The Rolling Stones, like many of the artists who had yet to become institutions, were still living in real time in the eighties and making shit records that helped those of us coming of age ignore them and their fellow travelling sixties geniuses (who were making an equally strong showing of appearing like they had never been great in the first place). The positive upshot was that I heard a lot of “new” music instead. But curiosity eventually got the better of me, and The Stones quickly became my gateway for recognising that what at first sounds like a mess (Sticky Fingers, Exile On Main Street, Goats Head Soup), may cohere into one of the most arresting auricular experiences of your life, if you stop listening for things, and allow the music to drench you on its own terms.
‘Winter’ is atypical insofar as Mick Jagger sings without the ego that has framed his career, dissolving it in the brotherhood of the collective, and is stronger for seeming to sing for the entire band. The evocation of place – “And I wish I been out in California, when the lights on all the Christmas trees went out” – sung from the home counties, was definitional for me in trying to create the same sense of being somewhere. Years later Lana Del Rey also sang just as convincingly (and more beguilingly) of California (my favourite place after London and The New Forest), but whereas Lana is looking to sell the place in her song (like the Beach Boys whose ‘California Saga’, lovely as it is, could count as musical estate agency), while being the living personification of a regional entity, blending weather and geography with her own qualities to entice a potential lover to join her there, Mick seems to be surprised that the Golden State has left such on impression on him. Lana’s is a haunting piece of storytelling, but the Stones weirder approach got me first as the mists of an English Winter set in, longing for a place and unattainable states that cannot be found elsewhere. Listening to California I discovered that you can find satisfaction, however incompletely and remotely, in a story, and also the importance of transportive writing.
