Sir Mick Jagger presents "The Rolling Stones*"

Basilides of Alexandria preached this doctrine to the Persians: God is Not-Being since Being inevitably possesses impure components. Pure Not-Being is nameless, unspeakable, unthinkable. From this Not-Being, there proceed three “son-ships” or filiations, each of which perceives itself to be bereft and imperfect because separated from original nothingness. The first filiation is essence or idea, and no sooner separated from Not-Being, it takes wing and flies, at the speed of thought, back into Not-Being and is absorbed therein. The second filiation is comprised of pure, unmixed elements and, beholding the flight of essence into Not-Being imitates that flight itself, ascending upward to the Father on its wings. But the second filiation, being of grosser substance than the first, fails to achieve reunion with Not-Being and remains separate from the Father as a boundary between the Mundane and the Supra-Mundane. The third filiation, a compound of pure elements and gross matter, beholds the ascension to Not-Being initiated by the second filiation and, also, flies upward. But the third filiation’s wings are inadequate and, repelled by the boundary now instituted by the second filiation, falls downward into the Panspermia and, there, joins itself to Being, thus, creating the world in which we exist.

The heresiarch Simon learned his doctrine from Helena, an aging prostitute in Tyre. Helena told Simon that Wisdom or Sophia was a void content to linger in the presence of the All-Father, Not-Being. Catching glimpse of a ray of light emitted by atoms comprising the Panspermia, Sophia pursued that beam downward through 12 Aeons, mistakenly believe that she was pursuing an emanation of Not-Being. Each Aeon, animated by Sophia, is a reflection of the preceding and higher level, but afflicted with the defects that arise when an image is reproduced in a mirror. The lowest of the 12 Aeons is our world, the 12th iteration of a reflection of a reflection, and, except for the faint presence of Sophia, a scent like perfume almost infinitely diluted, a chaos of filth and confusion.

The world, it seems, is an emanation of a filiation or energy that is defectively reproduced until almost all traces of the original purity are lost. Our voices are the echoes of echoes.

This same concept exists in art history and archaeology. George Kubler theorized that most art objects result through activity that is the perpetuation of an original impulse of creativity. The history of art is the history of the transmission of a signal that becomes weaker, less vibrant, and more attenuated with each reproduction. Art involves “prime objects” and their replicas and the replicas of those replicas, a process repeated recursively until the replica degenerates into chaotic matter or is appropriated into the service of another and different “prime object.”

And so --

“No,” Sir Mick Jagger said, “the riot at Leroy in Minnesota or Iowa or wherever it was...no, that riot was not similar in any way to what happened at Altamont Speedway.”

The aging rock star had agreed, reluctantly, to a press conference in the bowling alley installed in the basement of his 16th century chateau in the south of France. His lawyer, Norman, stood by his side. Everyone remarked at how healthy Sir Mick looked, how wiry and tanned and fit, like a man accustomed to playing 18 holes of golf a day without cart or caddy. Everyone said that Sir Mick was at ease and that the business model for the proliferation of “The Rolling Stones*” bands was a lucid one and that the famous man looked wonderfully like himself, like the images that were projected above the stage when he sang, exactly like the icon that he had become.

The subject of the Press Conference, hastily implemented, was a riot resulting in many injuries and much property damage at a place called Leroy, Minnesota. Since this riot involved a rock-and-roll band called “The Rolling Stones*” questions as to responsibility were raised and, thus, Sir Mick Jagger was called to account, although the famous entertainer’s charisma was such, that no sooner were accusations lodged against him than they were also refuted or forgotten.

Briefly, here is what happened:

The inhabitants of Leroy, Minnesota, a small town on the Iowa border, were surprised and excited to learn that “The Rolling Stones*” had agreed to perform at their Community Center. In light of later events, no one was willing to take responsibility for organizing this performance. In the inexplicable way that filiations emanate from their father, Not-Being, the show seemed to simply materialize.

For several weeks, rumors circulated that the famous British band intended to play a concert in Leroy. Some people said that Sir Keith Richards, a member of the Stones, had purchased more than 15,000 acres of prime farm land in Howard county, Iowa a few miles across the state border Sir Richards operated under a pseudonym, impersonating a Jewish financier from Chicago, and he was said to be a fierce and unrelenting landlord to his tenants. Apparently, he had come to inspect his holdings and brought his band with him and, thus, the opportunity for the gig in the small Minnesota village. But, other people, possibly better informed, rejected this account and said that it was now twenty-five years since the Stones had last played Minneapolis and that, on that occasion, long ago, Sir Mick Jagger had a brief encounter with a local girl who had traveled to the big city to see him perform. Sir Mick Jagger’s love-child with this local woman had just completed college at Mankato State University and was now teaching History and Social Studies at Southland High School and, as the story was told, she was on Prom committee and had used her influence to invite “The Rolling Stones” to play for ninety minutes at the school dance. Everyone who knew this woman said that her resemblance to the famous singer was remarkable, particularly in the shape of her lips, and in Leroy, twenty miles from the Southland High School, everyone knew a friend who had a friend whose child was excited almost beyond endurance about the upcoming prom and mystery band that was scheduled to make an appearance. And that “mystery band,” supposedly, had agreed to make a second appearance, on Sunday afternoon, in Leroy at the town’s community center.

In any event, fliers soon appeared advertising that “Sir Mick Jagger’s ‘Rolling Stones*’” would play a concert in Leroy, possibly a benefit for a local cancer victim, because the tickets cost $10.00, a sum thought to be a little “spendy” in rural Minnesota. These fliers by some obscure agency were transported far and wide. People said that they saw fliers posted in Hy-Vee grocery stores on their community activities’ bulletin boards throughout northern Iowa and southern Minnesota, as far west as Worthington and as far south as the suburbs of Des Moines. Someone noticed the flier stapled to more than a dozen telephone poles at the University of Minnesota. A couple of radio stations announced the concert, although expressing suitable skepticism as to whether the information read on-air was accurate.

Leroy’s Community Center, on most days, doubles as the town’s Senior Citizen center. At first, members of the Senior Citizen board of directors opposed the use of the community hall for the concert. But, then, someone quite reasonably pointed out that, after all, Sir Mick and Sir Keith and the rest of the Stones were themselves senior citizens, indeed, quite elderly and that, perhaps, the concert was well-suited for the Center. Doubt was expressed as to whether the meeting room was sufficiently large to accommodate crowds expected for the show. But, after some debate, Board members concluded that the “spendy” ticket price could be expected to reduce attendance and that the hall would probably suffice.

The Community Center is located in the former First National Bank, a Leroy institution that had failed during one of the more recent farm crises, a handsome granite building with a classical pediment and stubby, fat pillars flanking the main door. This structure is noteworthy because designed by one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s students only a couple years after he parted company from the Master, and so, when the lending institution collapsed and went bankrupt, the City of Leroy bought the structure and remodeled it for use as a Community Center. In the basement of the building, there was a large meeting room that could accommodate up to 90 people and, indeed, had been used for wedding dances and receptions in the past. The “spendy” ticket price was expected to reduce attendance and so, generally, the hall was thought to be appropriate for the performance.

Leroy is a humble place, a farming town with houses gathered like fearful sheep around a half-dozen unassuming church steeples made from old brick that has been meticulously maintained and tuck-pointed. The town was once a rail hub, but the trains don’t stop there any more and, indeed, their right-of-ways have been converted to bike trails, threads of flat asphalt radiating from the village atop grassy embankments that cross the level, fertile farm fields. Corn and soybean are stored in four huge steel bins at the edge of downtown and, during bright days, the bright convex metal surfaces of those bins spray radiance in all directions. Decades worth of spilled grain is buried in crevasses and fissures in the concrete loading docks and mill-work around the bins and those corn kernels and soybean have decomposed so that there is a dense smell like old beer or corn-whiskey hovering around the grain bins and the truck scales and tin sheds in that neighborhood. People from the big cities riding their bikes in town always comment on the smell around the bins and it is heavy and intoxicating, soporific so that the homes and businesses gathered all around seem like the objects that you might behold in a dream, insubstantial and threatening to dissolve in the light reflected from the rotund and seamed curves of the metal granaries.

Mid-afternoon on the Sunday of the performance, volunteers with pick-up trucks drove from steeple to steeple, loading-up folding chairs from the fellowship halls in the churches. The chairs were taken to the Community Center, carried from the trucks, and set in rows in the basement hall. Two wooden platform risers, painted black and badly scuffed, had been loaned by the local elementary school and were shoved end-to-end in a corner of the basement room to make a low stage. The janitor and town-drunk was dispatched to a larger town nearby to buy a dozen fuses – there was some fear that the Rolling Stones’ power requirements might exceed the old Bank’s wiring capabilities and shut down the show. The fourth-graders at the school colored a banner that said: LEROY WELCOMES THE ROLLING STONES!!! – and each exclamation mark had a round, smiley face drawn in the circle beneath the vertical shaft.

The first party-buses appeared mid-afternoon. They were funky-looking vans, some of them brightly painted, and they cruised the quiet leafy streets of the village like gondolas paddling the Venetian lagoons. The people who came from the buses stood in the bright sunlight on the sidewalks, looking toward Main Street and the grain elevators beyond, blinking and baffled.

Larger buses came later and, then, hundreds of cars and, soon enough, the streets in the town were so clogged that the bigger vehicles couldn’t enter the village and had to disgorge their passengers on the outskirts. Cars lined the country roads around Leroy and people carrying folding lawn chairs and coolers hiked along the endless columns of parked vehicles toward the city in its clump of trees on the horizon. At the Bank, volunteers dragged the choir-platforms up from the basement meeting room and set them in front of the Coop gas station across the street from Community Center. They re-arranged the seventy or eighty folding chairs in a phalanx on the street in front of the splintery wooden stage and the city-cop unraveled yellow police-line tape from a big spindle and wrapped it around the seating. Someone posted signs written in magic-marker on the police-line tape: “VIP seating” the signs said. A couple of card tables were set up by the taped-off area and women were stationed there with small metal cash-boxes – they were supposed to sell the remaining seats in the VIP section and, since fifty or so advance tickets had been sold (notwithstanding the ten dollar admission fee), the women were supposed to limit access to the folding chairs to those with bona fide tickets.

The streets were crowded and people traipsed across lawns and backyards and frightened the dogs who howled at them, draining dry several Kool-Aid and lemonade stands set up by enterprising little girls. A couple of taco trucks crept through the crowd, selling styrofoam trays of taco al pastor, as well lengua, and tripe tacos. An ice-cream vendor parked his truck in an alleyway and played a tinny-sounding tune, “Mexican hat dance” over and over again to attract customers. The city-cop wouldn’t let the five or six beer trucks that arrived into town, but it didn’t matter –the trucks set up business on the outskirts, next to the abandoned motel, ineptly burnt for insurance money and the bowling alley, and pretty soon kegs appeared on Main Street. Some kids bought step-ladders from the local lumber yard and used them to climb onto the roofs of houses near the place on Main Street where Sir Mick Jagger’s “The Rolling Stones*” were scheduled to appear. The roofs were steeply slanted and the kids spread out beach blankets on the shingles and took off their shirts to sun themselves and so they reclined there, above the throng, white skin browning and reddening in the late afternoon glare. The show was supposed to start at 7:00 so as not to compromise Leroy’s noise ordinance which prohibited “loud or startling sounds” made after ten pm. A fist fight broke out at VIP section. A man with a bloody nose shouted: “you don’t mean ‘VIP.’ you don’t mean that at all – you mean ‘RSVP’, that’s what you idiots should have written.” Apparently, the man thought that he was incontrovertibly a VIP and one of the women charged with collecting admission fees said that she tended to agree with him.

Sir Mick Jagger’s “The Rolling Stones*” appeared in a rusty, battered-looking Suburban. They were studious-looking men in their thirties, with neatly trimmed beards and moustaches and wearing round, black sunglasses. “The Rolling Stones*” members carried North Face or Patagonia backpacks from which little round bottles of water were peeping out like pet chicks. Their sound man fought his way through the crowd to the soundboard. The mob was angry and it hissed and booed when the musicians stepped up onto the stage and someone threw a beer bottle. Then, a girl took off her shirt and a man lifted her up on his shoulders to display her to the crowd and she proclaimed that this sorry assembly of frail-looking bearded men in sunglasses was merely the warm-up band and that Mick Jagger and his lads were already in town, drinking beer in the basement of the Senior Citizen Center and that she had seen them and knew that they were ready to perform.

The crowd milled around in desultory manner and people sent emissaries to the beer trucks for more drinks. When the band began to play, the sound was ill-focused and diffuse and seem to run away, as if frightened, from the stage, losing itself in alley ways and back yards and vacant lots. The drums and bass were too loud and their amplified notes were flung across the city so that they resounded off the big round sides of the grain elevators and the echoes reflected from those convex steel shells were unpredictable, creating pockets of noise in the town where the drums sounded like machine-gun fire and the basses rumbled like a tornado rolling across the plains.

Before the fourth song, the lead singer spoke into his microphone. Under amplification, his voice popped and fizzled and he had to duck a beer bottle flung in his direction. “This is a number we call ‘Crossfire Hurricane’,” he said. He made a chopping motion with his guitar and the band started to play, but, at the same time, the crowd began to chant “ Satisfaction! Satisfaction! We can’t get no Satisfaction!” The roar from the audience was so great and extended so far back into the multitude gathered on the Leroy streets that the band leader was taken aback and he signaled to his musicians that they should pause.

“Did you really think that the Glitter Twins were going to play this town?” the guitarist cried into his microphone. “Are you naive or something? Look around and tell me -- what do you see?”

And, at his command, some of the people in the crowd did look around and they saw the small village with its shabby three and four-bedroom houses and their garages with peeling paint and the businesses on Main Street that had failed and were boarded-shut and the water tower like a tin shed or a concentration camp guard-tower posted overhead and the humble steeples that seemed almost ashamed to point at the sky which was huge and laden with clouds sculpted by the light of the setting sun and, far out in the country, clouds of dust were rising from the gravel roads were motorcycle gangs were hurtling to and fro through the cornfields.

“Would the real Rolling Stones ever play a place like this?” the guitar player shouted and, then, had to duck again because a flock of beer bottles shot toward his head and broke against the amplifiers. The band started to play once more and the crowd chanted “Satisfaction! Satisfaction!” and, then, someone discovered that the pumps at the Coop gas station were leaking a little fluid and that the ooze could be used to make Molotov cocktails. Flaming rags in beer bottles were flung through the air and the dry wooden platform-risers caught fire. “The Rolling Stones*” backed away from the mob, retreating behind a curtain of smoke. Several buildings were set on fire and a taco truck was knocked onto its side so that it also burned, although it was never established whether the vehicle was torched by the mob or simply took flame when its hot grease spilled as the truck was tilted. Smoke rose from the separate fires and the columns braided themselves together and rose as a black pillar over the village.

Sirens wailed over the two-lane black-top and squad cars skidded onto the scene, although for the first hour or two, the police were outnumbered, besieged in the bank building that they had seized as a command post. A humvee owned by the police force in a city forty miles distant appeared and the big, heavily armored truck knocked parked cars aside to part the crowd and open a path for fire engines. Ultimately six or seven fire trucks were maneuvered onto Main Street and they cast water in great arching streams over the mob and into the burning buildings which hissed and steamed like cauldrons. Then, fire-trucks aimed their water cannons at the crowd. Tear gas drifted through alleyways and chained dogs howled and voices roared through megaphones and, then, the fire-fighters blasted the mob with their hoses. In the intersecting radiance of the fire-truck headlights, jets of water shone like bright rays of light penetrating ancient and irremediable chaos. Bodies spun around and were hurled into the gutter and running men and women were tripped by the luminous blast, water pouring through the air like waterfalls and cascades turned on their sides and the people touched by that brilliant flood said that it was cold as a glacial stream, ice-water that shocked the heart and numbed the flesh.

“Do you think the confusion was warranted in any way?” a gentleman of the Press asked Sir Mick Jagger. “Not at all,” the famous band-leader said. He turned aside and beckoned to his lawyer. “Norman,” Sir Mick Jagger called, “Norman, can you explain this to them?” Norman stepped out of the shadows and bowed briefly in the direction of his boss and, then, he told the reporters that Sir Mick Jagger, with the permission and consent of the business corporation of which he was a principal, had agreed to license the use of the name “The Rolling Stones” to certain rock and roll bands that applied to him for this privilege. Bands seeking such a license were obligated to send a demo tape or CD to Sir Mick Jagger and, although he didn’t have time to listen to those demos (and, indeed, on legal advice, to avoid plagiarism litigation absolutely declined to listen), he deputized others in his organization to consider those submissions and, then, make recommendations to him as to which bands would be authorized to make use of the name “Sir Mick Jagger’s ‘The Rolling Stones*.” As a condition for being so licensed, the bands were required contractually to always present their title in that form, with the explanatory asterisk, and, further, were prohibited from playing actual covers of any of the songs written and previously copyrighted by Sir Mick Jagger and his partner, Sir Keith Richards – this restriction intended to avoid any dilution of the cachet associated with authentic songs by the actual “Rolling Stones.”

“There is no confusion whatsoever,” Norman, the lawyer said. He flipped on a Power-Point and displayed one of the fliers circulated in advance of the ill-fated show at Leroy, Minnesota. “Note,” Norman said. “The concert was advertised as featuring Sir Mick Jagger’s ‘the Rolling Stones*’...do you see that the asterisk by the name is clearly displayed?” The reporters acknowledged that the asterisk was readily visible. At the foot of the concert flier, in smaller letters, this legend appeared: “* The musicians perfoming as Sir Mick Jagger presents ‘The Rolling Stones*’ are not associated in any way “The Rolling Stones,” a British rock-and-roll group.” Norman shrugged his shoulders and, then, said: “Anyone who can read will understand that the musicians appearing under this name have no legal relationship and, indeed, no connection to the real Rolling Stones.” Several of the reporters looked puzzled. Someone asked: “But what does the asterisk in the footnote refer to?” Norman seemed annoyed by the question. He shrugged his shoulders again and said: “Why do you want to over-complicate this matter?” “But if every time the name ‘the Rolling Stones*’ appears it is accompanied by an asterisk, won’t you have a bottomless progression of footnotes, each footnote referring to another footnote below recursively and ad infinitum.” “I don’t know why that should necessarily be so,” Norman answered. But he looked baffled himself and held up his hand, palm facing the reporters, to signify that he was taking no more questions.

In Minnesota, investigators asked about the identity of the original promoter of the Leroy show. Not surprisingly, no one took responsibility. When authorities tried to discover who had composed and printed the fliers advertising the concert, this also remained enigmatic. After the calamity, the band members of the group known as “Sir Mick Jagger’s ‘The Rolling Stones*’” went their separate ways and never played together again. If they know who sponsored their appearance in Leroy that summer evening, no one is speaking.




Note:

* The musicians performing as ‘Sir Mick Jagger presents The Rolling Stones*’ are not associated in any way with “The Rolling Stones,” a British rock-and-roll band.