Not Sucking in the Seventies: The Rolling Stones and the Myth of Decline

Abstract

This article reappraises the Stones’ “lost years.” However, in covering their reputation-imperiling half-decade between 1973 and 1978, it reaches back to the band’s fabled 1960s heyday and forward to its “revival” in order to identify continuities in practice and performance to counter the critical orthodoxy. Through the ’70s, the Rolling Stones released eight studio albums and one live set and toured almost annually; and, while their growing number of critics were keen to charge them with treason, their growing number of fans were evidently untroubled by the band’s often-cited crimes against the “ideology of rock.” I am not simply proposing, though, that healthy sales should be mobilized to bust the myth of decline. For, if not always “ahead of the game,” the Stones had a creatively meaningful relationship with some of the decade’s key musical developments—glam, disco, punk, and reggae. So, far from standing still artistically, gazing glassily at their elegantly wasted navels, stupefied by narcotics and cocooned by their bank balances, the Rolling Stones did some of their best work in this period—from the glam-ballad “Angie” through the funky dread of “Finger Print File” to the lo-fi energy of “Respectable.”