In college I went about training myself to become a music journalist without realizing that’s what I was doing. I’d grown up in the 80s reading dad’s Rolling Stone magazines (and Black Beat, Right On!, Word Up, Spin, Billboard, etc.). Whenever Prince would tell a journalist that he loved Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns, I’d haul my 14-year-old ass to Crazy Eddie searching for whatever it was. Writers used so many Beatles/Rolling Stones/Bob Dylan comparisons that eventually I decided to give myself a strict education in these furthermuckers. I spent the summer of 1989 on a Beatles trip, and devoted my 19-year-old summer of 90 to the Stones.

The Beatles summer was a lot more interesting, but that’s a story for another time. My summer of Stones involved reading the biography Jagger by Carey Schofield, watching the Gimme Shelter documentary and discovering Exile on Main St. (recorded on an infamous vacation in the south of France), Hot Rocks 1964-1971, Some Girls (for “Miss You,” which I always liked) and Let It Bleed. I think Steel Wheels came out that year, and I went down early in the morning to the Times Square train station where the Stones would be announcing the album’s release to the world. It was maaad crowded and I broke out without seeing nary a grey hair on Mick, Keith, Ron or Charlie’s head.

I had (have) young parents, and so Beggars Banquet, Sticky Fingers and Let It Bleed were actually on vinyl at the crib growing up, but they never got any burn, not that I remember. Whatever Stones I knew was from the oldies station in the car. Despite my summertime 1990, I still haven’t listened completely to classics like Sticky Fingers or Beggars Banquet (though “Parachute Woman” is two minutes and 23 seconds of their finest moments); the albums are in my iPod from somebody, tracks get shuffled in sometimes.

Does “Brown Sugar” offend me? This a Black Rock Coalition question, like were John Lennon and Yoko Ono a little free with it recording “Woman Is the Nigger of the World.” I personally think that the Rolling Stones created something unique in trying their best to copy black blues styles. I gotta admit that I’ve heard Nirvana’s “In the Pines” more than the Leadbelly version it came from, and I’ve listened to Exile‘s “Ventilator Blues” more than any Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf song. And “I Just Want to See His Face” is one of the greatest songs of all time to put on a repeat-ad-infinitum loop after finishing a fat blunt. It’s complicated. When you’re a race man, you sound like a race traitor saying “you gotta lay down some of that baggage to enjoy to overall art of shit sometimes,” but that doesn’t make it any less true.

I wasn’t aware how much of a race-man I’ve been my whole life till I moved to France, where the blending of black and white is a lot less self-conscious. Case in point: I like the Rolling Stones – I’m not their biggest fan or anything, but fuck it, I can name at least 15 great songs by them – and yet a slew of racial touchstones went through my head last week watching Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light concert film of the Stones. Stuff like

1. Oh… isn’t it interesting that Mick Jagger doesn’t sing that line anymore from “Some Girls” about how “black girls just want to get fucked all night”? The song is in the film, but I guess that lyric is politically incorrect circa 2008.
   
2. And yet on “Far Away Eyes,” he still jokes about the “preacher on the colored radio station” without being embarrassed.
3. Is anyone aware that his first child Karis Jagger (born in 1970) was born from the African-American model Marsha Hunt? Like, nobody ever talks about Karis, and whatever became of her? Mick Jagger has a black daughter; no one ever says a word.
   
4. And for all the talk about the fan who got killed at the Stones concert at Altamont Speedway back in 1969, it seems to me that most people don’t realize Meredith Hunter was an 18-year-old brother on a date with a white chick at the front row of that Stones show, and was stabbed to death by Hells Angels security for precisely this reason.
5. Blues guitarist Buddy Guy mops the fucking floor with Keith Richards and Ron Wood during the Muddy Waters cover “Champagne & Reefer.” Mops the fucking floor.
6. Is it fair that the Rolling Stones are British multimillionaires through imitating African-American blues guys who died broke pretty much in near anonymity?
7. Why is black Rolling Stones bass player Darryl Jones never allowed in as an “official” member, despite touring with the group and playing on their records now for 15 years?
   

I sat around watching the Superbowl (of all things) with some family the year after Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, when the Stones did the halftime show. To them the performance was hilarious, because these guys are grandpas, and anyway, there was never that much respect for them. I could swear Miles Davis said something somewhere about how black folks just laugh at Jagger when he shimmies and shakes talking about the Harlem Shuffle; in the black community, the Stones are kind of a joke.

More on this in part 2. (Serendipity alert: me and Mick Jagger both have sons named Lucas; me and Keith Richards have the same birthday…)

This is a random thought that I’ve never been able to work into any essay anywhere, but I always wished that Rufus (the 70s group that gave us the immortal Chaka Khan) marketed their trademark tongue-and-lips logo as savvily as the Rolling Stones did. I wish I could stroll Les Halles and find T-shirts adorned with Chaka Khan’s luscious lips as easily as I can find old Mick’s.

Rufus dropped their first, self-titled album back in 1973 featuring the classic “Sweet Thing” and “Fool’s Paradise.” Stevie Wonder wrote “Tell Me Something Good” for the followup album, Rags to Rufus. And c’mon, tell me those lips don’t deserve to be splashed across a million T-shirts!

Most people who care about such ephemera think that Andy Warhol was responsible for creating the omnipresent Rolling Stone logo, but that’s not true. Warhol did the supercool design of 1971’s Sticky Fingers with the functional zipper on the front of the vinyl LP cover. (There was a copy in my house growin up.) But the logo of the group was done by graphic designer John Pasche. Don’t believe me, read this. One day, I’m gonna take the CD sleeve of Rufus to Les Halles and get its design imprinted on a T-shirt; sometimes you gotta take matters into your own hands.

Below: the first thing I ever saw on YouTube years ago (courtesy of ?uestlove), Chaka Khan playing the drums on some 1970s talk-show.