Sadean Aristocrats, 2000 Light Years from Home

I know, it doesn’t speak well of me that I can still get spooked by the Rolling Stones: but happens.  I was watching vh1classic and stumbled on Sound of the City, a low-budget, lower-tech cut and paste job of mostly live rock concert footage, when the promotional video for the Stones’ “2000 Light Years from Home” (1967) came on.

It scared me: not because the song is spooky (although it certainly is; much maligned, the Stones’ psychedelic-era records still stand up remarkably well, aside from the ‘let’s-sing-this-all-together-we-just-came-back-from-Morocco-and-now-we’re-the Master Musicians of Jajouka’-crap). No, it was the frozen and empty eyes of band members, framed in various close-up shots at the beginning of the clip that unnerved me. You can explain away how scary Brian Jones looked by blaming it on drugs: but the cold, brittle gaze of Watts, Richards, and especially Wyman, is harder to explicate: or forget. These eyes seem capable of gazing at anything, no matter how horrible, with the same unsettling mix of boredom and equanimity.

I recently read Mick Farren’s contemporaneous review of Sticky Fingers (1971), where he observes that the Stones moved in a few short years “from juvenile art student fuck-you-all to a cult of militant decadence that drew on the libertine anarchy of a de Sade nobleman.”  I initially thought the comparison with Sade was far-fetched; now, I’m not so sure.  I could easily imagine Pasolini casting Wyman et al, for the part of the pitiless aristocrats in Salò: voyeur-libertines capable of a malicious fury so molten that it's frozen. 
   The video was made when the band was in pitch battle with the Establishment as represented by the London police. Amazingly, the Establishment caved (John 'Hoppy' Hopkins, the London underground's chief organizer, was not as fortunate), while the Stones didn't appear to as much as flinch. The image in the video is tougher than most rock music of the time, the Stones' music included.