from the LP Goat’s Head Soup, Rolling Stones Records, 1973It was extremely difficult narrowing it down to just one single Stones tune, and the path getting there is littered with many stellar runners-up (“Sway”, “Ruby Tuesday”, “Torn & Frayed”, “Jigsaw Puzzle”, “Tumbling Dice”, “Sympathy”); and now I feel better for mentioning them all. The song I chose has been getting a lot of play amongst my circle of friends over the last couple of years, as we continue along in our pursuit to uncover the many forgotten album tracks that easily stand alongside the hits everyone knows so well. Mick & Keef were both turning 30 the year this album was released, and I feel comfortable saying that they had seen an awful lot of shit go down in that relatively short amount of time, by anyone’s standards: the death of former guitarist & band founder Brian Jones, the monumental fuck-up that was Altamonte, being arrested and consistently harassed by the police in the UK, the deaths of friends and peers like Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison. That list doesn’t even include the Stones’ own internal conflicts and ever-growing appetites for hard drugs which were beginning to threaten the band’s chances of holding it all together, “…went out walkin' through the wood the other day, can't you see the furrows in my forehead?... now all my friends are wearing worried smiles, living out a dream of what they was…you're gonna kiss and say good-bye, yeah, I warn you…don't you think, it's just about time to hide away?” When you find yourself in the middle of a shit-storm, whether individually or as a society, there is something comforting about looking backwards with tranquilized bliss at an uncomplicated & trouble-free past; however, when you’re in the midst of chaos, those carefree times can feel dreadfully distant, “…what tender days, we had no secrets hid away, now it seems about a hundred years ago…” Of course, the reality is that when we were kids our lives were indeed strewn with what we knew then as “stress”, it only looks small to us now in comparison with the rest of our journey in the rearview; the infusion of those lessons into a generally blithe, immature brain would snuff out the very flame of naivety which keeps a child young. The increasing distance between my time spent being a wild & rebellious young man, and my comparatively calm life now has me wondering if there is some way to reignite that youthful passion, but not have it overly tempered by the reality which we choose to live in (i.e. being “productive” members of society…not ready to ditch into the woods completely just yet…). Most of my friends and I were in such a hurry to become adults that now, as we find ourselves entering middle age, many of us are looking over our shoulders and yielding to Mick’s query, “…don't you think, it's sometimes wise not to grow up?”
