Anti-Climacus

MOONLIGHT MILE: The Rolling Stones, cultural icons as they are, operate with one significant disadvantage over most other bands: one already feels like one knows them before ever having listened to their albums properly. One knows them for their decadence, their flirtations with the occult (if you can't keep Black Sabbath and the Stones straight, and if you don't realize that the devil is the bad guy in "Sympathy for the Devil"), or else from Mick Jagger's strutting or Keith Richards' drug use--almost anything other than their actual music. It's worse, of course, because their best work was done so long ago--1981 if you're very generous--that in the lifetime of most everyone I know, they've only ever been something of a caricature. So when you come to one of their songs:



(much better, not-embedded version here)

...one hardly knows what to do with it. It's a song of travel, of distance, of longing, that builds throughout the song without relying on the usual tricks of increased tempo or volume. It is serious in an identifiably adult way, and leaves much room to just be beautiful (especially beginning at about 3:30 or "come on up, babe," depending on how you want to listen to it). It's at the end of an album (Sticky Fingers) that is marked by confidence and grace (and many other things besides).

My distinct memory of this song is that I once played it for Dara over her strenuous objections that she did not, in fact, like the Rolling Stones. She liked this song.