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  • Through the Lens, Darkly:Peter Whitehead and The Rolling Stones
  • Victor Coelho (bio)

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Figure 1.

Bill Wyman in Charlie Is My Darling, 1966


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Figure 2.

Charlie Is My Darling, 1966

[End Page 170]


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Figure 3.

Filming in the sixties


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Figure 4.

Filming the Stones, Charlie Is My Darling, 1966

[End Page 171]


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Figure 5.

Mick Jagger in Charlie, 1966


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Figure 6.

Whitehead with Keith Richards, Charlie, 1966

[End Page 172]


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Figure 7.

Whitehead with Mick Jagger, Charlie, 1966


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Figure 8.

Carolee Schneeman in per formance in New York City, 1966. Photo by Peter Whitehead, shot during the time he was making Charlie Is My Darling. Courtesy of Carolee Schneeman.

[End Page 173]

Despite their seminal importance in rock history—institutionally memorialized as Rock and Roll Hall of Fame laureates; economically powerful for almost half a century through outstanding market success and clever product and tour management; and, most important, for the durability of their roots-derived musical template—The Rolling Stones have never been the recipients of a detailed examination commensurate to their musical influence and cultural range. Academic surveys of rock music, typically organized by album or a genre-based chronological narrative, usually conclude their discussion of the Stones' music in the 1970s, thus ignoring the cyclic and dynamic processes of revival, the powerful communities created by downloading and sharing, the new listening and viewing strategies enabled by mobile technology, YouTube, and remixing—all of these the main ingredients, I would argue, for determining long-standing cultural significance in popular music.1 And while the foundational musical role played by the Stones during the English blues revival of the early 1960s is an unalterable part of the group's history, the question remains of how and why the blues—a moribund, culturally distant, and racially distinct vernacular music—became a point of reference for the synthetic, materialistic, and evanescent culture of London during the early sixties. To answer this, we need to consider the refraction of The Rolling Stones—the group and its music—that took place through the "third-party" industries of art, film, and popular fashion. Peter Whitehead's close and complicated relationship to the group during the 1960s and early 1970s, as chronicled through many completed and proposed projects, has left a fascinating documentary paper trail that offers valuable insights into these questions. [End Page 174]

Performer, Audience, Cultural Critic

What I call "third-party" is a crucial stage in the circuit of representation since it visually "translates" music into culture. Performers, as the "first party," are traditionally reluctant about ascribing meaning to songs and making pronouncements about their cultural significance. Bob Dylan, uncomfortable with the sobriquet attached to him as "The Voice of a Generation," remembered in his Chronicles that in 1968,

All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of. I'd left my hometown only ten years earlier, wasn't vociferating the opinions of anybody. My destiny lay down the road with what ever life invited, had nothing to do with representing any kind of civilization.2

More bluntly, following the release of the Stones' 1971 album Sticky Fingers, Keith Richards similarly minimized the alleged meanings (in this case, references to drugs) that became attached to his songs: "I don't think Sticky Fingers is a heavy drug album . . . I mean, you can't take a fucking record like other people take a Bible. It's only a fucking record, man."3 In short, the consideration of cultural meaning is usually not of primary importance by new groups. But, at the same time, rock musicians can no longer retreat to the studio and avoid public scrutiny or interpretation, as The Beatles did in 1966, and enclose...

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