Love?

In university I took a history of rock n' roll class. It was taught by musicologist Victor Coelho. He was one of the few really interesting teachers at the University of Calgary and his rock history class was a riot. But it was also maddening because Coelho would sometimes profess with certainty (as professors tend to do) on topics in rock n' roll that I thought were open to extremely broad interpretation. While he seemed to know his stuff when it came to the Rolling Stones, he made one claim that still strikes me as wrong.

When the topic of love and the Rolling Stones came up, Coelho said he believed that with only two exceptions, the Rolling Stones never used the word 'love' in their songwriting. I'm not bringing this up merely to be a stickler for details, but my immediate reaction would have to be that on this detail he was wrong. The Rolling Stones make constant reference to love in their writing. A cursory glance at song titles indicates that the word drops in from one album to the next: Love In Vain, Love is Strong, Blinded by Love, Hide Your Love, etc. It is littered throughout the songwriting too.

What Professor Coelho may have been getting at, however, was that he believed the Rolling Stones to be generally ambivalent about the concept of love. When compared to the Beatles, as he may have pointed out, the Rolling Stones do seem to be on the cynical side of the fence. I remember that Coelho played Can't You Hear Me Knocking in the lecture on the day he made the argument as a way of pointing out this ambivalence - a void that was filled with urgency, impatience, lust and driving need. If the song is indeed about unrequited love as a metaphor for cocaine addiction, then the sentiments of Can't You Hear Me Knocking fit the anti-love motif.

However, if we look elsewhere in the same era for another example a totally different picture emerges. Consider Gimme Shelter. It is a song considered to epitomize the marriage of the Rolling Stones with late '60s violence and mayhem. It truly does sweep away the last vestiges of Beatles inspired love-imagery. Tie in the association of the song in the Scorcese film about Altamont and line up the ultra-violent images that ended the film and a rather dark picture of the Rolling Stone is created.


But it is in this very place that I think the Rolling Stones make their ultimate statement about love - and what they have to say is anything but ambivalent or cynical. Mary Clayton's earth-shattering solo on the track sounds the twin warnings rape/murder...it's just a shot away. It's a dark and emotional summit for the song and the threatening storm that Jagger's vocal was building. But what is Mick's response to Clayton's section? The entire refrain of the track rests on a sentiment about love which is redemptive. Because the song does not return to violent imagery, love would seem to transcend these threatening themes. I can't imagine that this was an accident on the part of Jagger/Richards in such a sparing lyrical track.

At least at one time, in 1969, I think the Stones did care about love and took a view of it that allowed it to outshine the chaos, violence and misery that followed the band through much of the 1960s. As their career stretched out over the following thirty years they made a lot of subsequent statements about love, but none so forceful.

And here is a treat I found today on You Tube: Gimme Shelter live from Twickenham Stadium last year. An amazing version.