[Photo by IAN WRIGHT]
BY MARC SPITZ The T.A.M.I. Show was all about showcasing the new. James Brown arrived at the Civic Center and was promptly informed of what the Stones already knew. “I remember James coming up and saying ‘Of course I’m the last act on the bill, right?’ ” says Steve Binder, director of the T. A. M. I. Show. “I told him, ‘No, actually you’re going to be followed by the Rolling Stones.’ James looked at me and smiled and said, ‘Nobody follows James Brown.’ ”

[…]

“After James there was just enough time for the technical crew to get a smoke or a breather and to reconfigure the stage with the microphone setup or if they had their own drummer like the Stones did, bring their instruments on, twenty minutes,” Binder says. Twenty minutes . . . to follow that. Jagger lit a final cigarette and warmed his voice with a little Jack Daniels as the crew prepped the stage for the Stones. The sound of the fans clamoring for the band only made him worry about the challenge ahead: How does one justify following what just happened out there?

Jan and Dean returned to the stage to welcome “those fine fellows from England, the Rolling Stones.” Looking nervous but resigned, the brave young men from South London assumed their headlining position. And they pulled it off. The Rolling Stones did the impossible and made the viewer forget Brown’s epochal spot. They were something so different, ironically derived from the same beat, but after a half dozen TV appearances they were adept at presenting a new breed of energy — and of making a viewer believe that they were watching some sexed-up space invasion. That’s how they matched James Brown. Surprise and sex. The Stones were like nothing anybody had ever seen before: male and female, familiar and strange, coming right at the viewer, leaving them no time to think, only to surrender themselves. Patti Smith, in the pages of Creem magazine (where she was a contributor), recalled the sensation years later:

“The singer was showing his second layer of skin and more than a little milk,” she wrote. “Five white boys sexy as any spade . . . Blind love for my father was the first thing I sacrificed to Mick Jagger . . . masculinity was no longer measured on the football field.” At the time, Smith was a closet rebel teen from Jersey, a good Catholic girl. The T.A.M.I. Show performance presented options.

They started right into “Around and Around” with skinny Mick dressed in a sweater and clapping along to the beat at the mic. He looked much amused at all the sexed-up chaos; soon that old smirk returned to his lips as if to say, “This wasn’t so bad after all.” They played “It’s All Over Now.” Mick, finally having fun, changed a lyric from “She hurt my eyes open” to “She hurt my nose open.” He repeatedly jumped into the air as if trying to use the stand as a pole-vaulting stick. He danced a bit more than usual; you can see him experimenting with his own body. Here, perhaps, the Mick Jagger of ’69 was truly born — out of necessity and, in a way, an innate sense of morality. MORE

BEN RATLIFF:  Today in The New York Times Janet Maslin reviews Marc Spitz’s new book, “Jagger: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler, Rogue.” She liked the book, and so do I. It argues against the prevailing and increasingly boring theory that Keith Richards is the Stones’ main claim to authenticity, the soul of the band, the principal force of their sound and songcraft, and that Mick Jagger is a shallow socialite poseur. If you were persuaded by Keith Richards’ strong attitudes in his memoir, “Life” — which has sold a million copies worldwide in under a year, according to a recent statement by its American publisher — you may believe in this theory yourself. […] Mr. Spitz’s book doesn’t go too far into it, but there are a number of Stones songs allegedly written entirely — words and music — by Mick Jagger alone, or with other people who are not Keith Richards, or with minimal input from Keith Richards. They are not trifles: they’re among the Stones’ greatest, an alternate canon. For amusement, here’s at least a partial list, an album’s worth. MORE

RELATED: MickJaggerBiography.Com

[Illustration by Enkeling]

NEW YORK TIMES: As their popularity grows, so does their stardust. “Suddenly we were being courted by half the aristocracy, the younger scions, the heirs to some ancient pile, the Ormsby-Gores, the Tennants, the whole lot. I’ve never known if they were slumming or we were snobbing.” It’s a blue-­collar fairy tale, but distance between Mick and Keith begins to steadily expand — so much so, Keith confesses, that “I haven’t gone to his dressing room in, I don’t think, 20 years.” The Glimmer Twins, once so close Keith claims they had “identical taste in music,” now get caught up in the drug-fueled circus that defines middle-­period Rolling Stones, the late ’60s and early ’70s. These are the golden years, the years of “Sticky Fingers” and “Beggars Banquet,” when excess converges with success in such a way as to make it all seem causal. But a certain guest at the party makes quite an impression and stubbornly refuses to leave: heroin. Keith’s drug habit progresses, but he moves into one of the most prolific writing periods of his career. He and Mick compose most of the songs for “Beggars Banquet,” “Let It Bleed,” “Sticky Fingers” and “Exile on Main Street” while Keith is under the influence. Pulled by the poppy and pushed by cocaine, Keith acquires a taste for working unholy hours in the studio that damn near kill his colleagues. He goes round the clock and considers it mutiny if anyone toiling with him leaves the deck. “I realized, I’m running on fuel and everybody else isn’t. They’re trying to keep up with me and I’m just burning. I can keep going because I’m on pure cocaine . . . I’m running on high octane, and if I feel I’m pushing it a little bit, need to relax it, have a little bump of smack.” He’s trying to impress upon his readers not the foolishness of this diet but rather the impossibility of its being replicated, since drugs of this caliber are no longer available, and few have the discipline to stick to the recommended doses. No wonder Johnny Depp modeled his “Pirates of the Caribbean” character, Capt. Jack Sparrow, on this rakish and tippling taskmaster. MORE

RELATED: On a recent morning, the journalist Bill Wyman received a UPS package containing a typed manuscript. On reading it, he saw that it seemed to be the thoughts, at some length, of singer Mick Jagger on the recently published autobiography of his longtime songwriting partner in the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards. A handwritten note on an old piece of Munro Sounds stationery read: “Bill: For the vault. M.” From this, Wyman surmised that the package was intended for Jagger and Richards’ former bandmate, the bassist Bill Wyman, who has assiduously overseen the band’s archives over the past five decades and with whom Wyman the journalist coincidentally shares the same name. Wyman the journalist, a longtime rock critic, was once threatened with a cease-and-desist letter from Wyman the bassist’s Park Avenue attorneys and felt no compunction about perusing the contents of the package. The manuscript he received is reprinted below. MORE

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ME: You used to say Exile In Guyville was a song-by-song response to Exile On Main Street. I was always under the impression that was just bullshit and people bought it.

LIZ PHAIR: Oh my god, no. I absolutely took it dead seriously. I sat around with stacks, like hundreds of pieces of paper — you have to remember, I was stoned a lot. I was a twentysomething no-job. I hung out playing guitar all day. I had all this education, I thought analytically and someone had made a dare. I think an ex-boyfriend was like, “Well, why don’t you do a double album? Why don’t you do Exile On Main Street?” And it fit perfectly with what I was pissed about at that time: that no one thought that I could do anything of any value in the musical sense. So I just thought the bigger the mountain, the more motivation I had to climb it. I still have that problem. I had little symbols, each song would be listed, and I would do the songs on Exile, the one with the little symbols next to them, there was one with a kind of asterisk, I can’t remember. That was a pop song, and then a long, wavy line meant a slow song, a cross was another kind of song, a rocker was diagonal lines sort of like on Charlie Brown’s shirt. The symbols went so far as to be both in terms of musical style and also content, like if it was a depressing song about sorrow or angst or something, there was an arrow pointing from the top-left down to the bottom-right.

ME: So you put them all on little index cards that you kept arranging?

LIZ PHAIR: Yeah, I went nuts with it. I can’t tell you. We would go into the studio, and I’d be like, “You have to have this big guitar solo three-quarters of the way through because that’s what Exile On Main Street has.” And the lyrics had to be an answer or my equivalent. It had to either be putting him in his place, like if he was talking about walking down the street, and he’s talking about he’s mister footloose and fancy free, doesn’t meet anybody who gives a damn. I had to write a song about how much pain you could cause someone with that kind of attitude. Or I’d write my own song about walking down the street, being footloose and fancy free and not giving a damn. It either had to be the equivalent from a female point of view or it had to be an answer kind of admonishment, to let me tell you my side of the story. No wonder it’s such a good album — I put so much into it and uninterrupted attention, it was like a doctoral thesis. MORE

Liz Phair vs. Asimo Hashup from Rami Dearest on Vimeo.

NEW YORK TIMES: “Life” has already attracted undue attention for a schoolyard-sounding anatomical swipe at Mr. Jagger. But this is a book that pulls no punches, and most of its disses are more serious than that. “Cold-blooded” and “vicious” are only two of the more printable words he uses to describe Brian Jones. Allen Ginsberg was an “old gasbag.” Mick Taylor, the former Rolling Stone, “didn’t do anything” after he left the band, and Donald Cammell, the film director (“Performance,” starring Mr. Jagger and Anita Pallenberg, Mr. Richards’s longtime lover and partner in crime), couldn’t commit suicide quickly enough to suit Mr. Richards. (He shot himself in 1996.) When Marlon Brando propositioned him and Ms. Pallenberg, Mr. Richards remembers replying with this: “Later, pal.” As for Mr. Jagger, the complaints are deep-seated. They involve credit hogging, social climbing, egomania, insecurity, unethical business behavior and — here comes a Freudian’s holiday for anyone who’s ever watched the bare-chested young Jagger and Richards vamp it up together — uncertain sexual identity. There’s also a cool condescension about Mr. Jagger’s contributions to the duo’s songwriting. And a nasty nickname or two, like “Disco Boy.” In conversation about all this, Mr. Richards is emphatically blasé: “It’s bound to be somewhat rough, but the point is I’m trying to tell the story from Day 1 to now,” he says. And sure: “There’s the odd conflict here and there. But if you weigh it all out, those things count for nothing.” MORE

EXCERPT: The 1972 tour was known by other names – the Cocaine and Tequila Sunrise tour or the STP, Stones Touring Party. It was the beginning of the booking of whole hotel floors, with no one else allowed up, so that some of us – like me – could get privacy and security. It was the only way we could have a degree of certainty that when we decided to party, we could control the situation or at least get some warning if there was trouble. MORE

NPR FOR THE DEAF: Keef On Fresh Air

RELATED: It is one of the most intriguing chapters in the history of the Rolling Stones. The drugs raid on a party at guitarist Keith Richards’s Sussex home, Redlands, more than 40 years ago very nearly destroyed the band. And one of the 1967 episode’s unexplained mysteries was the identity of the man blamed by Richards and Mick Jagger for setting them up, a young drug dealer known as the Acid King. Crime scene: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards outside Redlands, the home that was raided by police in 1967. He was a guest at the party – and supplied the drugs – but vanished after the raid, never to be seen or heard of again. Jagger and Richards were arrested and jailed for possession of cannabis and amphetamines, though later acquitted on appeal.Richards claimed last week in his autobiography, Life, that the Acid King was a police informant called David Sniderman.The truth appears to confirm Richards’s long-held belief that the band was targeted by an Establishment fearful of its influence over the nation’s youth. The Mail on Sunday can reveal that Sniderman was a Toronto-born failed actor who told his family and friends he was recruited by British and American intelligence as part of a plot to discredit the group. MORE

RELATED: It was recently announced that Disney hired Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards to reprise his role as Captain Jack Sparrow’s (Johnny Depp) father in the upcoming “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.” Now, according to the Drudge Report, the studio is considering cutting all of Richards’ scenes out of the movie. Apparently, the musician’s new book, “Life,” talks about things that Disney doesn’t agree with, like teaching people that using high-quality drugs in moderation is a safe way to get stoned. MORE