It is not enough, and never has been, to write about the Rolling Stones as though they were just a musical group. They are that, of course, but only secondarily. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps in the beginning during their first couple of years together, it may be that music was their first concern. But by 1964, the time of the Stones' first American tour—in fact, for their first American tour—they had established an image for themselves. It started with mere surliness, Teddy Boy cheek that soon soured to plain nastiness. But gradually, their nastiness took on violent, Nazi overtones (note Guy Paellaert's nightmare vision of the Stones in Rock Dreams, in which they are pictured as SS men debasing little girls) until in 1967, with their album, Their Satanic Majestic Request, they emerged at last in their present diabolical manifestation, with their leader, Mick Jagger, in the role of the squirming, androgynous Lucifero.

By now, Jagger is not merely the leader. In a very real sense, he is the Rolling Stones. The only challenge ever offered him during their 13 years together came from Brian Jones, the group's ill-starred founder. When it failed, Jones dithered off into drugs and died isolated from the rest. Recently, Mick Taylor, the guitarist who replaced Jones, left the Stones. Nobody noticed. Either Charlie Watts, the drummer, or Keith Richards, the lead guitarist, both present at the creation, could leave the group tomorrow and it would still be the Rolling Stones, just as long as Mick Jagger were up in front of them, shaking his ass and groaning and rasping in the same old way.

That has changed very little. Play their entire recorded oeuvre—starting with The Rolling Stones on London, their first American album, released in May, 1964, and you will be struck, I think, by the fact that, except for a few minor wrinkles and shifts in direction, their approach to their music has been consistent from the beginning right to the present. 

That’s the joke in the title of their latest album, It's Only Rock and Roll. Hell, that's all it's ever been! To their credit, though, the Stones started with a kind of respect for the urban blues—and this has taken them a long way. The name of the group came from an old Muddy Waters number; and early on, they used to do a lot of his material, as well as that of other bluesmen, all of it carefully learned from American records. On this foundation, the group has built a whole repertoire of original songs which they play and Mick Jagger sings in a kind of Home Counties parody of basic black style.

I remember sitting high up in the stands in Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington, D.C., when the Stones made their appearance on their 1973 tour. The stage set up on the playing field below was so remote and the figures on it so tiny that the visual aspect of the show they were putting on was lost to me completely. I was forced, as all of us there were forced, to concentrate on the music alone. It was then, perhaps for the first time, that I realized just how ordinary the Rolling Stones are musically. And that in this, too, Mick Jagger is the Rolling Stones, for his musical limitations seem to inform and inspire the rest of the group. He seems to have about five good notes. All the rest come out shouted, squealed, or slurred to the point that the melodies he sings—and they are damned simple melodies, at that—are often altogether lost. If you think I’m laying it on unnecessarily here, just sit down and listen to a few of their old 45 rpm hit singles—”Paint it Black,” “Street Fighting Man, and Wild Horses,” for example. You’ll find on these he hardly manages to keep the tunes afloat.

The rest of the group is not much better. There never has been a soloist of any consequence with the Stones—no Eric Claptons, no Alvin Lees, no Peter Taylors—and of course there certainly could have been. Since about 1965, the Rolling Stones could have had practically anyone they wanted in the group. But they have never wanted a soloist: a guitar star would inevitably have provided competition for Mick Jagger, and Jagger would have found himself outclassed by even a competent musician. And so the group has always been known for its ensemble playing. They chug along in a kind of hard-driving, loose, jam style that is pleasant enough to listen to but becomes repetitive and dull within the space of a single LP or concert set. With the Rolling Stones you never get a sense, as you always did with the Beatles, of the enormous musical possibilities inherent in the Rock idiom. No, the Stones just keep angrily bang-bang-banging away at you until you must give in to them or stop listening altogether. 

The interesting thing is that some of their most enthusiastic and deeply committed fans—the ones who are up front at every concert—seem to have chosen the latter alternative. They don't listen. They just make noise. Whipped into a Bacchic frenzy that seems to peak constantly higher in the decibel range, the Stones' fans make it impossible for the group even to hear itself. As a result, that easy ensemble style of theirs that sounds so extemporaneous must actually be rehearsed down to the last split second until it can be played deaf night after night into the screaming void that surrounds them.

But the audience knows it has this right, that they are as much actors in this spectacle as the Stones themselves, even as much as Mick Jagger (though he, of course, is the leading player). It is their right, their role to shout and scream and drown out the music, for the music is not the point of it all. In a sense, they are. Jagger and the Stones offer them a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk in which the fantasies of the audience—sex and violence, evil and perversity—are given shape and substance before their very eyes.

The focus of all these fantasies, the one who acts them out up there on the stage is none other than Mick Jagger, of course. He has, almost of necessity, made of himself a kind of mythic figure, one who embodies all the qualities his audience might feel shamed in ordinary circumstances to claim. So you can think of him as a kind of combination Moloch and scapegoat. That's his myth, of course. What he is in real life is quite another thing, perhaps unknowable and perhaps irrelevant. We will eventually get around to questioning that, but let's look first at the myth of Mick Jagger.

To most, he is Turner, the mysterious, perverse pop singer-gone-recluse whom he played in the 1970 film, Performance. It was his second. Mick Jagger had earlier tried his hand at acting in the title role of Tony Richardson's Ned Kelly. The result was almost laughably bad, for Jagger has never really had it in him to play the working-class hero role in which English socialists have cast him—much less the legendary nineteenth century bandit who is a folk hero down under. The Ned Kelly myth is simply one to which Jagger's personal myth did not attach. Turner, however, is something else again. It is a part which seems made for him—and in fact, it was. Donald Cammell, who wrote the film and co-directed it with Nicolas Roeg, had known Jagger for quite some time. When he created the role for him he had the good sense to know that it would not do to base the character on what Jagger is—that it was far more important that Turner conform to what people thought Jagger was, that he remain what he has always been to his audience, a fantasy figure. And in Performance that is what Turner is—Jagger's image, his bright shadow. Mick said so himself once in an interview that I found reprinted in Rolling Stones (Amsco; 352 pages; $6.95), a kind of grab-bag compendium of material on the Stones edited by David Dalton. "The thing is," Jagger remarks somewhat disingenuously, referring to his role as Turner, "that it is very easy for people to believe that's what I'm like."

Turner is a startling character, one of the most original to be caught on film in the last decade. He dominates the movie. The sense of brooding, sullen evil he shows is so much more potent than the mere gangster nastiness of Chas (James Fox). But actually, the manifestations we see of Turner's evil nature are mild enough: He takes drugs, goes for a tub splash with a couple of girls, and indulges in a bit of innocent transvestism. But it is in his domination of Chas, his manipulation of him, that Turner seems most truly evil. Chas puts his faith in Turner, as in a kind of diabolical savior—and he is betrayed. The perversions that Jagger hints at—and more than hints at—in the role are mere trappings. Outward signs. He makes Turner profoundly and convincingly evil.

Is Mick Jagger evil? Or is it only silly to ask? We go sheepish in these times at meeting such questions head-on. Nevertheless it does have some pertinence for one who has in his fashion celebrated evil in songs such as "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Memo from Turner," and whose postures and public attitudes seem in studied imitation of some lurid late-Victorian conception of Satan. This is, it seems, what he wants us to think of him, isn't it?

This question, unasked but implicit, is central to Tony Scaduto's biography, Mick Jagger: Everybody's Lucifer (McKay, $8.95). Lurking through the book is the evil Jagger image, the Lucifer of the subtitle. And we find here not just discrepancies between image and reality, but distortions so extreme that for them to be truly contained in a single psyche would take, if not cause, schizophrenia. Scaduto, who proved himself a very thorough researcher of unwilling subjects in his earlier biography of Bob Dylan, has gone to everyone around Jagger, people who knew him when, and he has stitched together a fascinating patch-work portrait of a young man who emerged from the most mundane sort of suburban, middle-class background (Dartford) to become a superstar, without ever really altering his values, attitudes, or intentions perceptibly. You can take the boy out of the middle-class, but you can't take the middle-class out of the boy. His father, Joseph Jagger, was a physical training instructor (he has since become a university teacher of physical education), and he brought his son up on the sort of brisk discipline one would expect from such a man. And young Michael responded to it without a qualm or a murmur. “No matter how much of a rebel Jagger seemed to have become in his later public image," Scaduto writes, "he was almost rigidly conventional as a boy." And he would remain so for years to come. There was of course the band Jagger had in school, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, but others in other schools had bands; there was nothing unique in this. Among the things that set him apart were his talent for mimicry and his great energy. “But on the whole,” Scaduto sums up, “Jagger was in no way out of the ordinary.”

He had already met Brian Jones, a hip kid who was then a more advanced musician, when he began commuting into London to the London School of Economics to prepare for the career in business or journalism he had in mind for himself. On the train one day he met and started to talk to another Dartford boy, Keith Richards, who was commuting in to go to art school. They found they were interested in the same kind of music, although Richards was then just learning the guitar. Eventually, Jagger, Jones, and Richards got together, first under the leadership of an older musician, Alexis Korner, who was deep into blues. Then later—1962—the three split to form their own group and the Rolling Stones were horn. The rest is history, more or less—except that on the personal side we see Jagger, in the close glimpses he permits, as a very careful, calculating individual whose instincts are always to protect himself. Scaduto strongly implies that Jagger's unswerving devotion to his own best interest may well have cost Brian Jones his life.

Although Jones' death in 1968, drugged and drowned in his own swimming pool, presented the Rolling Stones with a profound crisis, the group came back strong—only to meet in a year's time with an even greater disaster: Altamont. The Stones' free concert on that California hillside, which ended in the murder of one man and the beating of many by members of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang who had been detailed to guard the performers, has been taken as the event which marked the sad terminus to the Sixties.

The definitive account of Altamont and the tour that led up to it is to be found in the Maysles’ full-length documentary film, Gimme Shelter. No matter what your reservations may be regarding the sensational nature of the picture (murder committed before your very eyes—and won’t the violence freaks get off on that?) nevertheless it is a fascinating document, right from the beginning of the tour to its ugly conclusion. It is seldom granted to us to be shown as clearly and demonstrably as we are in this film the particular consequences of abstract acts. The dark, roaring frenzy created by the Rolling Stones in cities across the country is presented to us there in color and screaming stereo. And in the middle of it all, twitching and strutting his way provocatively through their repertoire is Mick Jagger, the dark prince himself. Is he angry? He seems so much of the time. His mouth, when not shouting forth those graceless lines he writes, seems perpetually in a sneer. An aura of something surrounds him. It is as though he were transmitting violence with every gesture, every note. And all that we know of him from Tony Scaduto and from the others who have written honestly about him persuades us that this has been worked out quite consciously in advance, that there is no spontaneity to it. He is in some sense like a priest, for the audience’s response is by now so routinized as to be almost ritualistic. He is their intermediary, their vessel; he takes from them all they have to give of hostility and bad feeling, consecrates it with his own fierce energy, and offers it up. 

So I’m suggesting, of course, that the Mick Jagger image—-the years of anger and that snarling message of violence he and the Rolling Stones sent out across America in hundreds of concerts and thousands—millions!—of records contributed much to the bad vibes at Altamont. I’m suggesting that the climate of violence there came almost predictably as a consequence of the communal fantasy in which the Stones and their audiences had long been participating. Tell me that it was nothing so abstract as the Stones’ image that was responsible for what happened at Altamont but specifically the Hells Angels who beat on troublesome members of the crowd with pool cues and then stabbed, beat, and kicked to death a black man, Meredith Hunter. Tell me that, and I will tell you that it was to complement their image as the bad-asses of Rock and Roll that the Rolling Stones decided to use the Angels as their very own rent-a-cops. Of course the Stones didn't know it would turn out as it did. You can see that in the consternation written all over their faces in those sequences in Gimme Shelter in which they watch the Altamont footage on the editing machine: They didn't know the gun was loaded.

At one point before the Stones came on at Altamont, when the Jefferson Airplane (a group that has transmitted its share of violence into the atmosphere) was playing, the first serious beatings occurred around the apron of the stage. Grace Slick stopped singing and screamed at the nearest member of the Hells Angels, “What's happening here?” He turned to her, and pointing a finger, said, “You’re what's happening here!” I've always felt that that Angel knew just what he was saying; they're not as dumb as they look, you know.

Also, I’ve always felt it was no mere coincidence that the song Mick Jagger was singing when the Angels interrupted the Rolling Stones to murder Meredith Hunter was “Sympathy for the Devil.”

So? It’s ancient history, isn’t it? All of this happened years ago so that it may seem now like so much news from nowhere. But if we’re ever going to understand that remarkable episode in our social history that we refer to now in the past tense as the Sixties, then we have to understand Altamont. More, we shall have to understand the appeal of Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones if we are to understand the nature of violence and mass hysteria in our age and the one to come. They were originally supposed to play in A Clockwork Orange, you know—and Mick Jagger was to star in the role of Alex, subsequently played by Malcolm McDowell. The Rolling Stones as skinheads of the year 2000—it seems right, doesn’t it? Maybe the future does belong to them, after all. —Bruce Cook