Thursday, July 11, 2024

MAN OF WEALTH AND TASTE

 A  recent piece in the Washington Post has writer Jason Schwartzman puzzling out the reason why The Rolling Stones have seemingly stopped using the "Who killed the Kennedys" line from Sympathy for the Devil  in their most recent live concerts. A lifelong Stones fan, hearing a song that he's memorized each note, grunt and quasi-lurid lyric absent that reputed "payoff" line  was too much and set the author off on a mini investigation, as such , to find out the why of  the line's elimination. My guess is that the line has worn out its shock value and is, at best, not suitable in an historical moment where Americans seem poised to choose between democracy and totalitarianism in the upcoming Presidential election. Being men of wealth and taste and properly British to the DNA, it didn't seem a proper thing to announce given the current climate . 

It was heavily rumored that the Stones, stricken by unusual levels of concern and moral determination, had  dropped 'Sympathy" from their set list after the 1969 fiasco at Altamont where the Hells Angels murdered Meredith Hunter. It became part of the general mythology of the band, a musical force that wrote a song so cursed with malevolent spirit that they simply had to leave it alone. This was a wide spread belief, but it turns out after all this time to not true, an urban legend, maybe a rumor turned lose by the Stones themselves to distance themselves from the evil the song might have inspired. Mick Jagger did say, to paraphrase, that something to the effect that weird things happen when they play the song. But they never dropped the song from their live performances because, I suppose, commerce is king. After initially loving the song when it first came out, I quickly tired of it. A song created for shock value and maximum impact loses power and relevance with repeated listening. I think it's one of their weakest songs from their richest period. Even when I loved the song back when, I thought the "who killed the Kennedy's " line and the answer "After all , it was you and me" was nothing short of a cop out, another example of Jagger ducking behind theatrical ambivalence . 

Laying the blame on "you and me" for the Kennedy assassinations was a chief device . Mailer in Rolling Stone didn't buy the resolution either and called the song , essentially, a case of all build up with no pay off. Jagger evidently tried to sell the audience on the idea that he might be a Satanist but wanted some plausible deniability. On the matter of songwriters dealing with the assassinations of saints and political heroes, nothing has surpassed Phil Och's masterpiece "The Crucifixion

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