How times change. Our forebears once thought that full-figured Bill Haley was at the razor-sharp, frighteningly decadent and anarchic edge of pop culture. Compared to the Rolling Stones’ subsequent carnival of drug busts, court appearances, car crashes, house fires, paternity suits and chosen or enforced overseas exile, not to mention the matter of Keith Richards’s alleged blood transfusion, or of his unusual choice in dispersing his father’s ashes (cocaine, nostril), Haley’s act now seems as quaint as the background accompaniment to an Edwardian tea-dance.

Of course, the Stones themselves have moved on a bit from their heady, satanic-majesty days, when local shopkeepers prepared for their arrival by shuttering up their premises as if in anticipation of a natural disaster, and no less than the Archbishop of Canterbury denounced them from the pulpit. Back then, it seemed the Stones in general, and Mick Jagger in particular, had formed a withering contempt for the “incestuous bartering-house for vested interests,” as John Osborne called the British ruling elite. Mick saw them as the arrogant, toffee-nosed scions of privilege, like the unnamed rich girl he pulverized so superbly in his 1965 song “Play with Fire.”

Mick and Keith are like Merrie Melodies cartoon characters, no matter how often vaporized, they bounce back

Mick and Keith are like Merrie Melodies cartoon characters, no matter how often vaporized, they bounce back

Two years later, in one of the defining episodes of the Swinging Sixties, Jagger and Richards found themselves in a British courtroom facing drug possession charges, amid rumors that the police who had called for them at Keith’s country home had interrupted an orgy of diabolism, voodoo or worse, that the interior of the house had resembled nothing so much as a scene of smoke-filled decadence out of some banned Arabian erotica, and that Mick himself had been found in an unusual combination with his girlfriend Marianne Faithfull and a Mars bar.

The two Stones were duly convicted and handed custodial sentences, although both men’s convictions were later overturned on appeal. In the times ahead, both they and their band would become as polarizing in their way as Britain’s Great Train Robbers before them: either plucky scapegoats, or heinous thugs who had committed every crime in the tabloid........

© The Spectator