A FAN’S NOTES

A New Stones Album

Sometimes, you know, I must remind myself to remember Gordon Lightfoot’s admonishment to a lover as advice for me: “Baby, step back.”

I was gearing up to write a SAINTS PRESERVE US post eviscerating Monique LaGrange, another in a long line of Albertan hot messes, a Catholic School Board trustee in the central city of Red Deer. She, overcome by a visit from the Holy Spirit who told her to “Go for it!” posted an internet meme (because internet memes pass as intellectual discourse) equating LGBTQ clubs in schools to the Hitler Youth. Bit of a reach. My scalpel was sharp, but I wasn’t sure where to make the first of a thousand cuts.

And so, I turned to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, the Banshee of Invermectin, whose government is now actively pursuing withdrawing Alberta from the national Canada Pension Plan, key webbing in a liberal democracy’s social safety net. This “Pay less! Get more!” scheme was not even a plank in her platform when the provincial election was held just five months ago. This calculated deceit, possibly a ploy to keep her party’s lunatic fringe in line (see above), suggests the absolute apex of cynical governance: It is in her party’s best interests to create new issues rather than solving existing ones. I have the unsettling hunch that this folly will snowball in to an avalanche. There’s no stopping the momentum of bad policy, admitting a mistake doesn’t poll well.

Beyond the myopia of my provincialism is the morass of national and foreign affairs, and the quagmire of international events. I was at the liquor store the other day, needing a box of beer. En route to the walk-in cooler in the back I paused before the shelves of Irish whisky. The bottle of Writer’s Tears I bought in 2020 is down to its last few fingers. These times we live in insist I stock up. Why can’t everybody just shut up, calm down and fuck off? Please and thank you. A dram of escape to remain mindful of Lightfoot “Baby, step back” and to apply the philosophy of Tim Curry: “Ideology is too much responsibility for me/I do the ‘Rock’ myself, when I can get it!”

Well, I did just that last Friday when Hackney Diamonds hit the record shops. Saturday and Sunday too. And I did it again on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday. I’m a keen student! The new Stones album is shockingly good. My expectations were less than zero. No surprise really. Crossfire Hurricane is a fine authorized documentary of the band, released sometime between its fiftieth and sixtieth anniversaries. Tellingly, it wraps with the conclusion of the 1982 European tour. Thoroughly researched or scholarly histories of the Stones, no matter how well written, tend to revert to bullet point prose following the release of Tattoo You in 1981. The message is clear: nineteen or twenty years in they were spent as a cultural force. Fashionably irrelevant. Fair enough.

The novel on my night table is The Last Chairlift, John Irving’s latest. It’s a hefty hardcover, something of a strain on my arthritic wrists. It’s a work in the tradition of Dickens, a writer Irving greatly admires, filled with social commentary. The story ticks every box of the Irving oeuvre. Every device, trick, theme or trope Irving has employed since Setting Free the Bears was published in 1968 appears in this novel which can make paragraphs of it read like excerpts from an anthology of his selected writings. But it’s all new material and very good at that, and in the blink of my bedside lamp, I find myself some four hundred pages in. Hooked.

Should K-Tel have been the record label issuing Hackney Diamonds, it would’ve been called The Sounds of the 70s. You can picture the type font. I’m hearing fragments from Sticky Fingers to Some Girls and everything in between. I swear I’ve even picked up on the boogie-woogie piano riff of “Short and Curlies” somewhere within its grooves. But it’s all new Stones and very Stonesy at that. A shard of the glinting attraction of Hackney Diamonds is its traditional vinyl length, about twenty minutes of music per side. This was how things used to be done when song sequencing mattered. When this old band decides play to its strengths in whatever configuration, a fan realizes Mick and Keith et al are pretty good at what they do.

When the Stones were inducted in to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Jagger quoted French artiste Jean Cocteau from the podium: “First you shock them and then they put you in a museum.” That venerable, institutional slide commenced in 1983 with Undercover. I will always argue the merit of that album, underrated, overlooked and left to languish without a supporting tour. Writing as a hopelessly corrupted lapsed Catholic, I can tell you I’ve learned more about the nature of faith as a completist, sad sack Stones fan than I ever did reading Soren Kierkegaard. I always took the leap with their subsequent sporadic, scattershot releases. Even during the worst of times there were always a few gems on a Stones album, they just took a little more time to dig. The semi-comic nadir reached its acme with the release of Honk in 2019. This particular compilation included “hits” previously available only on two previous hit compilations, Forty Licks and Grrr. In my defense, the Honk bonus disc featured a random assortment of live tracks. And further, just for the record, I don’t consider myself one of those unhealthily obsessed and creepy Stones fans; I can talk about other things.

Hackney Diamonds fades away with divine inspiration. The sparse acoustic cover of the Muddy Waters classic “Rolling Stone Blues” (sleeve spelling, too many other variants to list) is at once celebratory and elegiac. Back in 2016 I assumed Blue and Lonesome was goodbye. A fine album of covers made by two old mates who’d grown up together in a suburb of London seemed to close the circle. It could’ve been waxed and released in 1963 when Jagger-Richards was still an aspirational songwriting credit. The well had run dry and there was nothing left to say; I almost heard them sigh. Blue and Lonesome wasn’t exactly a sweeping exit but it sure sounded like a fine denouement. I was wrong.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site www.megeoff.com has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.