Time Is on My Side . . . (Yes It Is)

It was late--or rather, it was early, past midnight on a Monday morning--when I wearily left the office. Driving home on the freeway, I was startled by a bright corona blazing from the hills of Elysian Park.

For a moment, I was puzzled, even alarmed; this is (or was, until the rain began) fire season.

Then, a sense of peace and reassurance came over me. It was the lights of Dodger Stadium: The sun still rises in the east, and the Rolling Stones are still on tour.

And if Mick Jagger--the Peter Pan, the Dorian Gray, the Energizer Bunny of rock ‘n’ roll--as long as Mick is still going, then every baby boomer in the world can still tell himself that it’s the typeface that’s gotten smaller, that they’re just making belts shorter these days, and it’s not too loud, and he’ll never be too old.

*

The Rolling Stones and the Beatles came across the Atlantic and the airwaves at about the same time, and the schism was clear from the beginning.

The Beatles were, so we thought, good boys. (How many years would it take us to get the bit of shtick in “A Hard Day’s Night” when John takes a big snort from a Coke bottle?) The Stones were, as their countryman Lord Byron once wrote of a former mistress, “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” The Beatles received honors from the queen. The Stones would probably have tried to peek under her ermine.

Where I lived, good kids listened to the Beatles. Oh, they were a little daring, hair-wise, but they wore suits. None of us would dream of having a crush on John, because he was married, nor on Ringo, because he was way too old and our dads would have a fit, and frankly, we had our doubts about a guy who wore more jewelry than we did.

Bad kids--girls who wore eye makeup, boys who smoked--listened to the Rolling Stones.

You knew just by looking at their album covers that the Stones were not the kind of boys who would bring you home by your curfew. They were louche. They were wild. They were scary. No decent girl would want to have anything to do with them. Except . . . except . . .

Then that song came out, the notorious “Let’s Spend the Night Together”--which, next to rap tunes like “Me So Horny” or the sex-manual lyrics of “Not Tonight,” was tame as a Presbyterian hymn.

A friend and I, knowing we’d be in trouble if we got caught listening to the song, sneaked into her sister’s room and played it with the sound turned low, muffling our half-thrilled, half-embarrassed shrieks with the pillows.

Even we had heard the saying, in inverted Hallmark prose, that good girls go to heaven and bad girls go everywhere. To listen to the Stones then was to be able to put your id out on a long leash, and to imagine, safely, what it would be like to ride a motorcycle or get stoned or just go wild--to inhabit a virtual yet still-virtuous musical reality that the Stones, like Dorian Gray’s portrait, lived out for us.

*

Years later, I found myself covering a festival-seating Rolling Stones concert at Anaheim Stadium. I knew about Altamont; the odds of my attending a Stones festival-seating concert by my own choice are on a par with my being invited to be keynote speaker at a Promise Keepers convention.

Then, in a backstage tunnel, I encountered Mick, swarmed by his entourage. I was dumbfounded. He was not a caricature. He really looked like that. Except, as they say, smaller.

Then, a couple of summers ago, I ran into Keith Richards at the Cipriani Hotel in Venice. (I tell it this way because it sounds cool; in truth, he was pointed out to me as I was drinking the frothy, peachy drink the place is known for. He appeared to be having something in a short glass--probably ginger ale, but I liked to think it was absinthe, or liquid nicotine. The man may look like walking beef jerky but he has a truly remarkable constitution. I would buy a ticket to watch his autopsy.)

The great singer-songwriter Grace Slick, who is writing a book about her own memorable (and sometimes unremembered) history, was telling me a while back that the notion of “old people” leaping around onstage, trying to do what they did at 25, was very sad. But she made an exception for two of them: Tina Turner, and her own role model, Mick Jagger. He didn’t invite the audience to have fun, she said: He challenged them, he dared them to do it.

*

The summer the Beatles played what turned out to be their last live public concert, in Candlestick Park, we visited relatives in the Bay Area. Of course the concert was sold out. Of course I sobbed; fate had brought me this close to the Beatles, and now we would be kept apart? Life could not be so cruel. So on the night the Beatles played, my dear father drove me to Candlestick Park. We sat in the car. I couldn’t see or hear a thing, of course. But I knew they were in there.

Where will I be, I wonder, for the Stones’ last concert? If it’s the Forest Lawn tour, wake me up.