Rock: Taste for Graffiti

At last the music of the Rolling Stones has been enshrined where some of their less charitable listeners have always felt it belonged: on a lavatory wall. The cover of the Stones’ latest—and as yet unreleased—album is a photo of a graffiti-covered wall above an unpleasant-looking toilet. The name “The Rolling Stones” appears plainly, as do the title of the album, Beggars’ Banquet, and the names of the tunes it contains. Scrawled in smaller letters are sly references by the Stones to themselves and their friends, as well as such phrases as “God rolls his own” and “Lyndon loves Mao,” plus a bit of familiar bathroom doggerel.

To nobody’s surprise, London’s Decca Records concluded that the cover was “in dubious taste,” and refused to distribute the album on its release date two months ago, thus holding up sales that probably would have amounted to $1,000,000. Decca may have been thinking of rival EMI’s problem in 1966 when its U.S. subsidiary, Capitol Records, had to recall 500,000 copies of a Beatles album because of the cover. It showed the Beatles, in butcher smocks, laden with chunks of raw meat and the decapitated bodies of dolls.

Unlike the Beatles of two years ago, the Stones insist that they will not change their cover. “We don’t find it at all offensive, so we must stand by it,” says Mick Jagger. “If we allow them to dictate to us what we can and cannot do in the way of packaging, next they are going to try to tell us what to sing.” Last week the argument was in the hands of the lawyers for both sides.

Boycotted in Chicago. At least one thing can be said for the cover. It suits the spirit of the music inside. The album bristles with the brand of hard, raunchy rock that has helped to establish the Stones as England’s most subversive roisterers since Fagin’s gang in Oliver Twist.* It also stands in notable contrast to their previous album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, which ventured into the realm of electronic wizardry and psychedelic fantasy charted by the Beatles in Sgt. Pepper. Since that was an alien idiom for the Stones, they sounded pretentious and boring.

Now, in keeping with a widespread mood in the pop world, Beggars’ Banquet turns back to the raw vitality of Negro rhythm-and-blues and the authentic simplicity of country music. This is home ground for the Stones and, among white groups, they are all but unbeatable on it. But the album still will not please listeners who lack a taste for musical graffiti. How could it, with songs like the slow, bluesy Stray Cat, addressed to a 15-year-old girl (“Bet your mama don’t know you can bite like that”)? Or the driving, syncopated Street Fighting Man (“Comes summer here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy”)? Coincidentally, Fighting Man was released as a single during last month’s Democratic Convention and was promptly boycotted by most Chicago radio stations. Perhaps the best track is Sympathy for the Devil, in which an intriguing Mick Jagger lyric rides over a sizzling Latin beat:

Just as every cop is a criminal,

And all the sinners, saints;

As heads is tails, just call me Lucifer.

While the impasse over the release of Beggars’ Banquet drags on, the Stones are already conjuring more headaches for Decca. They hint that the cover of their next album may make the bathroom wall of Beggars’ Banquet look cute by comparison. Its subject: the Pope.

* In the Stones’ case, life tends to imitate art. Two weeks ago, a London court found Guitarist Brian Jones guilty of possessing narcotics and fined him $120.