January 21, 2021:
So that when Goat's Head Soup arrived I greeted it with the same expectation with which I'd received Exile.
I took our little Sears portable stereo into my room, cranked it up on the floor as loud as I was allowed, sat back on my teensy single bed prepared for what I was expecting to be a transcendent experience, the same kind of experience I'd had when encountering Exile the first time.
My disappointment was both overwhelming and confusing.
The album seemed disingenuous. It seemed like a tired band, a spent band, going through the motions. Playacting at being the Rolling Stones. With nothing to say.
In that moment I realized they were no longer dangerous. They were false, and in a very real sense I was adrift, for they'd been a kind of visceral anchor. Where through all the falsity and disappointment of the world, rock and roll told the truth, and they were that rock and roll, and now there was nothing.
They toured Europe on that album. I taped the King Biscuit FM broadcast which later became a famous bootleg, The Brussels Affair, and played that tape a million times, 'cos it still had Mick Taylor and Bobby Keys and Charlie Watts, and its coked-up energy dovetailed perfectly with my 15-year-old hormones. I still have the tape. But there was a hollowness to it. A kind of self-parody. This was the beginning of their transitional phase, when they morphed from being anti-showbiz to, eventually, a showbiz institution, from dangerous to fun. I suppose from a business perspective that was one of the most brilliant re-inventions in showbiz history. But it broke my heart, left me confused and adrift, confronting through that whole period the sad, deflated reality that revolution was no longer on the agenda.