Juiced Up and Sloppy

Keith Richards can’t play the guitar. Charlie Watts can’t play a fill. Bill Wyman is a bass owner, not a bass player. Mick Taylor couldn’t hold his liquor, and looks like he’d rather be wearing a tuxedo and playing behind Cliff Richard. What Mick Jagger is doing onstage is what people do to distract you from the fact they don’t have an ounce of grace or rhythm, or any other compelling reason to look at them. I used to refer to it as “Doing nothing frantically.” Smearing yourself with Elmer’s Glue and then running through Carly Simon’s closet is not style. None of them, least of all the lead singer, can sing one little bit.

Why would any of that matter? For a period of maybe half a decade, perhaps a little more, they were the most important thing in pop music, and for good reason. I was alive in 1969, and they served as a most compelling soundtrack for the disintegration of the sixties, then immediatley and ably transitioned to an excellent drugged-out Magi, present at the birth of the decade of international delirium tremens that followed.

(via Sippican Cottage: Juiced Up And Sloppy)