Eyesight to the Blind
Fernanda Robledo
“Cocksucker Blues” was my first real introduction to The Rolling Stones. In one of my photography classes, we were looking at the work of Robert Frank, a very well known American photographer and film director. We watched “Cocksucker Blues”, Frank’s documentary of the Stones while they are on their 1972 tour. The film was/is very shocking since it shows the band doing lots of drugs and having promiscuous sex, but also very real because it shows the loneliness and gloom of life on the road. "It's a fucking good film, Robert, but if it shows in America we'll never be allowed in the country again." (Jagger). My second and most formal introduction to the Stones happened on Saturday November 25th of the present year at around 8:00 p.m. when I received a phone call from a friend who was wondering if I wanted to go see The Rolling Stones. I replied with an: “I don’t know…maybe…” I have never listened to the Stones before, I do not own any of their albums nor know any of their lyrics, and I only know a little about some of the band members might from rumors concerning a Mars bar or the tabloids talking about them bunking their heads. Probably by now I am being hardly judged and even hated for my musical ignorance. After making sure that the ticket was offered to me for free, I then said: “What the heck, I rather be out there than stuck here at home writing essays…” so I went. We arrived at BC Place a few minutes before the band came on stage; we were welcomed to our seats by big red fireworks and the smell of pot. The place was packed and as the band started playing, the crowd went wild. I looked around me and I realized that this crowd was a total mix; young, old, yuppies, hippies, hardcore rockers, eccentrics, etc., everybody was there. As I was watching the older couple rocking and copying Mick Jagger’s moves I realized that this was history, that this band was bringing together all those generations that they have been inspiring with their music since the 60’s. I had never experienced anything like that before, it was a very interesting phenomenon. After that concert I started thinking about why The Stones are still so popular, what is it about their music, their songs that people are so attracted to them. I really wanted to know what was going on in the 60’s because people talk about this era as a time of great change in the world, as a time of liberation. When I think of the 60’s all I can think about is hippies, psychadelic tie-dyes, bell-bottoms, drugs and lots of sex but I know that there was something much deeper going on, so here we go….
The hippies or flower children were the youth of the 60’s who were ideas of freedom, happiness, hope, revolution and change. Hippie culture rejected the typical American 50’s consumer society who went to church, lived in the suburbs, whose recreational time was spent sitting at homewatching sitcoms and whose married couples were sleeping in separate beds. I mean, we do have to agree that that kind a life sounds pretty boring, who would not want to rebel against it. British youth was also reacting against it society because they were pretending that World War II hadnever happened, that everything was and had always been alright.
Both British and American youth started changing and because they were opposing to war and the ideals that older generations had set. Music was a aid to create that change, and in this case it was through rock and roll. Apart from just being a musical style, rock and roll became a way of life, a language a fashion style, all characterized by ‘attitude’. From the very beginning, rock and roll has always been associated with youth, rebellion, sex, and drugs. “Rock treats the problems of puberty, it draws on and articulates the psychological and physical tensions of adolescence, it accompanies the moment when boys and girls learn their repertoire of public sexual behaviour” (Frith and McRobbie 371). In the 1950’s rock and roll was a synonym for disruption and the ability to shock older generations became part of the allure of the music to young people. Everybody remembers Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 when he first swiveled his hips in public. It seemed that in the first few years of the 1960’s that rebelious spirit had been tammed but within a few years rock and roll reclaimed its power and it was coming back at full force, and it would have social, cultural and political consequences. Rock and roll wanted to change the world. “This desire begins with the demand to live not as an object butas a subject of history⎯to live as if something actually depended on one’s actions⎯and that demand opens onto a free steet” (Marcus, On Record 5-6). The parents of this generation had fought to regain peace, prosperity and security but in this fight equality and justice had been lost. The young generations, known as the ‘Baby Boomers’ started questioning the politics of their government. “Hippies were important because it was only through stepping out of society that people were abletolookat it objectively-to see what was wrong with it, to see how they’d like it to change” (Miles 10). Rock and roll was doing it too, in particular folk music with Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary whose songs talked about peace and civil rights. Without them, Bob Dylan’s songs would have never been heard. While he was in New York, he started writing about racial suffering and the threat of nuclear apocalypse. He inspired people with his songs. “He pointed out problems, hypocrisy, suffering, and expressed his personal feelings of outrage and compassion in so forceful a manner that listeners came to share those feelings, to find them within themselves. This makes Dylan not a prophet but a leader, an agent for change in a society that did not know it was awaiting his arrival” (Townsend).
This rock explosion was not just happening in the U.S. but also in Britain. From the American music market point of view, the “British Invasion” began overnight in 1964, but in England there had already been an American Invasion for many years. “In England-catching the reverberations of the jazz milieu of Miles Davis and Jack Kerouac-the youth scene had acquired the status of a mammoth sub cultural class, which was the by-product of a post war population top-heavy with people under the age of eighteen” (Gilmore 67). Liverpool, England gave birth to a four-piece group called The Beatles in 1962. It took The Beatles a year to transform and redefine British pop culture and they did the same with American culture after their arrival in the U.S with ‘Love me Do’. The Rolling Stones became very popular at that time with their first major song ‘Satisfaction’. Every single young kid heard these lyrics and went wild. Mick Jagger became the James Dean of the sixties; the band personified rebellion in their music, attitude, and appearance. The rock lifestyle has always been associated with sex and drugs, and actually during the mid 1960’s drug use became identified with rock culture but certainly, it was not the first time drugs had been used for artistic recreation. Drugs gained popularity and musicians were promoting experimentation which may have influenced the use of drugs with the youth of that generation. “Getting high started being seen as a way of understanding deeper truths and sometimes as a way of deciphering coded pop songs. Along with music and politics, drugs were seen as an agency for a better world, or at least a shortcut to enlightment or transcendence” (Gilmore 70). When the Beatles started publicly accepting their use of marihuana, many fans followed. The rumor says that, apparently it was Bob Dylan Dylan who introduced them to drugs during his 1964 tour of England. “One of the great things about early pot was the sheer hysteria , the laughs. This could appear very, very funny, hilariously so” (McCartney).
The dream for equality, harmony and tolerance did not last long, the Vietnam war exploded and young troops were sent to fight it. Consequently, music became darker and more troubled. Plenty of artists like The Doors, Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop and the Stooges were totally open about using their music as a force of rebellion to shock audiences. Music in the late 1960’s was about doubt and fearing the possibility of another World War that would completely destroy the planet. 1968 was a big year for the world. “Martin Luther King was murdered on April 4th on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee” (Wikipedia). Two months later, “on June 6th, Robert Kennedy was assassinated a few moments after delivering a speech celebrating his victory at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Califronia” (Wikipedia). Dreams and the dreamers were slowly desintegrating; The Beatles made moremusic but the band desintegrated shortly after. A year later, The Rolling Stones lost band member, Brian Jones.
There was nothing greater than to end the decade with a massive concert, ‘Woodstock Music and Arts Fair’. The concert was held in a farm in Bethel, New York from August 15th to 18th. The show was attended by over 500,000 people, most of them got in for free. The weekend was rainy, everything was overcrowded, and the people that were at the concert had to share food, alcoholic beverages, and drugs. “There were a lot of people coming together to break society's rules while dancing to some inner prompting in order to get closer to some higher truth that's a pattern that unites the Civil Rights marches and the Anti-War protests and the student sit-ins and the rock festivals” (Railton). Some of the many performers at Woodstock were: Richie Havens, The Fish, Sweetwater, Ravi Shankar, Joan Baez, Carlos Santana, Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, Creedence Clear Water, The Who, Joe Cocker, Ten Years After, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Sha-na-na, Jimi Hendrix, among others. “Woodstock was not a wake. It was a confused, chaotic founding of something new, something our world must now find a way to deal with” (Marcus, Woodstock 56).
Rock in the 1960’s showed that it was capable of uniting masses for important causes that could help bring change in the realm of politics, society, etc., even if it was through chaos and rebellion. “The 1960’s proved that rock is anything but a trivial music; it does have impact, and at its worthiest, it still aims to threaten, to draw boundaries, to defy, and to win young people over to its view and ethos” (Gilmore 77). Music now a days is so different form what it was then, messages are no longer profound, with this, I am not saying that music has to be profound to be good, but it when music has a deeper meaning people seem to appreciate it more. Now a days everything just seems so fake and plastic, it all has become about mass media and consumerism, becoming rich and famous. So where have all the talented people gone? I know that there is talent out there but it is hard to find amongst all this crap. The main ingredient in music in the 60’s was rebellion, and it is still here but people are using it in a different way like exploiting their bodies in order to get their 10 minutes of fame. Will pop music die just like rock music is said to have died in order to start a newer, truer, better musical style? I do not know the answer to that question but you never know; at least people are starting with fashion, people are adopting back the 70’s so maybe change might occur in the music industry as well. Hey at least the annoying teen bands are out of the map, that is improvement just right there.
Works Cited
Frith, Simon and Angela McRobbie. “Rock and Sexuality” On record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990. 371-389.
Gilmore, Mikal. “The Sixties”. Rolling Stone: The decades of rock and roll. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001. 65-77.
Greil, Marcus. Lipstick Traces. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
---ed. “The Woodstock Festival”. 20 Years of Rolling Stone: What a long strange trip it’s been. Ed. Jann S. Wenner. New York: Friendly Press Inc., 1987. 49-56.
Jagger Mick. “Cocksucker Blues”. January 2003. http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday012703.htm
Robert F. Kennedy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kennedy
Martin Luther King,Jr. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_luther_king
Miles, Barry. Hippie. New York: Sterling Publishing Inc, 2004.
Rialton, Stephen. Psychedelic ‘60’s: Introduction. February 1999. http://www.lib.virginia.edu/small/exhibits/sixties/intro.html
Townsend, David N. “Changing Times.” Rock n’ Roll Culture and Ideolgy. 1997. http://www.dntownsend.com/Site/Rock/3change.htm
“Cocksucker Blues” was my first real introduction to The Rolling Stones. In one of my photography classes, we were looking at the work of Robert Frank, a very well known American photographer and film director. We watched “Cocksucker Blues”, Frank’s documentary of the Stones while they are on their 1972 tour. The film was/is very shocking since it shows the band doing lots of drugs and having promiscuous sex, but also very real because it shows the loneliness and gloom of life on the road. "It's a fucking good film, Robert, but if it shows in America we'll never be allowed in the country again." (Jagger). My second and most formal introduction to the Stones happened on Saturday November 25th of the present year at around 8:00 p.m. when I received a phone call from a friend who was wondering if I wanted to go see The Rolling Stones. I replied with an: “I don’t know…maybe…” I have never listened to the Stones before, I do not own any of their albums nor know any of their lyrics, and I only know a little about some of the band members might from rumors concerning a Mars bar or the tabloids talking about them bunking their heads. Probably by now I am being hardly judged and even hated for my musical ignorance. After making sure that the ticket was offered to me for free, I then said: “What the heck, I rather be out there than stuck here at home writing essays…” so I went. We arrived at BC Place a few minutes before the band came on stage; we were welcomed to our seats by big red fireworks and the smell of pot. The place was packed and as the band started playing, the crowd went wild. I looked around me and I realized that this crowd was a total mix; young, old, yuppies, hippies, hardcore rockers, eccentrics, etc., everybody was there. As I was watching the older couple rocking and copying Mick Jagger’s moves I realized that this was history, that this band was bringing together all those generations that they have been inspiring with their music since the 60’s. I had never experienced anything like that before, it was a very interesting phenomenon. After that concert I started thinking about why The Stones are still so popular, what is it about their music, their songs that people are so attracted to them. I really wanted to know what was going on in the 60’s because people talk about this era as a time of great change in the world, as a time of liberation. When I think of the 60’s all I can think about is hippies, psychadelic tie-dyes, bell-bottoms, drugs and lots of sex but I know that there was something much deeper going on, so here we go….
The hippies or flower children were the youth of the 60’s who were ideas of freedom, happiness, hope, revolution and change. Hippie culture rejected the typical American 50’s consumer society who went to church, lived in the suburbs, whose recreational time was spent sitting at homewatching sitcoms and whose married couples were sleeping in separate beds. I mean, we do have to agree that that kind a life sounds pretty boring, who would not want to rebel against it. British youth was also reacting against it society because they were pretending that World War II hadnever happened, that everything was and had always been alright.
Both British and American youth started changing and because they were opposing to war and the ideals that older generations had set. Music was a aid to create that change, and in this case it was through rock and roll. Apart from just being a musical style, rock and roll became a way of life, a language a fashion style, all characterized by ‘attitude’. From the very beginning, rock and roll has always been associated with youth, rebellion, sex, and drugs. “Rock treats the problems of puberty, it draws on and articulates the psychological and physical tensions of adolescence, it accompanies the moment when boys and girls learn their repertoire of public sexual behaviour” (Frith and McRobbie 371). In the 1950’s rock and roll was a synonym for disruption and the ability to shock older generations became part of the allure of the music to young people. Everybody remembers Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 when he first swiveled his hips in public. It seemed that in the first few years of the 1960’s that rebelious spirit had been tammed but within a few years rock and roll reclaimed its power and it was coming back at full force, and it would have social, cultural and political consequences. Rock and roll wanted to change the world. “This desire begins with the demand to live not as an object butas a subject of history⎯to live as if something actually depended on one’s actions⎯and that demand opens onto a free steet” (Marcus, On Record 5-6). The parents of this generation had fought to regain peace, prosperity and security but in this fight equality and justice had been lost. The young generations, known as the ‘Baby Boomers’ started questioning the politics of their government. “Hippies were important because it was only through stepping out of society that people were abletolookat it objectively-to see what was wrong with it, to see how they’d like it to change” (Miles 10). Rock and roll was doing it too, in particular folk music with Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary whose songs talked about peace and civil rights. Without them, Bob Dylan’s songs would have never been heard. While he was in New York, he started writing about racial suffering and the threat of nuclear apocalypse. He inspired people with his songs. “He pointed out problems, hypocrisy, suffering, and expressed his personal feelings of outrage and compassion in so forceful a manner that listeners came to share those feelings, to find them within themselves. This makes Dylan not a prophet but a leader, an agent for change in a society that did not know it was awaiting his arrival” (Townsend).
This rock explosion was not just happening in the U.S. but also in Britain. From the American music market point of view, the “British Invasion” began overnight in 1964, but in England there had already been an American Invasion for many years. “In England-catching the reverberations of the jazz milieu of Miles Davis and Jack Kerouac-the youth scene had acquired the status of a mammoth sub cultural class, which was the by-product of a post war population top-heavy with people under the age of eighteen” (Gilmore 67). Liverpool, England gave birth to a four-piece group called The Beatles in 1962. It took The Beatles a year to transform and redefine British pop culture and they did the same with American culture after their arrival in the U.S with ‘Love me Do’. The Rolling Stones became very popular at that time with their first major song ‘Satisfaction’. Every single young kid heard these lyrics and went wild. Mick Jagger became the James Dean of the sixties; the band personified rebellion in their music, attitude, and appearance. The rock lifestyle has always been associated with sex and drugs, and actually during the mid 1960’s drug use became identified with rock culture but certainly, it was not the first time drugs had been used for artistic recreation. Drugs gained popularity and musicians were promoting experimentation which may have influenced the use of drugs with the youth of that generation. “Getting high started being seen as a way of understanding deeper truths and sometimes as a way of deciphering coded pop songs. Along with music and politics, drugs were seen as an agency for a better world, or at least a shortcut to enlightment or transcendence” (Gilmore 70). When the Beatles started publicly accepting their use of marihuana, many fans followed. The rumor says that, apparently it was Bob Dylan Dylan who introduced them to drugs during his 1964 tour of England. “One of the great things about early pot was the sheer hysteria , the laughs. This could appear very, very funny, hilariously so” (McCartney).
The dream for equality, harmony and tolerance did not last long, the Vietnam war exploded and young troops were sent to fight it. Consequently, music became darker and more troubled. Plenty of artists like The Doors, Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop and the Stooges were totally open about using their music as a force of rebellion to shock audiences. Music in the late 1960’s was about doubt and fearing the possibility of another World War that would completely destroy the planet. 1968 was a big year for the world. “Martin Luther King was murdered on April 4th on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee” (Wikipedia). Two months later, “on June 6th, Robert Kennedy was assassinated a few moments after delivering a speech celebrating his victory at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Califronia” (Wikipedia). Dreams and the dreamers were slowly desintegrating; The Beatles made moremusic but the band desintegrated shortly after. A year later, The Rolling Stones lost band member, Brian Jones.
There was nothing greater than to end the decade with a massive concert, ‘Woodstock Music and Arts Fair’. The concert was held in a farm in Bethel, New York from August 15th to 18th. The show was attended by over 500,000 people, most of them got in for free. The weekend was rainy, everything was overcrowded, and the people that were at the concert had to share food, alcoholic beverages, and drugs. “There were a lot of people coming together to break society's rules while dancing to some inner prompting in order to get closer to some higher truth that's a pattern that unites the Civil Rights marches and the Anti-War protests and the student sit-ins and the rock festivals” (Railton). Some of the many performers at Woodstock were: Richie Havens, The Fish, Sweetwater, Ravi Shankar, Joan Baez, Carlos Santana, Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, Creedence Clear Water, The Who, Joe Cocker, Ten Years After, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Sha-na-na, Jimi Hendrix, among others. “Woodstock was not a wake. It was a confused, chaotic founding of something new, something our world must now find a way to deal with” (Marcus, Woodstock 56).
Rock in the 1960’s showed that it was capable of uniting masses for important causes that could help bring change in the realm of politics, society, etc., even if it was through chaos and rebellion. “The 1960’s proved that rock is anything but a trivial music; it does have impact, and at its worthiest, it still aims to threaten, to draw boundaries, to defy, and to win young people over to its view and ethos” (Gilmore 77). Music now a days is so different form what it was then, messages are no longer profound, with this, I am not saying that music has to be profound to be good, but it when music has a deeper meaning people seem to appreciate it more. Now a days everything just seems so fake and plastic, it all has become about mass media and consumerism, becoming rich and famous. So where have all the talented people gone? I know that there is talent out there but it is hard to find amongst all this crap. The main ingredient in music in the 60’s was rebellion, and it is still here but people are using it in a different way like exploiting their bodies in order to get their 10 minutes of fame. Will pop music die just like rock music is said to have died in order to start a newer, truer, better musical style? I do not know the answer to that question but you never know; at least people are starting with fashion, people are adopting back the 70’s so maybe change might occur in the music industry as well. Hey at least the annoying teen bands are out of the map, that is improvement just right there.
Works Cited
Frith, Simon and Angela McRobbie. “Rock and Sexuality” On record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990. 371-389.
Gilmore, Mikal. “The Sixties”. Rolling Stone: The decades of rock and roll. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001. 65-77.
Greil, Marcus. Lipstick Traces. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
---ed. “The Woodstock Festival”. 20 Years of Rolling Stone: What a long strange trip it’s been. Ed. Jann S. Wenner. New York: Friendly Press Inc., 1987. 49-56.
Jagger Mick. “Cocksucker Blues”. January 2003. http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday012703.htm
Robert F. Kennedy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kennedy
Martin Luther King,Jr. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_luther_king
Miles, Barry. Hippie. New York: Sterling Publishing Inc, 2004.
Rialton, Stephen. Psychedelic ‘60’s: Introduction. February 1999. http://www.lib.virginia.edu/small/exhibits/sixties/intro.html
Townsend, David N. “Changing Times.” Rock n’ Roll Culture and Ideolgy. 1997. http://www.dntownsend.com/Site/Rock/3change.htm
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