The Wrong Stuff
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POSTERMINARIES
The Wrong Stuff In the 1960s, it was common to be told “never trust anyone over 30,” at least if you weren’t. Well, next month (June 2001) brings the 60th birthday of Rolling Stones’ drummer Charlie Watts, so maybe we should soften the warning. (Or should mistrust be doubled, or even squared, at twice the dreadful age of 30?) I am tempted to write about the aging of our heroes, but that strikes a little close to home since I am of a generation that considers that the Stones passed their prime when the ‘60s ended, in 1972 or so. (Such a great decade, according to Abby Hoffman, that it failed to end until two years into the next one.) Of course, like most rock ’n’ roll bands, the Stones’ repertoire was (still is, I suppose) based on a couple of simple tricks—the three-chord song, and a heavy reliance on catch phrases as the basis for their lyrics. Songs like “Play with Fire,” “Heart of Stone,” “Off the Hook,” “Under my Thumb,” “Mother’s Little Helper,” “Salt of the Earth,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “Time Waits for No One,” “Hot Stuff,” “Beast of Burden,” “Wild Horses,” “Brown Sugar,” “Rock and a Hard Place,” “Dirty Work,” and “Out of Control” come from phrases in common use at the time of writing. Other catch phrases can be found within the songs, too. Many of them are not suitable to be printed on the cover of a record album, and have been heavily euphemized for that purpose. Of course, this is all part of the tradition of popular music. (Even the terms “Rock ’n’ Roll,” “Jazz,” and “Funk” were originally slang terms for an activity not appropriate for polite conversation, or more than an obscure hint in this column.) Many popular bands of the ‘60s used similar writing techniques: While the Beatles probably created more catch phrases than they “borrowed,” even the great poet of the pop singers, Bob Dylan, resorted to using “Don’t think twice” as a song title and catch line. Among the masters of the art were the Who, or at least their principal songsmith, Pete Townshend. (Why IS there an “h” in that name??) Rather than just using a stock phrase, Townshend would often twist it slightly, giving a new shade of meaning. The Who’s second hit “Substitute” includes the immortal line “I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth,” simultaneously capturing the teenage angst of the time and a wealth of cultural assumptions about new materials, too. This is a creation in the great tradition of materials-oriented catch phrases— particularly those based on obviously wrong choices of materials. I think the first one that I actually noticed was the term “glass jaw” applied to a boxer whose 424
fights seemed to end with a fractured mandible. I was but four years old at the time so this may count as a formative experience. I recall thinking that the poor man in question had suffered a particularly strange form of prosthetic surgery, somehow related to the horrific fate of the “man in the iron mask,” until my older brother explained the metaphor to me. Maybe this is the event that nucleated my lifelong inter
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