Aging with the Stones
GRUBER, RUTH ELLEN
Letter from Vienna Aging with the Stones By Ruth Ellen Gruber Vienna My friend, a rather senior European diplomat, said he would try to get us tickets for the opera. Instead, he got us...
...Founded in 1995, the international body grew out of the Cold War era's "Helsinki process" of human rights monitoring and conflict resolution...
...Reading their names immediately conjures up yearbook photos of smiling, milk-fed suburban kids in jackets and ties or, for us girls, mandatory black sweaters and pearl necklaces...
...The one person I did stay in touch with died of AIDS in 1990...
...He told me he is a prominent physician, is on his third marriage, and lives not far from where we grew up...
...I'm going to scream...
...But the Beatles broke up...
...The whole sordid, scary scene, caught on film, was incorporated into the exceptional feature-length documentary film Gimme Shelter...
...There was no escaping the irony that the OSCE meeting took place in the Hofburg Palace, within earshot of Heldenplatz, the square where a triumphant Adolf Hitler stood on a balcony and harangued the cheering multitudes after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938...
...What, I wondered, can this mean...
...I didn't have the urge to scream this time, but I did feel the push to sing along and bop to just about every song that evening...
...The parley did not produce any concrete actions...
...Nevertheless, like thousands—millions?—of others, I signed up for membership on classmates.com...
...That was 34 years ago...
...Throughout my teens they were the bad boys of rock'n'roll, the dark, edgy counterbalance to the more upbeat, bouncy Beatles...
...The arms raised and waving like wheat in a windblown field among the standing crowd pressing up to the stage...
...The conference in effect became a forum for a passionate enunciation of Jewish concerns about pernicious mutations of what former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who headed the large U.S...
...But the very fact that it took place marked the recognition of anti-Semitism as a unique form of prejudice the world needs to address on its own...
...Their venue was Warsaw's Palace of Culture, the Stalinist-era skyscraper that stands in the middle of the Polish capital...
...Can the Stones really have caused a scandal in 1967 by bucking threats of censorship to sing "Let's Spend the Night Together" on The Ed Sullivan Show'1 Was there really a big to do over whether Jagger sang "Let's spend some time together" or actually mumbled the real, offending lyrics...
...There was stunned silence for a minute, disbelief, some tears...
...Even the huge video projections, something that had not existed in 1969, looked the size of postage stamps...
...And that most of us seem to care enough about one another to join a Web site where we at least put our names in touch...
...And only a few of the others done here had come out less than 30 years ago...
...Some 60,000 fans filled the stands and formed a solid, heaving carpet on the field...
...The concert we saw in Vienna lasted more than two hours, without a break...
...The public address system crackled, and the principal's voice came on with the somber, shocking news...
...Somehow it gives me an unexpected sense of comfort to know that people I remember as 17-year-olds are not only still living but scattered around the country, even around the world...
...Thinking about this, and about the Stones' "Who killed the Kennedys...
...though I don't remember any riots...
...Sympathy for the Devil," with its line shouting out "Who killed the Kennedys...
...Every battle fought and won by the singers and their songs was a vicariously liberating blow...
...the Stones are still out there, "establishment longhairs," as one of my brothers puts it...
...she said when I told her I had been to their concert here...
...Not because I've kept up through the years with a number of college friends, but because we were all so unformed in high school, so utterly poised to go in any direction whatsoever...
...I told my friends, incredulous—and I did...
...I ditched anti-Semitism for an evening," I joked with friends among the delegates...
...line, I did a Web search for a boy I haven't seen since graduation, whom I have never quite forgiven for his behavior the day President Kennedy was assassinated inNovember 1963...
...He is not on classmates, com either...
...The stadium was packed...
...A public outcry that the Stones' Satanic self-imagery, incarnated in "Sympathy for the Devil," had somehow incited the violence prompted the group to drop the song from their concerts for several years...
...the year before...
...As it turns out, I've lived in Europe ever since...
...For the Vienna concert, my friend and I had seats in the very last row of the stands...
...Inparticular, many cited a new form of anti-Semitism that, while drawing on traditional anti-Jewish stereotypes, has increasingly appeared to shift the target of hatred to Israel as the collective embodiment of the Jewish people...
...Nearly 400 delegates from the 55 countries in Europe, North America and Central Asia that make up the OSCE participated...
...We were so far away from the stage that—as in 1969—the band looked like miniature figures jerking about on the distant platform...
...Then the boyraised his hand and asked the teacher for the next question on the quiz, as if nothing had happened...
...I was in Vienna for a conference that had nothing to do with rock'n'roll—and that may one day be looked back upon as "historic...
...The last—and, now that I think of it, the only other—time I had seen the Stones perform live was way back in November 1969, when I drove up to Detroit from my college in Ohio...
...It is characteristic of middle age to look back at one's youth, and there is nothing like attending a performance by wrinkled old rockers to kick-start the process...
...He was a brilliant student, particularly in the sciences, and we were in our eighth grade science class taking a quiz...
...At the time it symbolized Moscow's cultural hegemony over the Soviet satellite countries...
...These developments, it was noted, have been accompanied by an erosion of post-Holocaust taboos, enabling some critics of Israel's actions against the intifada to"legitimize" traditional anti-Semitic expression...
...The Vietnam War was still raging...
...For us, raunchy music and risqué lyrics were expressions of what was then called the counterculture...
...To us, it was like a window on this pop-rock culture— on the West...
...And of course the Rolling Stones, formed in 1962, encompass the entire sweep...
...I'm going to scream...
...After all, Charlie Watts, the drummer, is 62 and both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards turn 60 this year, so the grandmotherly women and white-haired men, some sitting with children or grandchildren, were no surprise...
...The search I ran on Google failed to turn him up...
...The Stones were the only major Western rock group to break another barrier by playing "behind the Iron Curtain" in the tense Cold War days of the '60s...
...It wasn't quite like old times...
...Still, here in Vienna, the spectacle of a charismatic performer galvanizing tens of thousands of people with a potent performance and a perfectly calibrated light show had creepy and uncomfortable echoes...
...I didn't pay the fee that would allow me to initiate contact with anyone, but I can browse the list and see who else signed on...
...I distinctly recall the uncontrollable urge...
...touched wounds that were still raw after the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr...
...It was years since I had been to a stadium concert of any kind, and it fascinated me to see how rock concert rituals have been passed down and perfected...
...Even now, when the Stones approach — or, truth be told, cross over—the border into self-parody, there is something rebellious about the nose-thumbing way they refuse to slow down, refuse to stop, refuse to "act their age...
...I don't remembermuch more than seeing Mick Jagger prancing on stage, far, far away—as if I were looking through the wrong end of a telescope—and feeling a tremendous pressure to scream...
...On that same tour, only a couple of weeks later, came Altamont, the infamous free Stones concert in California where a young black man was stabbed to death right in front of the stage by a Hells Angel...
...Ruth Ellen Grub er is a regular NL contributor...
...For my friend and her contemporaries in Poland, the music and its trappings meant that, too, but they meant something different as well, something more concrete...
...delegation, termed "the Western world's oldest andmost persistent species of hatred...
...I remember him as a tall, gangly, bespectacled, awkward, studious teen...
...I was there," my friend told me...
...Convened by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), it was the first major international conference at the government level exclusively devoted to the subject of antiSemitism...
...The Rolling Stones...
...Because the Stones concert went on until past midnight, I was rather bleary when I got to the conference the next morning...
...At least for some of us, "Street Fighting Man" seemed to make a lot of sense...
...In the '60s and early '70s they exuded rebellion and the busting of taboos— though some of those taboos, particularly from today's vantage point, seem pathetically absurd...
...By the time they started performing it again on tour, I had left the United States, vowing never to return while Richard M. Nixon was President...
...Shortly afterward, out of the blue, I received an e-mail through classmates, com from someone who also was there, taking that quiz...
...But when I started thinking about it, I wasn't so sure...
...The entire event was redolent of nostalgia...
...I moved away from my childhood neighborhood in suburban Philadelphia soon after high school, and I have scarcely had contact with any of my classmates since...
...When the Stones came to town police outside the building turned water cannons on fans who rioted because the Communist nomenklatura had cornered most of the tickets...
...Looking back is such an obsession, apparently, that one of the most successful Web sites on the Internet is said to be www.classmates.com, which puts people in touch with long-lost high school friends...
...You just have to love Keith Richards, that living testimonial for the preservative powers of alcohol, drugs and tobacco, for still being alive— and for flaunting his spikey hair, his jewelry, his onstage cigarettes, his bare torso, and his ravaged physiognomy...
...Instead, he got us stadium seats for the recent Rolling Stones performance here...
...Speakers described a spike in violence against Jews and Jewish institutions in several countries since the beginning of the second intifada, many of them attacks carried out by disaffected Muslim youth...
...The screaming...
...I found it easily, and sure enough six of the 14 songs listed were on the bill in Vienna...
...Mick Jagger is of course not Hitler— nor is he the self-proclaimed satanic figure of the Altamont days...
...That takes me back to the Palace of Culture in 1967...
...In fact, I have always been more curious about how my high school friends turned out than about what happened to those I knew in college...
...Yes, pearl necklaces...
...It is amazing how many others from my class are there...
...I remember 'Satisfaction' and Mick Jagger and dancing on the stage...
...And I keep remembering that just a year or so after my Polish friend attended the 1967 Stones concert in Warsaw, she was among the 20,000 Polish Jews forced into exile by the Communist regime in an anti-Semitic campaign disguised under the banner of "anti-Zionism...
...That concert, too, was in a large stadium...
...This was linked partly to fallout from the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and partly to an increasing identification of Jews and Israel with the United States in a confluence of anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism...
...The chauffeured official car from the embassy glided to a halt near Prater Stadium, and we joined a motley throng heading toward the entrances...
...In the case of our generation, there may be no better vehicle for such stocktaking than music...
...They also described a wave of hate mail, anti-Semitic Web sites on the Internet, and a demonization of Israel in the media and the political arena...
...They spanned at least three generations...
...Scrutinizing the attached photo of the distinguished-looking, white-bearded paterfamilias of several grown children, I couldn't help musing over the inevitable aging process and the unpredictable trajectories of life...
...A Polish friend who now is the director of a Jewish arts foundation in London reminded me how political and politicized it all was, and not just from the perspective of a teenager in suburban America...
...The best view of the city, ran an old joke, is from its top—because you can't see it...
...Just for the hell of it, I searched the Internet for the program of the 1969 concert I had attended in Detroit...
...The United States was instrumental in pushing for the meeting—at times in the face of reluctance by some European states that insisted anti-Semitism should be addressed within the context of more general human rights and discrimination issues...
...Her newest book is Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe...
...The inevitable glowing cigarette lighters held up during slow songs...
Vol. 86 • July 2003 • No. 4
