Barbara emailed me to apologize for not liking my Stones song. Which was unnecessary and I told her so. But it occurred to me you all don’t know what happens behind the scenes. I write as much elsewhere as I do here. Sometimes I think you’re getting cheated. So here’s what I just wrote to Barbara.

****************************

It’s all okay. You have to understand that my role is to stir the pot. Which I do with great joy and delight.

Never thought you’d buy into the Stones. No reason you would or should. You cannot know, or have any reason to relate to, what they did for me when I was young and ever since. They popped into my life by a kind of low rent miracle. My roommate at prep school and I were terrible housekeepers. Suddenly the first Stones live album came to light in a pile of our laundry. Neither of us had bought or acquired it. It was just there. And there was no jacket for it either. But it always played. No fatal skips. Scratches, yes, but they went with the screaming girls in the audience who almost drowned out the music.

We became Stones fans. We listened to every new Beatles album but only once or twice. The ones we had to play again and again and again were the Stones. They were laughing at the whole sixties thing while it was happening. Acute satirists of the very wave they were riding.

They visited every genre of popular music, mixing respect with their own distinctive sound. (The best Bob Dylan song I ever heard was by them. Family. Hilarious.) Whatever they did was always still Stones. They were, to me, life itself. Full of humor, incredible vitality, unstoppable perseverance, raw sexuality, and an amazingly apolitical demeanor that they’ve dropped only once or twice in 50 years of being on top.

I’ve been to five big Stones concerts, maybe more. I almost never go to concerts. Almost always I’ve been accompanied by agnostics who just want to check the Stones box on their concert bucket list. Invariably, there is a moment when they turn to me and say, “Holy shit! These guys are the most amazing band I have ever seen!”

So I figured you had some clip-level knowledge of them. I picked the most anti-Stones cut they have ever done.

Fifty years. Impossible. Nobody sits at the top for fifty years. Last year, they finally got invited to the annual Brit equivalent of Woodstock. Glastonbury. They’ve never been politically correct enough. But they got invited, they came, and they conquered. Absolutely. Jagger is seventy and he ruled that stage like nobody ever. Youtube has clips of individual songs. He doesn’t have to ask people to sing along. He just points the microphone at the crowd and they sing like hell.

All right. I’ll stop. We like a lot of the same music. But I like more music than you do. In large part because while you were raising a family I was battling this sickness that has been afflicting our nation. I went to war as a writer while I was a naïf in college. I graduated from Harvard at the age of nineteen feeling my life was done and I was all alone. The Stones kept me from feeling alone.

They insisted that I live, hard and strong, and demandingly. And they haven’t betrayed me. Because they keep doing it themselves. And as I feel increasingly frail, they’re still playing the same role. Can you believe it? Mozart makes me believe in God, but he’s not keeping me alive.

When I need to feel that feeling in my belly, the go to hell defiance of all the bad news, it’s the Stones I need.

Factor that in when you think of musicology.