1969

Fifty years ago I was given my first Rolling Stones record by a cousin five years my senior: the newly released single Honky Tonk Women. In effect I was too young for it. I couldn't make heads or tails of the lyrics barely intelligible for me, and even if I had, my perception of bar maids at that time was at best vague. Even the cover did not look exactly appealing: a dark bar scene with two tarted-up women, a bar-keeper and four other sinister male figures: one sailor, one policeman, and two gentlemen in suits – all of them having astonishingly long hair. What immediately got me, however, was that compelling beat. After a short intro on cow bells (!) a mighty drum beat fell in and made me move involuntarily. Then all hell broke loose. This was a completely unanticipated physical experience for a boy whose most daring excursion into rhythm until then had probably been Tom Jones's Help Yourself.

The second interesting experience was the reaction of my environment. My father abhorred the sounds suddenly emerging from my room. He called the music “primitive,” the singing “howling,” and the artists “long-haired monkeys.” The neighbors in the apartment above started to complain about incessant monotonous thumping. My mother, attempting to appease without avail, tried to interest me in mainstream pop music and related, supposedly funny movies (“Hurrah – the school is burning”/“Hurra, die Schule brennt”). A request to see the much talked about “Go for it, baby!” (“Zur Sache, Schätzchen”) instead was declined, merely piquing my curiosity.

In the family a TV-set had been bought in time so that one could watch Apollo 11's landing on the moon in the middle of the night on July 21st, 1969. In August the box showed pictures of masses of long-haired youths gathering in the Catskill Mountains of New York State for “Three days of peace and music.” These ended with a colored guitarist playing a US national anthem which included rocket fire and the wails of dying soldiers. Richard Nixon reduced the troops in Vietnam but resumed the bombing. Ho Chi Minh left the world on September 2nd.

On September 28th West Germany voted for an end of the first Great Coalition between the Christian and the Social Democrats. Willi Brandt emerged as chancellor and gave politics a new drift. The federal president, in theory supervising the new government, had already been strategically placed in March and was also considered a bit of a leftist: Gustav Heinemann.

In December I was called to the TV news by my father to witness that people had actually started to kill each other during a concert of the morons I admired so much. But it was too late. I had already subscribed to the release of their long play 33 rpm album, ominously called “Let It Bleed,” at the alternative Montanus bookstore in Heidelberg. Due to high demand before Christmas an “emergency version” was issued at first. This came in a plain pink-orange cover complete with a voucher to be subsequently exchanged for the real, provocative artwork. I still treasure both.

All of this and much more happened half a century ago. Nobody expected the youths of 1969 to wear blue jeans and t-shirts as sexagenarians, let alone that the Stones would still be Rolling in their seventies. As far as I am concerned, I have been growing my (now vanishing) hair too long ever since and continue to be hooked to that beat and riff. You may still find me sitting at my desk, humming:

“I read a boring article on heart valves.

I had to put up some kind of a fight.

There's many a boring article on heart valves.

But I just can't seem to drink them off my mind.

It's a ho-o-o-oonky tonk journal!

Gimme, oh gimme, oh gimme

Some honky tonk blues!”