My Aunt’s Favorite Rolling Stones Album
Copyright 2011 by Peter A. Teeuwissen. All rights reserved.
One afternoon early in 2008, I got into my car to visit my aunt, who was in a nursing home in the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease. As I reached the end of my street, I pushed in some music and began to listen. It was Let It Bleed. After a couple of songs I realized that this must be my aunt’s favorite Rolling Stones album of all time. And that’s saying something, isn’t it, because they’ve put out a shitload of records over the past 45 years. Some consider the double-sized Exile on Main Street or Voodoo Lounge to be their masterpieces; others are partial to their live performance discs, like Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out, Love You Live, or Flashpoint. My personal favorite is Some Girls, which revisits the witty misogyny of Flowers and Aftermath with the wealth of raunchy experience acquired from additional years of hedonistic rock stardom. But Let It Bleed is my aunt’s favorite, and I’ll tell you why. First, though, a little about my aunt and her disease.
My aunt was born in 1924 in Belgium, a small and mostly inconsequential country in northern Europe, in the Flemish city of Bruges, where her parents and two brothers were living at the time. They were from the U.S., but were living there because her father, my grandfather, was a sort of missionary. I say a sort of missionary because I don’t think that’s precisely what he was called. He did fit the basic definition of a missionary, that is, someone who deliberately tries to interfere in the religious beliefs of a foreign population. But (except in the case of Mormons) the idea of being a missionary usually also entails dwelling exclusively in what we now call the Third World, among folks of dusky hue who practice religions other than Christianity. My grandfather’s mission, by contrast, was in the midst of white people in the very cradle of whiteness. Still, it was Belgium, a place where other Europeans (my grandfather was a naturalized American originally from Holland) have generally felt free to do whatever they please without regard to the desires of the locals. He was running a small evangelical Protestant church in an otherwise exclusively Roman Catholic city in an otherwise exclusively Roman Catholic country. He and the people who backed him believed that although Protestantism and Catholicism were in some vague technical sense parts of the same religion, the only true path to God lay in the Protestant approach. Being Catholic to them wasn’t much better than being an outright bone-in-the-nose heathen. (The Catholic Church, it must be said, felt pretty much the same way in reverse, with the weight of many centuries of accepted legitimacy to bolster its beliefs.) So my grandfather’s outfit sent him and a few others into Belgium to try to convince at least a few Catholics to take another look at their approach to Jesus, involving as it did such impediments to salvation as the worship of the Virgin Mary, the veneration of saints, the doctrine of transubstantiation, and of course the pope.
So my grandfather was with his young family in Belgium when my aunt was born. The brothers (one of whom was my father) grew up and moved back to the U.S. in the 1930s, but my aunt and grandparents stayed on until they were driven out, not by the Belgian Catholics, but by the Nazis, who had recently occupied Belgium. At first my grandfather’s small congregation was tolerated by the Germans, and as a result he found himself in an awkward position, in that his was the church of choice for a number of the occupying soldiers who were garrisoned in the city. Officially, doctrinaire Nazis tended to be antagonistic toward Catholicism, which they regarded as too international in its scope, and answerable to a power outside the Reich. Protestantism, on the other hand, having been one of the manifestations of northern European nationalism, they considered relatively harmless, and even potentially useful. This did nothing to enhance my grandfather’s popularity among the Belgians, who were now being worked over by Germany for the second time in less than a generation. To those few locals who had succumbed to the blandishments of my grandfather’s nearly two decades of evangelizing, the fact that they now sat in their one-room house of worship alongside the hated occupiers, in their grey and black uniforms festooned with swastikas and iron crosses and their polished knee-high boots, was hard to accept. To make matters worse on himself, my grandfather, with the audacity of an evangelical preacher who answered to no one but God, and who felt personally hooked in to the cosmic truth, would sometimes take the opportunity during his sermons to remonstrate with his German guests about the excesses of National Socialism. That sort of thing was definitely not what the occupying army wanted to hear from the pulpit. Eventually being American no longer amounted to being neutral in the eyes of the Germans, so in late 1940, my aunt and her parents had to hightail it out of Belgium, under cover of the night, making their way through France into neutral Spain and Portugal, back to this country.
My aunt, a teenager by then, finished her schooling and went to college in Grand Rapids, Michigan, then on to nursing school in Detroit. After that she went to work in a Spanish village in New Mexico and on a reservation in Arizona for a few years, and then here and there, finally returning to Michigan, where she spent the remainder of her career in geriatric nursing. Meaning that she was in charge of taking care of old people in nursing homes just like the one where, on this afternoon in early 2008, she now found herself a patient, deep in a fog of permanent befuddlement.
As it presents itself, Alzheimer’s disease is a fairly easily understood and pervasive condition about which the general public is for some reason quite ignorant. Simply put, it’s a progressive illness in which the brain gradually rots away. For the sake of illustration, imagine worms invisibly and systematically munching and digging little furrows in the old grey matter, starting at the front and working back. The autopsied brains of people who have died with the disease, instead of being plump and pinkish grey as they should be, resemble more closely those shriveled bad walnuts you sometimes crack open on Thanksgiving. A German doctor named Alois Alzheimer identified the disease and gave it his name more than a hundred years ago, before the Germans scorched the neutral Belgian earth during the First World War, and before the same Germans occupied Belgium in 1940, sending my grandparents and my aunt back to this country. Alzheimer's disease has an easily identifiable set of symptoms, and a pretty predictable run. If the patient doesn’t die of something else first (a fairly big if, since most of the victims are elderly), Alzheimer’s, with a systematic efficiency that a German of any era would admire, will work its way from what’s called the “executive” portion of the frontal lobe of the brain, where wit and the ability to differentiate Protestantism from Catholicism (or for that matter shit from Shinola) reside, back to the more workmanlike areas, like the ones that tell you when to go to the bathroom, how to move your legs, and when to swallow, and finally to the mechanical parts of the brain that make you breathe and tell your heart to beat. Alzheimer’s patients who are otherwise blessed with good health eventually lose the ability to eat and drink, and death soon follows, unless they are fed by tubes, in which case things go on a bit longer, until the heart or lungs fail. And there it is. That’s a brief and unscientific explanation of the disease. I challenge any physician to quibble much with it.
The incidence of Alzheimer’s disease in the general population is rapidly increasing, and nobody really knows why, though some intriguing theories abound. Initially, experts in the medical community tended to cover up this ignorance with bullshit, as they are prone to do. They were assisted in this endeavor by the fact that diseases of the elderly just don’t create as much of a sense of urgency as illnesses that strike people down in the prime of life. When an old person dies of a disease, people figure, well, you’ve got to die of something. Once someone has attained a certain age, younger folks (which is to say the majority of people) are likely to say they’re living on borrowed time anyway. Borrowed from whom I don’t know. From them, I guess. When they hear how old a senior citizen is they often say things like, “God bless him!” The people who say those things are young. No old person would say something as vapid and meaningless as “God bless him” about another old person.
Estimates of the number of people with Alzheimer’s disease vary widely, between 25 and 40 million worldwide. That’s close to ten percent of those who are over the age of 65. As an epidemic, this is on a par with the number of people who are living with HIV and AIDS, but increasing more rapidly. This incidence is far more than any single type of cancer or heart disease, which in any event are often treatable, reversible, or even curable, unlike Alzheimer’s. Doctors, probably because they didn’t want to seem like complete dolts for not knowing why, at first tried to say Alzheimer’s was increasing because people were living longer and not dying as much of other things. That of course was just silly, because all anyone needs to do is look at the entire population over the age of 65 at any given time in history, no matter how large or small that population may have been, and then look at the percentage of those people who suffered from Alzheimer’s (or any form of dementia), and they’ll see that the prevalence of the disease today is greater than it's ever been, and growing. No one disputes this any more.
Faced with an illness of unknown origin that is irreversible, incurable, fatal, and rapidly spreading, the medical community has taken to casting about almost at random for new angles on the disease, running tests and gathering anecdotal information about the lives of the elderly—things as disparate as caffeine and alcohol consumption, tobacco use, what kind of deodorant and cookware people use, their weight, cholesterol, insulin levels, family history, and whether they read a lot. So far this data has proved largely useless, but has given rise to some darkly amusing suppositions. One such is the theory that if you stay mentally active, by doing lots of crossword puzzles and watching shows like Jeopardy, you’ll stave off the disease. The idea being, apparently, that those invisible brain-eating worms are going to be frightened into hibernation by all that cool trivial information, or maybe by the humorless countenance of Alex Trebek.
At this point, hope for the tens of millions who have Alzheimer’s and the hundreds of millions who will get it soon rests in the off chance that some piece of information these researchers come up with will accidentally link itself to an actual cause or contributing factor of the disease, and may one day prove to be its undoing. Like when scientists thought cholera was caused by the smell of sewage—the “miasma” rising from rivers into which it had been poured—rather than from the shit itself present in the drinking water taken from the rivers. So they rerouted the waste through sewers and the cholera problem ended. They thought they had solved the problem by eliminating the smell, when they had really solved it by preventing people from drinking the bad water. It seems obvious to us now that drinking shitty water can make you sick in any number of ways, but in the nineteenth century, before the germ theory of disease had taken hold, the idea was not only wild but unwelcome in the eyes of the medical community.
One tiny speck of amelioration does exist. There are drugs on the market that purport to slow the progression of dementia. The problem is knowing when to start taking them. If you do have Alzheimer’s disease and you and your family are past the point of denial, perhaps because you have started doing things like putting the car keys in the freezer and brushing your teeth with deodorant, you can start taking medication to keep you at that level of bewildered incompetence for a little extra time before the lights go out permanently.
On the day I got into the car to visit my aunt, she was well past the comparatively idyllic state of confusion and fear that plagues its victims in its first few years. She was in a wheelchair, having forgotten how to walk. She wore diapers, having forgotten how to contain her bowels or bladder. She was being fed, having forgotten how to hold a fork or spoon. She was mute, having forgotten how to speak. But I knew then and I know now that her favorite Rolling Stones album was Let It Bleed.
Let's turn that old wayback machine to the year 1969. It was a transitional year for the Stones, and Let It Bleed was in several ways a transitional record for them. Brian Jones, increasingly marginalized by drugs and the relentless synergy of the Jagger-Richards collaboration, and barely present for the recording of their previous album, Beggar’s Banquet, was replaced during that summer with Mick Taylor, in my aunt’s opinion the finest guitarist ever to play for the Rolling Stones, however briefly he sojourned with them. If you doubt that, she suggests you listen to his exquisite work on Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out, instrumentally the best live album they ever did. My aunt’s theory about why Taylor left the band three years later (at first glance the most ridiculous career move in England since the abdication of King Edward VIII) is that his guitar playing was simply too good. The Stones have never been a group that particularly features instrumental virtuosity, and my aunt believes that Mick Jagger, and to a lesser extent Keith Richards, did not relish being upstaged by a top-notch guitar player, or the idea of having the Stones become another power jam group. Be that as it may, both Brian Jones and Mick Taylor appear on Let It Bleed, representing the old and the new in that regard. Brian drowned in his swimming pool before the album came out.
Also, my aunt believes that Let It Bleed established and set in stone what was to become the standard format for the group, from which they have not varied much on all their studio albums over the ensuing four decades, namely, the inclusion of one number featuring Keith, usually without Mick, on vocals, with that and all the rest of the tunes being Jagger-Richards numbers, save for the occasional blues or Motown standard. Let It Bleed further typifies the ensuing Stones studio work, as an album whose theme or title tune, as the case may be, is not allowed to overshadow its rather more eclectic content. To younger Stones fans this format may seem a matter of course, but a glance at the band’s growth during the 1960s in their previous ten U.S. albums will show how gradually and fitfully they worked up to the formula in Let It Bleed, from which they have parted hardly at all since.
Their first U.S. release, England’s Newest Hitmakers, from 1964, contained only one Jagger-Richards song out of twelve, plus two others attributed to “Nanker Phelge,” an early pseudonym for tunes written jointly by the group. The other nine cuts were covers of a variety of established American artists—two blues songs (Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee” and Willie Dixon’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” both made famous by Muddy Waters); one Motown number (Holland, Dozier and Holland’s “Can I Get a Witness”); Bobby Troup’s jazzy “Route 66”; Chuck Berry’s “Carol”; the Buddy Holly standard “Not Fade Away”; and three rhythm and blues tunes. On their second U.S. album, 12 X 5, the Stones upped their original song production to five numbers, with the remaining seven being covers of songs from Wilson Pickett, Chuck Berry, the Drifters, and other black artists. This mix of a few original songs with a liberal sprinkling of Chuck Berry, delta blues, and rhythm and blues continued until their sixth album, Aftermath, when the band produced its first all Jagger-Richards record. At this point Mick and Keith had hit their stride as songwriters, needing no fillers from beyond their increasingly fertile imaginations. Their next four U.S. albums contained only one outside song, the Motown hit “My Girl,” which appeared on 1967’s Flowers. But among these releases were a couple of experimental and gimmicky “concept” albums: the psychedelic and otherworldly Their Satanic Majesties Request and the country/proletarian Beggar’s Banquet. At this juncture the group was still (embarrassingly and needlessly) trying to imitate the Beatles, if somewhat satirically, after the latter group’s wildly successful Sgt. Pepper album. But with Let It Bleed my aunt feels that the Stones emerged from experimentation and hit a groove that felt right.
Let’s look at the individual songs on the album. As its first plucked guitar notes give way to the wailing eerie falsetto overlay, the introduction of the bass, and finally the full band sound with percussion, the opening of “Gimme Shelter” evokes the gradual gathering of dark clouds and creates an almost palpable lowering of barometric pressure, which the listener takes in at a visceral level. Then come the lyrics:
Ooooh, a storm is threatening
My very life today.
If I don’t get some shelter,
Oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away.
Thus begins the song, and the album. Few tunes do as good a job of combining words and music to create mood and weather as this one does. When she hears it, my aunt invariably looks out the window where, even on sunny days, she expects to see a front rolling in. She loves the song because it reminds her of the sky and the mood in western Belgium, where she grew up. There the storms blow in from the North Sea almost daily, and it rains over 300 days a year. Later the song says, “War, children, it’s just a shot away.” Well Belgium has seen plenty of that, from the defeat of the Belgae by the Romans to Napoleon’s last stand in the Brussels suburb of Waterloo, to the Schlieffen Plan, to Hitler. It makes her think of course of the occupying German army during her last months there. At the end, just as the fullness of the song has built up little by little from a single plucked instrument, it fades away slowly from the solid instrumentation down to nothing again, with Mick’s howling harmonica on top. Very nicely done.
The next cut, Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain,” is a great favorite with my aunt. She’s a big blues fan, and one of the things that attracted her to the Stones in the first place was that they have always paid their respects to the blues. Hell, their very name is taken from a Muddy Waters song. Early on, in about 1964, they visited the Chess recording studios in Chicago, and got to see where some of their idols, like Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf, and the Ur-rocker Chuck Berry (whose music brought Mick and Keith together in the first place), recorded. That visit is immortalized in the instrumental, “2120 South Michigan Avenue,” recorded right on the spot. Having “Love in Vain” on Let It Bleed is typical Stones, my aunt thinks. They like to be thought of as a kind of blues band. That’s not quite true, but it’s close. In fact, the most consistently covered American on their early work is Chuck Berry. My aunt counts no fewer than seven numbers previously recorded by Chuck Berry on their first five albums, and over a dozen all told. Of course, Chuck Berry didn’t influence just the Stones, but an entire generation of white guys, from the Beatles (“Roll Over Beethoven” and the Berry-inspired “Back in the USSR”) to the Kinks (“Beautiful Delilah”; “Too Much Monkey Business”) to Manfred Mann (“Down the Road A Piece”) to the Beach Boys (“Surfin’ USA” was just a rip-off of “Sweet Little Sixteen”) to that ubiquitous 60s shlockmeister Johnny Rivers, who covered nearly everyone, badly. Indeed, my aunt thinks, Chuck Berry’s influence on 60s rock is underestimated to this day, in part because the irascible old Chuck is still around. He’s one of those people for whom death might be a good career move. But that’s another story. Back to the subject at hand.
The attribution of “Love In Vain” on the original Let It Bleed liner notes was to someone named Woody Payne. No one is sure who Woody Payne was, but he seemed to get credit for having written a number of blues standards, both of Robert Johnson’s and others. As Johnson’s belated fame (including the ridiculous legend of his Faustian bargain at the crossroads) began to grow, thanks to his tunes being sung by English guys around the same age as the Stones, people began to attribute his songs to him alone. Interest in Robert Johnson and the blues in general was piqued in white America, not so much because of the Alan Lomax folklorist types as because stoned teenagers wearing headphones would gaze, glassy-eyed, at album notes and wonder who in the hell was this Robert Johnson guy, and who Willie Dixon and Chester Burnett and McKinley Morganfield were. They eventually found out. My aunt thinks it’s worth noting that in 1970, on Ya Ya’s, the authorship of “Love In Vain” is listed as “Traditional, arranged by the Rolling Stones.” Only in the CD version of that album does Johnson get credit. Similarly, Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breaking Down,” which appeared on Exile on Main Street in 1972, gets the “Traditional arranged by” bullshit attribution. On the CD version of Let It Bleed, which came out some time in the 80s, Johnson gets no credit at all for “Love In Vain.” It says all songs on the disc are by Jagger and Richards. Finally in 1995’s Stripped, “Love in Vain” gets credited this way: “Adaptation and new words by M. Jagger/K. Richards.” My aunt has listened to Johnson’s original recording of “Love in Vain” and that of the Stones on Stripped and, seriously, they changed about two words from the Johnson original. My aunt finds this failure to give credit where it’s due puzzling, particularly since in the mid 60s Cream had no trouble crediting Johnson with the authorship of “From Four Until Late” and “Crossroads,” even though they really did give them new arrangements.
In a weird twist, the Stones decided to add mandolin, typically a bluegrass instrument, to the arrangement of “Love in Vain” on Let It Bleed. It works, but it brings up another point. In fact, the Stones, always prone to following trends, were at that time besotted with American country music, as were many other top tier performers, including Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton. Country-inspired groups were springing up like weeds; Nashville was red hot. Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Band, even freaky John Sebastian—all were kissing the ass of country. It was crossover time, and as long as the money was good, the crossing over would go on. But this particular crossing of the bluegrass and blues streams in “Love In Vain” was kind of a one-off deal. Ry Cooder gets credit for playing the mandolin on "Love in Vain," and according to him, he played a good deal more on the album. At least he got some credit, which is more than you can say for poor old Robert Johnson.
My aunt knows that the Stones began flirting with country on their previous album, Beggar’s Banquet, released in ’68. “Dear Doctor” was a great send-up of the genre, all the better for being overtly satirical. For musicians from outside the U.S. the blues-country mixing probably seemed logical because they weren’t as aware of the deep racial divide along musical lines as we were. To the Brits, “rural American music” might seem like a viable category, whether it is being sung by a grandson of slaves in a shack in Mississippi or by a handful of hillbillies on a front porch in Kentucky. (My aunt gets this impression when reading biographies of American bluesmen written, as they often are, by scholarly English wankers.) American audiences know, on the other hand, that the gulf between blues and C&W is as historically and culturally wide as the mighty Mississippi itself. Few men other than Ray Charles and Elvis Presley have successfully bridged it.
Be that as it may, with the release of “Honky Tonk Women” as a single in the summer of ‘69, just before Let It Bleed came out, the Stones got right up on the county bandwagon. So it was that an even more rustic version of the song, “Country Honk,” was put on the album as the third cut. This one has the really sublime fiddle playing of a guy named Byron Berline, of whom my aunt had never heard. Turns out old Byron was, and still is, a bluegrass fiddle heavyweight, touring with his own band today, but who also did a huge amount of work with rock and pop groups—The Eagles, Elton John, The Byrds, to name a few—going back to about the time he appeared on “Country Honk.” Also, “Country Honk” lists Mick Taylor on slide guitar, for his album debut with the Rolling Stones, although my aunt can only hear acoustic and fiddle, and can’t really tell where the slide guitar is on this song. My aunt also loves the car honking near the beginning and at the end of “Country Honk,” which reminds her of sitting up on the third floor flat of a house in Ann Arbor, back when the album first came out, stoned to the gills, and swearing every time the song was played that someone was outside on the street honking their horn. The cannabis-fed paranoia that the song inspired, usually followed by the relief of uncontrolled laughter, still makes her feel high when she hears it played.
After their two ventures into Americana with “Love In Vain” and “Country Honk,” the boys went back home for “Live With Me,” which is about as purely and absurdly English as can be. Indeed, the idea that “taking tea at three” is a nasty habit could only be appreciated by an Englishman. Then there are the “score of harebrained children … locked in the nursery,” who “queue up for the bathroom.” That’s followed by a succession of references to servants, maids, butlers, chauffeurs, footmen. It’s as if Mick and Keith are deliberately shaking off any soil they might have picked up from the States in the previous tunes. Two things my aunt particularly likes about “Live With Me” are the righteous bass line laid down at the beginning (not by Bill Wyman as you might think, but by Keith, according to the liner notes), and Charlie Watts’s drum work, which is so simple yet elegantly persistent here. My aunt also likes the line “The maid she’s French, she’s got no sense/ She’s wild for Crazy Horse” because it reminds her of two things. First, a fact that every non-French person who has ever lived in Europe knows to a certainty, and that is that the French have indeed got no sense. Because they are French. It’s the kind of thing that ordinarily goes without saying on that side of the Atlantic. And the allusion to the maid being on heroin reminds my aunt of her own drug addiction, brought on by years of taking synthetic opiates for severe pain from shingles, another great old peoples’ disease with which she has been afflicted.
The last song on side one (from back in the days when you had to turn the record or the tape over) is the eponymous “Let It Bleed.” What can you say about this one? Creaming, dreaming, leaning, coming, bleeding, it’s all there in one sloppy package that is quintessentially Rolling Stones as we now think of them. The title was a sort of mockery of the Beatles’ “Let It Be,” which was already around, even though the album with the same name wasn’t released until 1970. But it was more than just a tweak of the guys from Liverpool. First let’s back up. As my aunt and just about everybody else who was around during the 1960s knows, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were regarded as rivals by their audiences. We now know that in real life they toked each other up and dropped acid together, and that Mick probably tried to screw everyone else’s wife or girlfriend. But in those days we thought they were almost mortal enemies, the way we fancied the guys who played for the Red Sox and the Yankees were. (That, we later found out, wasn’t true either. All Red Sox players, even now, secretly want to play for the Yankees.)
Friends or enemies? In the music world of the British invasion, the truth lay in the middle somewhere. The Stones and the Beatles were buddies, sort of, but were also intense rivals for the spot at the pinnacle of rock and roll, and the Stones always seemed to be playing catch up, from a position of rather illogical insecurity. Without a doubt the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour spawned Their Satanic Majesties Request, probably the worst Rolling Stones album ever made, and a very inferior crack at the total immersion “concept” album. That Stones fans tolerated this sad period of blatant imitation by their group is a testament to their abiding faith in what they knew was original and great about them. The insecurity that led to Satanic Majesties may have been fed by managers, promoters and record execs, but was probably also that of Mick Jagger himself, who, according to my aunt, just couldn’t stand to be upstaged, and still can’t. With him it’s like a sickness. Lucky for him few are capable of doing it.
Back to the song “Let It Bleed,” though. My aunt knows that there’s more to the takeoff on “Let It Be” than just a play on words. The Stones were really offering fans an antidote to Paul McCartney, whose maudlin tunesmithing began to dominate the Beatles in their latter days and has been a blight on popular music in the forty years since they broke up. “Let It Be” starts out
When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me,
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
And in my hour of darkness She is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
This crap was more than the Stones or their fans could take. McCartney was turning his group into jell-o fuck popsters, in spite of the efforts of John Lennon and George Harrison to keep it rocking. So in “Let It Bleed” Jagger and Richards offered up some unsentimental psychology of their own, suggesting that real comfort might be derived not from visions of mom but from the exchange of bodily fluids:
She said, “My breasts they will always be open
Baby, you can rest your weary head right on me.
And there will always be a space in my parking lot
When you need a little coke and sympathy.”
Yeah, we all need someone we can dream on,
And if you want it, baby, you can dream on me.
Yeah, we all need someone we can cream on,
And if you want to, well you can cream on me.
When I find myself in times of trouble Mother Mary doesn’t come to me, she comes on me. Try dreaming that some time, Paul.
Of course we can’t leave “Let It Bleed” without mentioning the reference to “that jaded faded junky nurse.” My aunt can identify with that, though she most definitely never saw anyone knife anyone in their dirty filthy basement. Her addiction was very respectable and matter-of-fact, and nobody ever really referred to it as such. I never did ask the staff at the nursing home whether the doctors weaned her off the Oxycontin after she got past the point of seeming to feel much pain from the shingles. I think maybe one of the few benefits of getting old is that people don’t call you a drug addict even when, for all practical purposes, you are one.
Turning now to side two of the album, let’s start not with the first song, “Midnight Rambler,” but with the second one, “You Got the Silver.” The reason for this is that my aunt thinks “Midnight Rambler” has such a climactic feel to it that it should have been last on the album. But the way they packaged music back in the days of vinyl was to place the two strongest songs as the first cuts on each side. There were probably at least two reasons for this. First was that people wanted to hear the best stuff first, and this was in the days before you were able to just push a button and skip to whatever song you wanted on the CD. You had to lift the arm and find the right spot unless you were starting from the beginning of the side. Also (and my aunt thinks this is equally important) was the fact that records wore out differently depending on where the cuts were on the disc. Anyone who has played the shit out of vinyl knows that the last song on each side got a lot scratchier than the first. The reason for that was simple. As the needle worked its way around the long continuous groove it picked up dust and dirt and cigarette ashes and cat hair and whatever else was around, so that by the time the stylus reached the last tune it was pushing in front of it a whole pile of debris. This interfered with the fidelity of the sound and scratched the record at the same time.
“You Got the Silver” was Keith’s first solo song. This began the tradition of having at least one Keith solo on just about every studio album, and also, some time later, of Mick leaving the concert stage to let Keith and the rest of the band play these tunes. My aunt figures that this deal was developed on account of the increasing tension between Keith and Mick, and was intended to mollify Keith, whose insecurity seems to have had a greater basis in reality than Mick’s. After all, the guy was never a virtuoso guitarist, and even though he’s damned good most of the time, he lived in a world inhabited by Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Johnny Winter, Dickie Betts, and many other guys who had more talent than he did. And as for a voice, well, Keith never had much of one, and that got worse early on.
Rolling Stones songs typically feature a strong beat, a solid wall of good guitar work, neat stylish drumming, and nearly incomprehensible lyrics sung by Jagger. But the lyrics are not the main thing. In spite of not knowing all the words my aunt loves Stones songs, and even sings along with them, because they’re so damn musical in a tough rocking way. Still, from time to time the Stones can turn a felicitous lyric phrase. My aunt is particularly fond of the one from “Rocks Off,” on Exile on Main Street, that goes, “The sunshine bores the daylights out of me.” Too bad hardly anyone ever hears lines like that, which pop up more often than you might think.
Back to Keith. Unlike the bulk of the Rolling Stones’ music, his solos, including “You Got the Silver,” are all about the lyrics. For some reason, even though he has a shitty voice and could and should fill his numbers with heavy guitar playing to cover it up, he doesn’t. He wants you to hear the words. We’re given to believe that, unlike Lennon and McCartney, who shared credit for Beatles songs but in fact wrote them separately, Jagger and Richards have always collaborated. My aunt thinks that typical Stones numbers about women, when sung by Mick, are on the whole emotionally aloof. They’re about sex at the libidinal level more than about love, or they take pains to present women as selfish (“Stupid Girl”), annoying (“She’s So Respectable”), dissipated (“Honky Tonk Women”), obsessed with sex (“Star Star”), or all of the above (“Some Girls”). Complaining about women is one of their trademarks. On the other hand a Keith Richards song usually features his lovelorn soul laid bare, and is full of supplication, remorse, and self doubt. He’s either pining after someone unattainable, or he’s warning her off because he’s a no good druggie, like this from “Before They Make Me Run,” from Some Girls:
Watched the taillights fading, there ain’t a dry eye in the house
They’re laughing and singing
Started dancing and drinking as I left town.
Gonna find my way to heaven, ‘cause I did my time in hell,
I wasn’t looking too good but I was feeling real well.
Or this, from “The Worst,” off of Voodoo Lounge:
Well I said from the first
I am the worst kind of guy
For you to be around.
That’s pretty straightforward. No strutting or dancing or falsetto cooing while waving a feather boa. Just Keith’s naked soul laid out on the stage, like a patient etherized on a table. It doesn’t take a shrink to figure that Keith Richards, in spite of copiloting the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band, is one fragile fellow, bless his heart. Here on Let It Bleed, in “You Got the Silver,” it’s
Tell me honey, what will I do
When I’m hungry, and thirsty, too.
Feeling foolish, and that’s for sure,
Just waiting here, at your kitchen door.
Mick Jagger could have sung those words, and sounded a lot better, but we just wouldn’t have believed them coming from him.
My aunt was disappointed in love, too. There were the two boys in Belgium, adolescent suitors. Then came the occupation and the war. One went into the resistance, and the other became a collaborator. Both were lost to her, and they became enemies of each other for life. America was new and different and the boyfriends just didn’t come along over here for an oddly studious kid who was really American in name only. After a brief torrid affair when she was in her 20s, the curtain fell for the last time on romance, and my aunt became what they once called an Old Maid. Regret would have been her sole partner for the duration if not for a loyal friend and companion, another nurse, with whom she shared the last 50 years of her life. But the touch of a man, felt briefly in the heat of the desert, would forever after elude her.
“Monkey Man” continues the theme, fostered in “Let It Bleed” and “Live With Me,” of freakish antiheroism, as if the Stones are feeling the need to counter the saccharineness of not just the McCartney side of the Beatles, but the insipidity of the songs that exploited the largely phony “flower power” movement, which had produced gems like “If You’re Going to San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” “Sympathy for the Devil,” of course, got this off to a good start earlier in the year, on Beggar’s Banquet. Hi, I’m your friendly neighborhood Lucifer. Here in “Monkey Man” they’re bidding “Welcome To Our Bad Boy World. “I’m a fleabit peanut monkey,” “I’m a cold Italian pizza,” “I’ve been bit and I’ve been tossed around/ By every she-rat in this town,” “I’m a sack of broken eggs.” What does it all mean? From this self-effacement we’re supposed to feel a little sorry for the boys even as we envy them, the original motley crew, surrounded by oversexed women, taking drugs back stage, flirting with the demimonde, in their endless tours and bars and hotel rooms and studios and mansions and tax havens. They want us to know that they’ve arrived financially, but their hearts and minds are twisted in a sort of down to earth, working class way. Except that the Stones were really middle class guys who only manufactured the suggestion of grittier pasts for the benefit of their audiences. The Beatles, who began closer to the bottom, aspired to rise above it and leave it behind forever, as folks of the lower classes typically do.
My aunt thinks “Monkey Man” typifies an aspect of the Stones that might be called Fuck-Up Chic. It plays out through subsequent albums with songs like “Dead Flowers,” “Tumbling Dice,” “Torn and Frayed,” “Coming Down Again,” “Memory Motel,” “Beast of Burden,” and many more. And it continues to this day, even though they’re now senior citizens, nearing prime Alzheimer’s territory. It’s all about one night stands and broken love. It started way back with “Spider and the Fly” and was the most imitated thing about the Stones, even more than the satanic shit, which they’re quick to point out here in “Monkey Man” they were only using as a gimmick and not a way of life:
I hope we’re not too messianic
Or a trifle too satanic
We love to play the blues.
And after all, isn’t that why we love the Rolling Stones? They’re just a group of happy-go-lucky messianic, satanic, blues playing, groupie screwing dope chippers. I know that’s why my aunt loves them.
We arrive next at “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Don’t you love its weirdly inapposite solemnity? Talking about cherry sodas with Mr. Jimmy while the sopranos sing in the background. My aunt thinks there’s real wit lurking under everything the Stones do, and nowhere does it reveal itself better than here. They employed the London Bach Choir on this one. Again, it was in brazen imitation of the Beatles, who had used a full orchestra on Abbey Road. There’s a reason for this pomposity. At bottom, all rock musicians feel that their music is inferior to that which we call Classical, or “serious.” In the same way, rock lyricists often secretly long to be regarded not as ditty-meisters but as poets, like the badly deluded Jim Morrison. As rock superstars get more successful and wealthy, they start getting more grandiose. After all, people are following them around telling them how great they are and getting them everything they want. And of course money talks in all endeavors, musical or otherwise, and now that they have the money, they’re damn well going to hire an orchestra, thereby purchasing more legitimacy. For the Beatles, it was an inflated estimation of their own quality (which in their confusion they thought was demonstrated by their fame), combined with their desire to experiment with instruments not normally used in pop music. For the Stones, it was more a matter of taking the Beatles’ successful idea and riffing on it, partly to be like them, and partly to deride them. If imitation is flattery, the Rolling Stones flattered the Beatles incessantly while the two groups coexisted. But to their credit, the Stones quickly arrived at the point where they understood their niche, and occupied it comfortably, never attempting to dazzle with profound messages or overwhelming music. They rock hard, they put on a great show, and they roll on.
At last we come to the song my aunt thinks ought to be the album’s finale, “Midnight Rambler.” It’s a confused mishmash about a burglar-rapist-murderer, but the music is what drives it, just as in “Gimme Shelter.” As my aunt likes to say, it’s all in the execution, and here is an instance of how with the Rolling Stones the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That’s why they’re still together after all these years, and why they’ve never successfully been able to go their separate ways. By himself, Keith is just a really ugly guitar player with a horrible voice. By himself, Mick is a just a prancing fairy. Charlie Watts is probably an idiot savant (have you ever heard the guy talk?). Ron Wood is, well, limited. But put them together and you’ve got something great that nobody can adequately describe. The best attempt to date has been Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light, where he wisely lets the camera roll during a two-night concert. You see the phenomenon of the Stones for yourself, without explanation. The view is better than at a live concert, and for a fraction of the ticket price.
My aunt knows that nothing occurs in a vacuum in the world of rock. “Midnight Rambler,” as a song about a killer, has antecedents. “Mack the Knife” comes immediately to mind. Then there’s “Riders on the Storm,” by the Doors, which came out two years earlier:
There’s a killer on the road.
His brain is squirming like a toad.
Take a long holiday,
Let your children play.
If you give this man a ride
Sweet memory will die.
Killer on the road.
Even back in the 60s, before Hannibal Lecter, there was something attractive about the menacing force of a predatory criminal. Charles Manson had already done his thing and the world was fascinated. So “Midnight Rambler” starts
Did you hear about the midnight rambler
Everybody got to go.
Did you hear about the midnight rambler
The one that shut the kitchen door.
He don’t give a hoot of warning
Wrapped up in a black cat cloak …
However, whereas the Doors played it straight, the Stones, as always, add more of a whimsical touch:
Well you heard about the Boston …
It’s not one of those …
Well, talking about the midnight … sh … The one that closed the bedroom door.
I’m called the hit-and-run raper in anger
The knife-sharpened tippie-toe …
Knife-sharpened tippie-toe? In spite of its menacing tone, there’s something absurdly tongue-in-cheek about the song, my aunt thinks, even as the tempo rises and the music gets more insistent, with Mick’s wailing harmonica adding urgency, and the midnight rambler tells of the mayhem he’s going to commit--
I’m gonna smash down all your plate glass windows
Put a fist through your steel-plated door.
The song continues to build to its climax, the music propelling the listener to an inevitable catastrophe. In the background is the chorus, chanting, over and over, “Oh don’t do that,” “Don’t you do that.” Then, the ultimate phallic violent words, my aunt’s favorite moment in the album, shouted not spoken, and rather silly: “I’LL STICK MY KNIFE RIGHT DOWN YOUR THROAT BABY AND IT HURTS!!!”
My aunt died about a month after I drove down to visit her while listening to Let It Bleed. A week or two before the end, she quit swallowing food. Her brain didn’t remember how to perform that task any more. You could put things into her mouth, but eventually they would just dribble back out. On the Friday before the Monday on which she died, I went to see her and wheeled her downstairs to the little coffee shop in the lobby of the old folks’ home. She could still sit up and look around. Her favorite thing to drink had always been black coffee. I got her a cup, and cooled it down with some water. I also got a chocolate chip cookie. I fed her a couple of sips of coffee and a bite of the cookie. She could move her lips and chew a little bit, but the stuff stayed in her mouth, and eventually began to leak out, dark brown, so I stopped. I wiped her mouth, over and over, until all that mocha drool was gone. Then I took her back upstairs. I think she might have enjoyed the taste of the coffee and cookie, or at least the experience of having it in her mouth. That was the last time I saw her alive.
I should probably tell you at this point that in all likelihood my aunt had never heard of Let It Bleed. She may have been vaguely aware of the existence of the Rolling Stones, but I’m pretty sure she never listened to more than a note or two of any of their songs, and then only by accident. But you've probably guessed that.
A few weeks after she died we had a graveside service where we buried the urn containing her ashes. One of my cousins came from France. That evening, sort of in honor of my aunt, my wife and cousin and I went to see a movie just out called In Bruges, starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as two hit men who have to hide out in Bruges, on account of Farrell’s having accidentally killed a child in England in the course of bumping off a priest (or a bad guy impersonating a priest, I forget which). Since it was probably the only movie in English that would ever be filmed in or in any way concern the city of Bruges, I just had to go. It was darkly funny and very violent, but most definitely not a tribute to the medieval Flemish town where my aunt had been born and grew up. The city with its landmarks is one of the stars of the film, but gets no respect. The Colin Farrell character repeatedly likens being in Bruges to being in hell.
Afterwards my cousin said what was obvious to us, namely that our aunt would have been mortified by the movie. I also wondered vaguely how the Belgians might have felt about it, already the butt of jokes by other Europeans, invaded by enemy armies and missionaries from alien religions, and now by a foreign film crew.
On the drive home from the movie theater, we listened to Let It Bleed, my aunt’s favorite Rolling Stones album.
Copyright 2011 by Peter A. Teeuwissen. All rights reserved.
One afternoon early in 2008, I got into my car to visit my aunt, who was in a nursing home in the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease. As I reached the end of my street, I pushed in some music and began to listen. It was Let It Bleed. After a couple of songs I realized that this must be my aunt’s favorite Rolling Stones album of all time. And that’s saying something, isn’t it, because they’ve put out a shitload of records over the past 45 years. Some consider the double-sized Exile on Main Street or Voodoo Lounge to be their masterpieces; others are partial to their live performance discs, like Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out, Love You Live, or Flashpoint. My personal favorite is Some Girls, which revisits the witty misogyny of Flowers and Aftermath with the wealth of raunchy experience acquired from additional years of hedonistic rock stardom. But Let It Bleed is my aunt’s favorite, and I’ll tell you why. First, though, a little about my aunt and her disease.
My aunt was born in 1924 in Belgium, a small and mostly inconsequential country in northern Europe, in the Flemish city of Bruges, where her parents and two brothers were living at the time. They were from the U.S., but were living there because her father, my grandfather, was a sort of missionary. I say a sort of missionary because I don’t think that’s precisely what he was called. He did fit the basic definition of a missionary, that is, someone who deliberately tries to interfere in the religious beliefs of a foreign population. But (except in the case of Mormons) the idea of being a missionary usually also entails dwelling exclusively in what we now call the Third World, among folks of dusky hue who practice religions other than Christianity. My grandfather’s mission, by contrast, was in the midst of white people in the very cradle of whiteness. Still, it was Belgium, a place where other Europeans (my grandfather was a naturalized American originally from Holland) have generally felt free to do whatever they please without regard to the desires of the locals. He was running a small evangelical Protestant church in an otherwise exclusively Roman Catholic city in an otherwise exclusively Roman Catholic country. He and the people who backed him believed that although Protestantism and Catholicism were in some vague technical sense parts of the same religion, the only true path to God lay in the Protestant approach. Being Catholic to them wasn’t much better than being an outright bone-in-the-nose heathen. (The Catholic Church, it must be said, felt pretty much the same way in reverse, with the weight of many centuries of accepted legitimacy to bolster its beliefs.) So my grandfather’s outfit sent him and a few others into Belgium to try to convince at least a few Catholics to take another look at their approach to Jesus, involving as it did such impediments to salvation as the worship of the Virgin Mary, the veneration of saints, the doctrine of transubstantiation, and of course the pope.
So my grandfather was with his young family in Belgium when my aunt was born. The brothers (one of whom was my father) grew up and moved back to the U.S. in the 1930s, but my aunt and grandparents stayed on until they were driven out, not by the Belgian Catholics, but by the Nazis, who had recently occupied Belgium. At first my grandfather’s small congregation was tolerated by the Germans, and as a result he found himself in an awkward position, in that his was the church of choice for a number of the occupying soldiers who were garrisoned in the city. Officially, doctrinaire Nazis tended to be antagonistic toward Catholicism, which they regarded as too international in its scope, and answerable to a power outside the Reich. Protestantism, on the other hand, having been one of the manifestations of northern European nationalism, they considered relatively harmless, and even potentially useful. This did nothing to enhance my grandfather’s popularity among the Belgians, who were now being worked over by Germany for the second time in less than a generation. To those few locals who had succumbed to the blandishments of my grandfather’s nearly two decades of evangelizing, the fact that they now sat in their one-room house of worship alongside the hated occupiers, in their grey and black uniforms festooned with swastikas and iron crosses and their polished knee-high boots, was hard to accept. To make matters worse on himself, my grandfather, with the audacity of an evangelical preacher who answered to no one but God, and who felt personally hooked in to the cosmic truth, would sometimes take the opportunity during his sermons to remonstrate with his German guests about the excesses of National Socialism. That sort of thing was definitely not what the occupying army wanted to hear from the pulpit. Eventually being American no longer amounted to being neutral in the eyes of the Germans, so in late 1940, my aunt and her parents had to hightail it out of Belgium, under cover of the night, making their way through France into neutral Spain and Portugal, back to this country.
My aunt, a teenager by then, finished her schooling and went to college in Grand Rapids, Michigan, then on to nursing school in Detroit. After that she went to work in a Spanish village in New Mexico and on a reservation in Arizona for a few years, and then here and there, finally returning to Michigan, where she spent the remainder of her career in geriatric nursing. Meaning that she was in charge of taking care of old people in nursing homes just like the one where, on this afternoon in early 2008, she now found herself a patient, deep in a fog of permanent befuddlement.
As it presents itself, Alzheimer’s disease is a fairly easily understood and pervasive condition about which the general public is for some reason quite ignorant. Simply put, it’s a progressive illness in which the brain gradually rots away. For the sake of illustration, imagine worms invisibly and systematically munching and digging little furrows in the old grey matter, starting at the front and working back. The autopsied brains of people who have died with the disease, instead of being plump and pinkish grey as they should be, resemble more closely those shriveled bad walnuts you sometimes crack open on Thanksgiving. A German doctor named Alois Alzheimer identified the disease and gave it his name more than a hundred years ago, before the Germans scorched the neutral Belgian earth during the First World War, and before the same Germans occupied Belgium in 1940, sending my grandparents and my aunt back to this country. Alzheimer's disease has an easily identifiable set of symptoms, and a pretty predictable run. If the patient doesn’t die of something else first (a fairly big if, since most of the victims are elderly), Alzheimer’s, with a systematic efficiency that a German of any era would admire, will work its way from what’s called the “executive” portion of the frontal lobe of the brain, where wit and the ability to differentiate Protestantism from Catholicism (or for that matter shit from Shinola) reside, back to the more workmanlike areas, like the ones that tell you when to go to the bathroom, how to move your legs, and when to swallow, and finally to the mechanical parts of the brain that make you breathe and tell your heart to beat. Alzheimer’s patients who are otherwise blessed with good health eventually lose the ability to eat and drink, and death soon follows, unless they are fed by tubes, in which case things go on a bit longer, until the heart or lungs fail. And there it is. That’s a brief and unscientific explanation of the disease. I challenge any physician to quibble much with it.
The incidence of Alzheimer’s disease in the general population is rapidly increasing, and nobody really knows why, though some intriguing theories abound. Initially, experts in the medical community tended to cover up this ignorance with bullshit, as they are prone to do. They were assisted in this endeavor by the fact that diseases of the elderly just don’t create as much of a sense of urgency as illnesses that strike people down in the prime of life. When an old person dies of a disease, people figure, well, you’ve got to die of something. Once someone has attained a certain age, younger folks (which is to say the majority of people) are likely to say they’re living on borrowed time anyway. Borrowed from whom I don’t know. From them, I guess. When they hear how old a senior citizen is they often say things like, “God bless him!” The people who say those things are young. No old person would say something as vapid and meaningless as “God bless him” about another old person.
Estimates of the number of people with Alzheimer’s disease vary widely, between 25 and 40 million worldwide. That’s close to ten percent of those who are over the age of 65. As an epidemic, this is on a par with the number of people who are living with HIV and AIDS, but increasing more rapidly. This incidence is far more than any single type of cancer or heart disease, which in any event are often treatable, reversible, or even curable, unlike Alzheimer’s. Doctors, probably because they didn’t want to seem like complete dolts for not knowing why, at first tried to say Alzheimer’s was increasing because people were living longer and not dying as much of other things. That of course was just silly, because all anyone needs to do is look at the entire population over the age of 65 at any given time in history, no matter how large or small that population may have been, and then look at the percentage of those people who suffered from Alzheimer’s (or any form of dementia), and they’ll see that the prevalence of the disease today is greater than it's ever been, and growing. No one disputes this any more.
Faced with an illness of unknown origin that is irreversible, incurable, fatal, and rapidly spreading, the medical community has taken to casting about almost at random for new angles on the disease, running tests and gathering anecdotal information about the lives of the elderly—things as disparate as caffeine and alcohol consumption, tobacco use, what kind of deodorant and cookware people use, their weight, cholesterol, insulin levels, family history, and whether they read a lot. So far this data has proved largely useless, but has given rise to some darkly amusing suppositions. One such is the theory that if you stay mentally active, by doing lots of crossword puzzles and watching shows like Jeopardy, you’ll stave off the disease. The idea being, apparently, that those invisible brain-eating worms are going to be frightened into hibernation by all that cool trivial information, or maybe by the humorless countenance of Alex Trebek.
At this point, hope for the tens of millions who have Alzheimer’s and the hundreds of millions who will get it soon rests in the off chance that some piece of information these researchers come up with will accidentally link itself to an actual cause or contributing factor of the disease, and may one day prove to be its undoing. Like when scientists thought cholera was caused by the smell of sewage—the “miasma” rising from rivers into which it had been poured—rather than from the shit itself present in the drinking water taken from the rivers. So they rerouted the waste through sewers and the cholera problem ended. They thought they had solved the problem by eliminating the smell, when they had really solved it by preventing people from drinking the bad water. It seems obvious to us now that drinking shitty water can make you sick in any number of ways, but in the nineteenth century, before the germ theory of disease had taken hold, the idea was not only wild but unwelcome in the eyes of the medical community.
One tiny speck of amelioration does exist. There are drugs on the market that purport to slow the progression of dementia. The problem is knowing when to start taking them. If you do have Alzheimer’s disease and you and your family are past the point of denial, perhaps because you have started doing things like putting the car keys in the freezer and brushing your teeth with deodorant, you can start taking medication to keep you at that level of bewildered incompetence for a little extra time before the lights go out permanently.
On the day I got into the car to visit my aunt, she was well past the comparatively idyllic state of confusion and fear that plagues its victims in its first few years. She was in a wheelchair, having forgotten how to walk. She wore diapers, having forgotten how to contain her bowels or bladder. She was being fed, having forgotten how to hold a fork or spoon. She was mute, having forgotten how to speak. But I knew then and I know now that her favorite Rolling Stones album was Let It Bleed.
Let's turn that old wayback machine to the year 1969. It was a transitional year for the Stones, and Let It Bleed was in several ways a transitional record for them. Brian Jones, increasingly marginalized by drugs and the relentless synergy of the Jagger-Richards collaboration, and barely present for the recording of their previous album, Beggar’s Banquet, was replaced during that summer with Mick Taylor, in my aunt’s opinion the finest guitarist ever to play for the Rolling Stones, however briefly he sojourned with them. If you doubt that, she suggests you listen to his exquisite work on Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out, instrumentally the best live album they ever did. My aunt’s theory about why Taylor left the band three years later (at first glance the most ridiculous career move in England since the abdication of King Edward VIII) is that his guitar playing was simply too good. The Stones have never been a group that particularly features instrumental virtuosity, and my aunt believes that Mick Jagger, and to a lesser extent Keith Richards, did not relish being upstaged by a top-notch guitar player, or the idea of having the Stones become another power jam group. Be that as it may, both Brian Jones and Mick Taylor appear on Let It Bleed, representing the old and the new in that regard. Brian drowned in his swimming pool before the album came out.
Also, my aunt believes that Let It Bleed established and set in stone what was to become the standard format for the group, from which they have not varied much on all their studio albums over the ensuing four decades, namely, the inclusion of one number featuring Keith, usually without Mick, on vocals, with that and all the rest of the tunes being Jagger-Richards numbers, save for the occasional blues or Motown standard. Let It Bleed further typifies the ensuing Stones studio work, as an album whose theme or title tune, as the case may be, is not allowed to overshadow its rather more eclectic content. To younger Stones fans this format may seem a matter of course, but a glance at the band’s growth during the 1960s in their previous ten U.S. albums will show how gradually and fitfully they worked up to the formula in Let It Bleed, from which they have parted hardly at all since.
Their first U.S. release, England’s Newest Hitmakers, from 1964, contained only one Jagger-Richards song out of twelve, plus two others attributed to “Nanker Phelge,” an early pseudonym for tunes written jointly by the group. The other nine cuts were covers of a variety of established American artists—two blues songs (Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee” and Willie Dixon’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” both made famous by Muddy Waters); one Motown number (Holland, Dozier and Holland’s “Can I Get a Witness”); Bobby Troup’s jazzy “Route 66”; Chuck Berry’s “Carol”; the Buddy Holly standard “Not Fade Away”; and three rhythm and blues tunes. On their second U.S. album, 12 X 5, the Stones upped their original song production to five numbers, with the remaining seven being covers of songs from Wilson Pickett, Chuck Berry, the Drifters, and other black artists. This mix of a few original songs with a liberal sprinkling of Chuck Berry, delta blues, and rhythm and blues continued until their sixth album, Aftermath, when the band produced its first all Jagger-Richards record. At this point Mick and Keith had hit their stride as songwriters, needing no fillers from beyond their increasingly fertile imaginations. Their next four U.S. albums contained only one outside song, the Motown hit “My Girl,” which appeared on 1967’s Flowers. But among these releases were a couple of experimental and gimmicky “concept” albums: the psychedelic and otherworldly Their Satanic Majesties Request and the country/proletarian Beggar’s Banquet. At this juncture the group was still (embarrassingly and needlessly) trying to imitate the Beatles, if somewhat satirically, after the latter group’s wildly successful Sgt. Pepper album. But with Let It Bleed my aunt feels that the Stones emerged from experimentation and hit a groove that felt right.
Let’s look at the individual songs on the album. As its first plucked guitar notes give way to the wailing eerie falsetto overlay, the introduction of the bass, and finally the full band sound with percussion, the opening of “Gimme Shelter” evokes the gradual gathering of dark clouds and creates an almost palpable lowering of barometric pressure, which the listener takes in at a visceral level. Then come the lyrics:
Ooooh, a storm is threatening
My very life today.
If I don’t get some shelter,
Oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away.
Thus begins the song, and the album. Few tunes do as good a job of combining words and music to create mood and weather as this one does. When she hears it, my aunt invariably looks out the window where, even on sunny days, she expects to see a front rolling in. She loves the song because it reminds her of the sky and the mood in western Belgium, where she grew up. There the storms blow in from the North Sea almost daily, and it rains over 300 days a year. Later the song says, “War, children, it’s just a shot away.” Well Belgium has seen plenty of that, from the defeat of the Belgae by the Romans to Napoleon’s last stand in the Brussels suburb of Waterloo, to the Schlieffen Plan, to Hitler. It makes her think of course of the occupying German army during her last months there. At the end, just as the fullness of the song has built up little by little from a single plucked instrument, it fades away slowly from the solid instrumentation down to nothing again, with Mick’s howling harmonica on top. Very nicely done.
The next cut, Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain,” is a great favorite with my aunt. She’s a big blues fan, and one of the things that attracted her to the Stones in the first place was that they have always paid their respects to the blues. Hell, their very name is taken from a Muddy Waters song. Early on, in about 1964, they visited the Chess recording studios in Chicago, and got to see where some of their idols, like Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf, and the Ur-rocker Chuck Berry (whose music brought Mick and Keith together in the first place), recorded. That visit is immortalized in the instrumental, “2120 South Michigan Avenue,” recorded right on the spot. Having “Love in Vain” on Let It Bleed is typical Stones, my aunt thinks. They like to be thought of as a kind of blues band. That’s not quite true, but it’s close. In fact, the most consistently covered American on their early work is Chuck Berry. My aunt counts no fewer than seven numbers previously recorded by Chuck Berry on their first five albums, and over a dozen all told. Of course, Chuck Berry didn’t influence just the Stones, but an entire generation of white guys, from the Beatles (“Roll Over Beethoven” and the Berry-inspired “Back in the USSR”) to the Kinks (“Beautiful Delilah”; “Too Much Monkey Business”) to Manfred Mann (“Down the Road A Piece”) to the Beach Boys (“Surfin’ USA” was just a rip-off of “Sweet Little Sixteen”) to that ubiquitous 60s shlockmeister Johnny Rivers, who covered nearly everyone, badly. Indeed, my aunt thinks, Chuck Berry’s influence on 60s rock is underestimated to this day, in part because the irascible old Chuck is still around. He’s one of those people for whom death might be a good career move. But that’s another story. Back to the subject at hand.
The attribution of “Love In Vain” on the original Let It Bleed liner notes was to someone named Woody Payne. No one is sure who Woody Payne was, but he seemed to get credit for having written a number of blues standards, both of Robert Johnson’s and others. As Johnson’s belated fame (including the ridiculous legend of his Faustian bargain at the crossroads) began to grow, thanks to his tunes being sung by English guys around the same age as the Stones, people began to attribute his songs to him alone. Interest in Robert Johnson and the blues in general was piqued in white America, not so much because of the Alan Lomax folklorist types as because stoned teenagers wearing headphones would gaze, glassy-eyed, at album notes and wonder who in the hell was this Robert Johnson guy, and who Willie Dixon and Chester Burnett and McKinley Morganfield were. They eventually found out. My aunt thinks it’s worth noting that in 1970, on Ya Ya’s, the authorship of “Love In Vain” is listed as “Traditional, arranged by the Rolling Stones.” Only in the CD version of that album does Johnson get credit. Similarly, Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breaking Down,” which appeared on Exile on Main Street in 1972, gets the “Traditional arranged by” bullshit attribution. On the CD version of Let It Bleed, which came out some time in the 80s, Johnson gets no credit at all for “Love In Vain.” It says all songs on the disc are by Jagger and Richards. Finally in 1995’s Stripped, “Love in Vain” gets credited this way: “Adaptation and new words by M. Jagger/K. Richards.” My aunt has listened to Johnson’s original recording of “Love in Vain” and that of the Stones on Stripped and, seriously, they changed about two words from the Johnson original. My aunt finds this failure to give credit where it’s due puzzling, particularly since in the mid 60s Cream had no trouble crediting Johnson with the authorship of “From Four Until Late” and “Crossroads,” even though they really did give them new arrangements.
In a weird twist, the Stones decided to add mandolin, typically a bluegrass instrument, to the arrangement of “Love in Vain” on Let It Bleed. It works, but it brings up another point. In fact, the Stones, always prone to following trends, were at that time besotted with American country music, as were many other top tier performers, including Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton. Country-inspired groups were springing up like weeds; Nashville was red hot. Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Band, even freaky John Sebastian—all were kissing the ass of country. It was crossover time, and as long as the money was good, the crossing over would go on. But this particular crossing of the bluegrass and blues streams in “Love In Vain” was kind of a one-off deal. Ry Cooder gets credit for playing the mandolin on "Love in Vain," and according to him, he played a good deal more on the album. At least he got some credit, which is more than you can say for poor old Robert Johnson.
My aunt knows that the Stones began flirting with country on their previous album, Beggar’s Banquet, released in ’68. “Dear Doctor” was a great send-up of the genre, all the better for being overtly satirical. For musicians from outside the U.S. the blues-country mixing probably seemed logical because they weren’t as aware of the deep racial divide along musical lines as we were. To the Brits, “rural American music” might seem like a viable category, whether it is being sung by a grandson of slaves in a shack in Mississippi or by a handful of hillbillies on a front porch in Kentucky. (My aunt gets this impression when reading biographies of American bluesmen written, as they often are, by scholarly English wankers.) American audiences know, on the other hand, that the gulf between blues and C&W is as historically and culturally wide as the mighty Mississippi itself. Few men other than Ray Charles and Elvis Presley have successfully bridged it.
Be that as it may, with the release of “Honky Tonk Women” as a single in the summer of ‘69, just before Let It Bleed came out, the Stones got right up on the county bandwagon. So it was that an even more rustic version of the song, “Country Honk,” was put on the album as the third cut. This one has the really sublime fiddle playing of a guy named Byron Berline, of whom my aunt had never heard. Turns out old Byron was, and still is, a bluegrass fiddle heavyweight, touring with his own band today, but who also did a huge amount of work with rock and pop groups—The Eagles, Elton John, The Byrds, to name a few—going back to about the time he appeared on “Country Honk.” Also, “Country Honk” lists Mick Taylor on slide guitar, for his album debut with the Rolling Stones, although my aunt can only hear acoustic and fiddle, and can’t really tell where the slide guitar is on this song. My aunt also loves the car honking near the beginning and at the end of “Country Honk,” which reminds her of sitting up on the third floor flat of a house in Ann Arbor, back when the album first came out, stoned to the gills, and swearing every time the song was played that someone was outside on the street honking their horn. The cannabis-fed paranoia that the song inspired, usually followed by the relief of uncontrolled laughter, still makes her feel high when she hears it played.
After their two ventures into Americana with “Love In Vain” and “Country Honk,” the boys went back home for “Live With Me,” which is about as purely and absurdly English as can be. Indeed, the idea that “taking tea at three” is a nasty habit could only be appreciated by an Englishman. Then there are the “score of harebrained children … locked in the nursery,” who “queue up for the bathroom.” That’s followed by a succession of references to servants, maids, butlers, chauffeurs, footmen. It’s as if Mick and Keith are deliberately shaking off any soil they might have picked up from the States in the previous tunes. Two things my aunt particularly likes about “Live With Me” are the righteous bass line laid down at the beginning (not by Bill Wyman as you might think, but by Keith, according to the liner notes), and Charlie Watts’s drum work, which is so simple yet elegantly persistent here. My aunt also likes the line “The maid she’s French, she’s got no sense/ She’s wild for Crazy Horse” because it reminds her of two things. First, a fact that every non-French person who has ever lived in Europe knows to a certainty, and that is that the French have indeed got no sense. Because they are French. It’s the kind of thing that ordinarily goes without saying on that side of the Atlantic. And the allusion to the maid being on heroin reminds my aunt of her own drug addiction, brought on by years of taking synthetic opiates for severe pain from shingles, another great old peoples’ disease with which she has been afflicted.
The last song on side one (from back in the days when you had to turn the record or the tape over) is the eponymous “Let It Bleed.” What can you say about this one? Creaming, dreaming, leaning, coming, bleeding, it’s all there in one sloppy package that is quintessentially Rolling Stones as we now think of them. The title was a sort of mockery of the Beatles’ “Let It Be,” which was already around, even though the album with the same name wasn’t released until 1970. But it was more than just a tweak of the guys from Liverpool. First let’s back up. As my aunt and just about everybody else who was around during the 1960s knows, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were regarded as rivals by their audiences. We now know that in real life they toked each other up and dropped acid together, and that Mick probably tried to screw everyone else’s wife or girlfriend. But in those days we thought they were almost mortal enemies, the way we fancied the guys who played for the Red Sox and the Yankees were. (That, we later found out, wasn’t true either. All Red Sox players, even now, secretly want to play for the Yankees.)
Friends or enemies? In the music world of the British invasion, the truth lay in the middle somewhere. The Stones and the Beatles were buddies, sort of, but were also intense rivals for the spot at the pinnacle of rock and roll, and the Stones always seemed to be playing catch up, from a position of rather illogical insecurity. Without a doubt the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour spawned Their Satanic Majesties Request, probably the worst Rolling Stones album ever made, and a very inferior crack at the total immersion “concept” album. That Stones fans tolerated this sad period of blatant imitation by their group is a testament to their abiding faith in what they knew was original and great about them. The insecurity that led to Satanic Majesties may have been fed by managers, promoters and record execs, but was probably also that of Mick Jagger himself, who, according to my aunt, just couldn’t stand to be upstaged, and still can’t. With him it’s like a sickness. Lucky for him few are capable of doing it.
Back to the song “Let It Bleed,” though. My aunt knows that there’s more to the takeoff on “Let It Be” than just a play on words. The Stones were really offering fans an antidote to Paul McCartney, whose maudlin tunesmithing began to dominate the Beatles in their latter days and has been a blight on popular music in the forty years since they broke up. “Let It Be” starts out
When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me,
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
And in my hour of darkness She is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
This crap was more than the Stones or their fans could take. McCartney was turning his group into jell-o fuck popsters, in spite of the efforts of John Lennon and George Harrison to keep it rocking. So in “Let It Bleed” Jagger and Richards offered up some unsentimental psychology of their own, suggesting that real comfort might be derived not from visions of mom but from the exchange of bodily fluids:
She said, “My breasts they will always be open
Baby, you can rest your weary head right on me.
And there will always be a space in my parking lot
When you need a little coke and sympathy.”
Yeah, we all need someone we can dream on,
And if you want it, baby, you can dream on me.
Yeah, we all need someone we can cream on,
And if you want to, well you can cream on me.
When I find myself in times of trouble Mother Mary doesn’t come to me, she comes on me. Try dreaming that some time, Paul.
Of course we can’t leave “Let It Bleed” without mentioning the reference to “that jaded faded junky nurse.” My aunt can identify with that, though she most definitely never saw anyone knife anyone in their dirty filthy basement. Her addiction was very respectable and matter-of-fact, and nobody ever really referred to it as such. I never did ask the staff at the nursing home whether the doctors weaned her off the Oxycontin after she got past the point of seeming to feel much pain from the shingles. I think maybe one of the few benefits of getting old is that people don’t call you a drug addict even when, for all practical purposes, you are one.
Turning now to side two of the album, let’s start not with the first song, “Midnight Rambler,” but with the second one, “You Got the Silver.” The reason for this is that my aunt thinks “Midnight Rambler” has such a climactic feel to it that it should have been last on the album. But the way they packaged music back in the days of vinyl was to place the two strongest songs as the first cuts on each side. There were probably at least two reasons for this. First was that people wanted to hear the best stuff first, and this was in the days before you were able to just push a button and skip to whatever song you wanted on the CD. You had to lift the arm and find the right spot unless you were starting from the beginning of the side. Also (and my aunt thinks this is equally important) was the fact that records wore out differently depending on where the cuts were on the disc. Anyone who has played the shit out of vinyl knows that the last song on each side got a lot scratchier than the first. The reason for that was simple. As the needle worked its way around the long continuous groove it picked up dust and dirt and cigarette ashes and cat hair and whatever else was around, so that by the time the stylus reached the last tune it was pushing in front of it a whole pile of debris. This interfered with the fidelity of the sound and scratched the record at the same time.
“You Got the Silver” was Keith’s first solo song. This began the tradition of having at least one Keith solo on just about every studio album, and also, some time later, of Mick leaving the concert stage to let Keith and the rest of the band play these tunes. My aunt figures that this deal was developed on account of the increasing tension between Keith and Mick, and was intended to mollify Keith, whose insecurity seems to have had a greater basis in reality than Mick’s. After all, the guy was never a virtuoso guitarist, and even though he’s damned good most of the time, he lived in a world inhabited by Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Johnny Winter, Dickie Betts, and many other guys who had more talent than he did. And as for a voice, well, Keith never had much of one, and that got worse early on.
Rolling Stones songs typically feature a strong beat, a solid wall of good guitar work, neat stylish drumming, and nearly incomprehensible lyrics sung by Jagger. But the lyrics are not the main thing. In spite of not knowing all the words my aunt loves Stones songs, and even sings along with them, because they’re so damn musical in a tough rocking way. Still, from time to time the Stones can turn a felicitous lyric phrase. My aunt is particularly fond of the one from “Rocks Off,” on Exile on Main Street, that goes, “The sunshine bores the daylights out of me.” Too bad hardly anyone ever hears lines like that, which pop up more often than you might think.
Back to Keith. Unlike the bulk of the Rolling Stones’ music, his solos, including “You Got the Silver,” are all about the lyrics. For some reason, even though he has a shitty voice and could and should fill his numbers with heavy guitar playing to cover it up, he doesn’t. He wants you to hear the words. We’re given to believe that, unlike Lennon and McCartney, who shared credit for Beatles songs but in fact wrote them separately, Jagger and Richards have always collaborated. My aunt thinks that typical Stones numbers about women, when sung by Mick, are on the whole emotionally aloof. They’re about sex at the libidinal level more than about love, or they take pains to present women as selfish (“Stupid Girl”), annoying (“She’s So Respectable”), dissipated (“Honky Tonk Women”), obsessed with sex (“Star Star”), or all of the above (“Some Girls”). Complaining about women is one of their trademarks. On the other hand a Keith Richards song usually features his lovelorn soul laid bare, and is full of supplication, remorse, and self doubt. He’s either pining after someone unattainable, or he’s warning her off because he’s a no good druggie, like this from “Before They Make Me Run,” from Some Girls:
Watched the taillights fading, there ain’t a dry eye in the house
They’re laughing and singing
Started dancing and drinking as I left town.
Gonna find my way to heaven, ‘cause I did my time in hell,
I wasn’t looking too good but I was feeling real well.
Or this, from “The Worst,” off of Voodoo Lounge:
Well I said from the first
I am the worst kind of guy
For you to be around.
That’s pretty straightforward. No strutting or dancing or falsetto cooing while waving a feather boa. Just Keith’s naked soul laid out on the stage, like a patient etherized on a table. It doesn’t take a shrink to figure that Keith Richards, in spite of copiloting the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band, is one fragile fellow, bless his heart. Here on Let It Bleed, in “You Got the Silver,” it’s
Tell me honey, what will I do
When I’m hungry, and thirsty, too.
Feeling foolish, and that’s for sure,
Just waiting here, at your kitchen door.
Mick Jagger could have sung those words, and sounded a lot better, but we just wouldn’t have believed them coming from him.
My aunt was disappointed in love, too. There were the two boys in Belgium, adolescent suitors. Then came the occupation and the war. One went into the resistance, and the other became a collaborator. Both were lost to her, and they became enemies of each other for life. America was new and different and the boyfriends just didn’t come along over here for an oddly studious kid who was really American in name only. After a brief torrid affair when she was in her 20s, the curtain fell for the last time on romance, and my aunt became what they once called an Old Maid. Regret would have been her sole partner for the duration if not for a loyal friend and companion, another nurse, with whom she shared the last 50 years of her life. But the touch of a man, felt briefly in the heat of the desert, would forever after elude her.
“Monkey Man” continues the theme, fostered in “Let It Bleed” and “Live With Me,” of freakish antiheroism, as if the Stones are feeling the need to counter the saccharineness of not just the McCartney side of the Beatles, but the insipidity of the songs that exploited the largely phony “flower power” movement, which had produced gems like “If You’re Going to San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” “Sympathy for the Devil,” of course, got this off to a good start earlier in the year, on Beggar’s Banquet. Hi, I’m your friendly neighborhood Lucifer. Here in “Monkey Man” they’re bidding “Welcome To Our Bad Boy World. “I’m a fleabit peanut monkey,” “I’m a cold Italian pizza,” “I’ve been bit and I’ve been tossed around/ By every she-rat in this town,” “I’m a sack of broken eggs.” What does it all mean? From this self-effacement we’re supposed to feel a little sorry for the boys even as we envy them, the original motley crew, surrounded by oversexed women, taking drugs back stage, flirting with the demimonde, in their endless tours and bars and hotel rooms and studios and mansions and tax havens. They want us to know that they’ve arrived financially, but their hearts and minds are twisted in a sort of down to earth, working class way. Except that the Stones were really middle class guys who only manufactured the suggestion of grittier pasts for the benefit of their audiences. The Beatles, who began closer to the bottom, aspired to rise above it and leave it behind forever, as folks of the lower classes typically do.
My aunt thinks “Monkey Man” typifies an aspect of the Stones that might be called Fuck-Up Chic. It plays out through subsequent albums with songs like “Dead Flowers,” “Tumbling Dice,” “Torn and Frayed,” “Coming Down Again,” “Memory Motel,” “Beast of Burden,” and many more. And it continues to this day, even though they’re now senior citizens, nearing prime Alzheimer’s territory. It’s all about one night stands and broken love. It started way back with “Spider and the Fly” and was the most imitated thing about the Stones, even more than the satanic shit, which they’re quick to point out here in “Monkey Man” they were only using as a gimmick and not a way of life:
I hope we’re not too messianic
Or a trifle too satanic
We love to play the blues.
And after all, isn’t that why we love the Rolling Stones? They’re just a group of happy-go-lucky messianic, satanic, blues playing, groupie screwing dope chippers. I know that’s why my aunt loves them.
We arrive next at “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Don’t you love its weirdly inapposite solemnity? Talking about cherry sodas with Mr. Jimmy while the sopranos sing in the background. My aunt thinks there’s real wit lurking under everything the Stones do, and nowhere does it reveal itself better than here. They employed the London Bach Choir on this one. Again, it was in brazen imitation of the Beatles, who had used a full orchestra on Abbey Road. There’s a reason for this pomposity. At bottom, all rock musicians feel that their music is inferior to that which we call Classical, or “serious.” In the same way, rock lyricists often secretly long to be regarded not as ditty-meisters but as poets, like the badly deluded Jim Morrison. As rock superstars get more successful and wealthy, they start getting more grandiose. After all, people are following them around telling them how great they are and getting them everything they want. And of course money talks in all endeavors, musical or otherwise, and now that they have the money, they’re damn well going to hire an orchestra, thereby purchasing more legitimacy. For the Beatles, it was an inflated estimation of their own quality (which in their confusion they thought was demonstrated by their fame), combined with their desire to experiment with instruments not normally used in pop music. For the Stones, it was more a matter of taking the Beatles’ successful idea and riffing on it, partly to be like them, and partly to deride them. If imitation is flattery, the Rolling Stones flattered the Beatles incessantly while the two groups coexisted. But to their credit, the Stones quickly arrived at the point where they understood their niche, and occupied it comfortably, never attempting to dazzle with profound messages or overwhelming music. They rock hard, they put on a great show, and they roll on.
At last we come to the song my aunt thinks ought to be the album’s finale, “Midnight Rambler.” It’s a confused mishmash about a burglar-rapist-murderer, but the music is what drives it, just as in “Gimme Shelter.” As my aunt likes to say, it’s all in the execution, and here is an instance of how with the Rolling Stones the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That’s why they’re still together after all these years, and why they’ve never successfully been able to go their separate ways. By himself, Keith is just a really ugly guitar player with a horrible voice. By himself, Mick is a just a prancing fairy. Charlie Watts is probably an idiot savant (have you ever heard the guy talk?). Ron Wood is, well, limited. But put them together and you’ve got something great that nobody can adequately describe. The best attempt to date has been Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light, where he wisely lets the camera roll during a two-night concert. You see the phenomenon of the Stones for yourself, without explanation. The view is better than at a live concert, and for a fraction of the ticket price.
My aunt knows that nothing occurs in a vacuum in the world of rock. “Midnight Rambler,” as a song about a killer, has antecedents. “Mack the Knife” comes immediately to mind. Then there’s “Riders on the Storm,” by the Doors, which came out two years earlier:
There’s a killer on the road.
His brain is squirming like a toad.
Take a long holiday,
Let your children play.
If you give this man a ride
Sweet memory will die.
Killer on the road.
Even back in the 60s, before Hannibal Lecter, there was something attractive about the menacing force of a predatory criminal. Charles Manson had already done his thing and the world was fascinated. So “Midnight Rambler” starts
Did you hear about the midnight rambler
Everybody got to go.
Did you hear about the midnight rambler
The one that shut the kitchen door.
He don’t give a hoot of warning
Wrapped up in a black cat cloak …
However, whereas the Doors played it straight, the Stones, as always, add more of a whimsical touch:
Well you heard about the Boston …
It’s not one of those …
Well, talking about the midnight … sh … The one that closed the bedroom door.
I’m called the hit-and-run raper in anger
The knife-sharpened tippie-toe …
Knife-sharpened tippie-toe? In spite of its menacing tone, there’s something absurdly tongue-in-cheek about the song, my aunt thinks, even as the tempo rises and the music gets more insistent, with Mick’s wailing harmonica adding urgency, and the midnight rambler tells of the mayhem he’s going to commit--
I’m gonna smash down all your plate glass windows
Put a fist through your steel-plated door.
The song continues to build to its climax, the music propelling the listener to an inevitable catastrophe. In the background is the chorus, chanting, over and over, “Oh don’t do that,” “Don’t you do that.” Then, the ultimate phallic violent words, my aunt’s favorite moment in the album, shouted not spoken, and rather silly: “I’LL STICK MY KNIFE RIGHT DOWN YOUR THROAT BABY AND IT HURTS!!!”
My aunt died about a month after I drove down to visit her while listening to Let It Bleed. A week or two before the end, she quit swallowing food. Her brain didn’t remember how to perform that task any more. You could put things into her mouth, but eventually they would just dribble back out. On the Friday before the Monday on which she died, I went to see her and wheeled her downstairs to the little coffee shop in the lobby of the old folks’ home. She could still sit up and look around. Her favorite thing to drink had always been black coffee. I got her a cup, and cooled it down with some water. I also got a chocolate chip cookie. I fed her a couple of sips of coffee and a bite of the cookie. She could move her lips and chew a little bit, but the stuff stayed in her mouth, and eventually began to leak out, dark brown, so I stopped. I wiped her mouth, over and over, until all that mocha drool was gone. Then I took her back upstairs. I think she might have enjoyed the taste of the coffee and cookie, or at least the experience of having it in her mouth. That was the last time I saw her alive.
I should probably tell you at this point that in all likelihood my aunt had never heard of Let It Bleed. She may have been vaguely aware of the existence of the Rolling Stones, but I’m pretty sure she never listened to more than a note or two of any of their songs, and then only by accident. But you've probably guessed that.
A few weeks after she died we had a graveside service where we buried the urn containing her ashes. One of my cousins came from France. That evening, sort of in honor of my aunt, my wife and cousin and I went to see a movie just out called In Bruges, starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as two hit men who have to hide out in Bruges, on account of Farrell’s having accidentally killed a child in England in the course of bumping off a priest (or a bad guy impersonating a priest, I forget which). Since it was probably the only movie in English that would ever be filmed in or in any way concern the city of Bruges, I just had to go. It was darkly funny and very violent, but most definitely not a tribute to the medieval Flemish town where my aunt had been born and grew up. The city with its landmarks is one of the stars of the film, but gets no respect. The Colin Farrell character repeatedly likens being in Bruges to being in hell.
Afterwards my cousin said what was obvious to us, namely that our aunt would have been mortified by the movie. I also wondered vaguely how the Belgians might have felt about it, already the butt of jokes by other Europeans, invaded by enemy armies and missionaries from alien religions, and now by a foreign film crew.
On the drive home from the movie theater, we listened to Let It Bleed, my aunt’s favorite Rolling Stones album.
