impressive for sure: WSB himself plus Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Terry Southern, John Cage and indeed Allen Ginsberg.
Charlie Watts might not have been an avid participant in much of the artistic upheavals which surrounded his more flamboyant frontmen – he was more interested in supporting the act from the percussive chair than indulging in the wild extremities – but, as we have seen, the musicians with whom he shaped a half-century of sound were rarely interested in avoiding the very excitements and inevitable tensions of maverick behaviour and decadent display. And outsider literary threads were often entangled in their florid canvas.