“What a drag it is getting old.” Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote that opening line to “Mother’s Little Helper” in 1965, when they were 22. Ever since then, they’ve proven that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.
The Rolling Stones have been redefining what it’s like to grow old for a long time, and the latest example is the recent news that Mick Jagger is going to be a great-grandfather next year. Plenty of 70 year olds have become great-grandparents. But how many of them played a part in sexually liberating an entire generation, whose band’s logo consists of lips hanging suggestively from tongue, and entertains millions of people by running (and I do mean running) and singing for two hours?
The Stones were viewed as old, even way back in 1978. The conventional wisdom was that Disco and Punk had threatened to make them look like Perry Como. Plus, these guys were in their (gasp!) mid-30’s. It sounds so stupid now, but age was looked upon as some sort of obstacle. That year, the Stones came out with Some Girls, which may be their all-around best album. The title track compared and contrasted women from different ethnic/racial backgrounds, including an infamous line regarding the sexual appetite of African-American women. I don’t recall Perry Como ever recording anything like that.
In a year that included Blondie’s Parallel Lines, Cheap Trick’s Heaven Tonight, Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Girl, Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town and the debuts of Van Halen, Ace Frehley, Magazine, The Police and The Cars, Some Girls was just as funky, intense, rocking, and sexy as any of those records.
One of the best known songs from it is “Shattered,” which kind of sounds like The Cars, with its bouncy, urban new wave energy. Their self-titled debut and Some Girls had come out at the exact same time, so the song anticipates The Cars rather than apes them. For some reason they even say “shadoobie,” but the Stones were so smooth, they pronounced it “Shadoobay.” So they took a nonsensical word and made it sound like a glamorous French fragrance. Overall, there’s such a palpable lust for life bursting from Some Girls, it’s too bad Iggy Pop had already used that phrase to title his album the year before. Not bad for a bunch of “old farts.”
In 1989, when they were mounting their “Steel Wheels” tour, how many times did we hear the same old cliched “Steel Wheelchair” jokes? Jagger and Richards were 46 and Ronnie Wood just 42. The incessant mockery of their ages made it seem like they were frail, incontinent senior citizens taking a break from the extended care facility. (Although it didn’t help that “Steel Wheels” is kind of a lame title for an album and tour)
The notion that musicians in their 40’s or beyond couldn’t perform live at a high level was a moronic one to begin with, and one the Stones made extinct with the “Steel Wheels” tour. I saw them at Shea Stadium in the fall, and they were one of the more exciting and dynamic live acts you’ll ever see. No one had seen a 40-something sprint across stadiums for two hours a night. It’s easy to forget that was a big deal then, and that’s not even 25 years ago.
To put it in perspective, bands like Wilco, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Metallica all have members older than most of the Stones were in ’89. When was the last time you heard a hacky old guy joke about those bands? Yeah, I’ve never heard one either.
And there’s Bruce Springsteen, who at 64 is roughly 20 years older than the Stones of the “Steel Wheels” era. He routinely gives his usual maximum energy performance, averaging three hours a show, with sometimes the set getting into four-hour territory. We’re all used to it by now, but that doesn’t make it any less extraordinary.
Bill O’Reilly is 64, too. Over the years I’ve noticed he’s sprinkled some “Hey, mans” in his exchanges. Seems fairly innocuous, but a conservative Irish Catholic from Long Island is using vernacular from the Beat 50’s and Hippie 60’s-70’s. It would’ve been unthinkable for earlier generations of Bill O’Reilly’s to talk like Tommy Chong, man. O’Reilly may be an employee of Fox News, but he’s also just another baby boomer raised on bands like the Stones.
The impact of Jagger becoming a great-grandfather probably won’t hit people until the next year or so, when either the Stones tour again, or he drops by an awards show or tribute. By then we’ll be seeing him performing those same moves and gyrations he’s done for the last 50 years, moves that have made him a sex symbol to women and men. And then it will truly dawn on all of us that Mick Jagger’s daughter is a grandmother. Yikes.
The second line in “Mother’s Little Helper is “Things are different today.” Thanks in large part to the Rolling Stones, they are.