Support Your Local Moderate Regime Elements
A holiday appeal from (but not for) your friends at The Parish Bulletin. Plus: Keith Richards at 80
There’s a recurring character in the coverage of official U.S. responses to international crises, at least since the beginning of the War on Terror—the elusive “moderate regime elements.” They are the people who might steer the policy of a recalcitrant state away from a disruptive course toward something safer and saner, perhaps through some kind of palace coup. Less hawkish State Department sources in stories from the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion hoped that moderate elements in the Hussein regime might save the day. Since then, I’ve seen this hope for Syria, Russia, the United States executive branch, and the United States House of Representatives. Most recently, unnamed U.S. sources have mused that moderate elements might configure a new Israeli government without Bibi, relying instead on someone who would not place such heavy psychic burdens on our co-dependent foreign policy leadership class. These elements are almost never named with any specificity (the exception is in the U.S. instance, where people like H.R. McMaster and Jim Mattis were supposed to be the moderate regime elements “adults in the room” but mostly failed). Perhaps they do not exist outside of official imaginations. They may be semi-mythical, like founding kings. I can imagine them: sober, adaptable, with freedom and scope for action and flexible ideological positions and ethnic allegiances. They are the ultimate answer to every short-term problem. I would love to be moderate regime elements. But it would be enough to sit with them in a room for a while, to watch, listen, and learn.
Outside of rogue states and governments, however, moderate regime elements are real. Lutheranism is moderate regime elements, very literally in the European context and almost literally here. A state university. The zoo.1 It’s a narrower and more specific identity than “civil society” or “third spaces,” since lots of what we include in those categories are not moderate. I’m thinking of institutions that can’t really be in the vanguard of drastic change but that can have good ecological effects if they function well. You might like or even love them, but you’re not going to try to remake the world in their image. It would just be nonsensical. Our political parties are becoming collections of memes, albeit at different paces, our fandoms are becoming obsessive identities, our media environment is being taken over by charismatic individuals with a platform, but the zoo keeps on opening up to let you see some cute little animals, and if a crisis thrust the zoo administrators into a caretaker governing role, they wouldn’t solve any big problems but they probably wouldn’t go out of their way to mess things up. We have a long-standing and accelerating cultural aversion to “institutions”—there’s no term in my little world more dripping with disdain than “the institutional church”—but we really super duper need them as a practical matter.
RIP The Audience (ca. Plato’s Cave - 2023)
I read two things in the last week that struck me as related on this subject. One was a survey of Democratic-aligned pollsters and political scientists on the gruesome state of Joe Biden’s re-election support. And the other was Ted Gioia’s essay “In 2024, the Tension Between Macroculture and Microculture Will Turn Into War.” These are, it struck me, two stories about the decline of “media” (a thing we consume and a sector of economic and cultural activity) as a, well, aggregating and mediating force in our world. Whatever else you want to say about the Biden White House’s political fortunes, I think part of their struggle is that, like the corporate media institutions Gioia writes about, they are dealing with an electorate that has to large degrees separated itself from any “audience” for political messaging or the narrative-framing power of political discourse. For my whole lifetime, “the media” was a site of ideological contention. We fought over the “balance” of newsrooms, the political positioning of major academic institutions, and the cultural alignments of the people who made movies and television shows. We distinguished “cultural power” from “political power,” with some people ludicrously insisting that the former was the one that really counted. And some people, including, once upon a time, me, were periodically auditioning for a perch in the world of “media” which might extend our voices and, who knows, ballast our shaky income streams. But we were fighting over territory that was rapidly emptying. Increasingly, as Barbara puts it, we appear to be auditioning in an empty auditorium, for an audience solely made up of the other people auditioning. Not so long ago, the New York Times “mattered” in part because its news reporting filtered down through other channels and its op-ed page positions helped set the terms in which local papers, talking-head shows, and dissenting media, left and right, had their own arguments. Now there seems to be a large and fast-growing share of the country that is simply not reachable through these means. Not only, or even most significantly, the portion whose worldview is centered on Fox News programming, but people for whom social media platforms are the sole information outlets and influencers are the most trusted voices.
That’s a world with its own juggernauts (I’ve never seen a Mr Beast video but he appears to have a larger audience than every opinion journalist in the land put together) and a massive ecosystem of smart and interesting niche content creators. Gioia may be right that legacy media firms ignore all of it at their peril. But the half-life of viral popularity is so brutal and the volume of content is so incomprehensible that it’s increasingly difficult to speak of an “audience” as such for any cultural product.2 And the thing about Moderate Regime Elements is that they can’t really be the work of one charismatic individual nor of a warren of below-the-radar free agents who are scrambling for a niche. They have an iterative relationship with “the audience” just like users of an algorithmic platform, but that relationship has to play out over a longer time scale, with a more slowly adapting personnel and some legitimate give-and-take between creators and consumers. They can change all they want, but they need an ethos, a history to which they relate themselves, and a future into which they are trying to project themselves. It also costs money and involves lots of things any one constituent doesn’t want and won’t use.
Why I Don’t Ask For Paid Subscriptions
There are a lot of reasons (I don’t have the time to do this regularly and well, I want to feel free to write weird and personal things here that even regular email-openers will want to skip, I am not cut out for this kind of hustling), but a big one is that I still want to support and be a part of Moderate Regime Elements rather than try to be a sole proprietor of a discourse outlet. I don’t blame anyone for doing this, by the way, and I have paid for a few subscriptions here and there. But I try to route my media spending as much as possible through outlets that have a bigger mandate. I subscribe to the New York Times, which, whatever else you want to say about it, is still the indispensable news organization. I keep paying for and reading the Dallas Morning News because it’s one of the few places left that pays attention to the sloshing of money and power around here. I always renew The Christian Century because I want there to be a place where a Christianity I (usually) recognize thinks through things together. I give money to my own church, of course, and to other church things.
I can’t say I’ll never turn on the paid subscription function, but if I do, it will almost certainly be because I’ve suffered some big financial setback and I’ll be relying on your goodwill rather than your hard-headed consumer acumen. If it happens, I will be busking rather than running a business. I want to keep my most saleable, audience-friendly ideas for the Moderate Regime Elements and keep this account for things that won’t fit, come up too fast, or that I don’t have any real excuse for writing about in the first place. I did what I think was a pretty good op-ed on school vouchers in the DMN recently that you might like (I take no credit for the death of the voucher bill in four consecutive special sessions but it’s a nice, rare feeling to have written for the winning side). I reviewed Freddie DeBoer’s new book on the self-sabotage of left-wing activism in the Century. In the event that you feel an impulse to “support my work,” you can subscribe to either or both of those periodicals, which do good work that no one else will do and which also pay me a little bit to write (needless to say, if you’re an editor who wants me to write for you, hmu). Or you can make a donation to my congregation. Or you can register for the 2024 Institute of Liturgical Studies, where I’ll be a plenary speaker (that would be cool because we could hang out). But really, I encourage you to find your own institutions (sigh) to invest some money and attention in. None of our choices can fix a broken media ecosystem, but it’s still better to try to be an audience for as long as someone is trying to speak to one.
Books
Having said all that, I was delighted to hear the podcast episode I recorded with my friend Katy Scrogin for Plain Reading on how reading interacts with ministry (and, well, a lot of other things. Topics touched on include: Cormac McCarthy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Marilynne Robinson, Christian Wiman, Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Joan Didion’s essay “On Self-Respect,” The Phantom Tollbooth, Harriet the Spy, Robertson Davies’ The Deptford Trilogy and What’s Bred in the Bone, Lou Reed, Pilgrim’s Progress, and, inevitably, Moby-Dick. It was a lot of fun and I hope people find something useful in it.
Appreciation: Keith Richards in 13 Tracks
I’m a huge fan, but it astonishes even me that so many people are walking around in 2023 wearing Rolling Stones shirts. This is because of good business decisions, of course, but that business acumen in turn only mattered because of two things: the showmanship of Mick Jagger and the songwriting of Keith Richards. Jagger wrote some good songs, to be sure, and Richards is no slouch as a showman (at least when he’s been awake). But without the Richards chords, Jagger would have had nothing to sell, and without the Jagger hustle, the Richards chords would never have been heard. It may be the most successful collaboration in the history of popular music and its two principals have spent the large majority of its sixty years hating each other’s guts.
Keith Richards turns 80 on Monday. I started listening to his songs when I was in seventh grade. They led me to blues, which led me to literature I would not likely have understood at all if I’d even encountered it, which led me to Chicago and its history. I can honestly say that getting into his music changed the trajectory of my life. I read his massive memoir right when it came out, in a few days of very late nights. I read Bill Wyman’s (the critic, not the Stones bassist) imaginary reply in the voice of Mick Jagger probably once a year because it’s one of the best pieces of online music writing I know. The Richards mystique was always a part of this influence—the drugs, the outlaw stuff, the death-watch journalism—and it’s remarkable how one can be such a disaster that one’s actual undeniable crappiness gets lost in the fog. It was a trap for him, too, I suppose; there’s an obvious downside to being a culture’s designated self-destructive addict. He’s not someone to admire, even a little bit, or to find colorful and exciting apart from the music. Even today, he’s ungenerous to the people who helped make his lowest-quality, addiction-hobbled records somewhat listenable.3 But the music was legitimately great, for a while, in ways that no one else could do at the time and few have been able to replicate since. These are, in my fan-who-learned-some-songs opinion, the key points in a long and irregular catalogue (my Mick post is here if you’re interested).
One of those guitar riffs that’s mind-meltingly obvious once you hear it, but groundbreaking all the same. The Stones were accused, early and often with justice, of drafting behind the Beatles but this was not a song you could imagine John and Paul writing. The story Keith tells is that he woke up in the middle of the night with the riff in his head, recorded it on the spot, and went straight back to bed while the running tape captured his snoring. It was the first, but not the last, time what amounted to found footage extended their career (see #10). It’s always in the live shows but doesn’t gain a lot from performance compared to some others (unless Keith is using his guitar to hit a guy rushing the stage).
This was never a personal favorite of mine, but it’s a sweet little ballad that has held up, with words and melody entirely by Richards. It lacks the cynicism of their later love songs and the maudlin neediness of Richards’ own later ballads. It’s actually about the woman!
The evolution of this song was captured in the studio by Jean-Luc Godard for his film 1 + 1, which is a real trip. It’s clearly a team effort, with chords and a slightly overwritten lyric by Mick and great work by Charlie Watts and Nicky Hopkins. But Keith really wrangled it into the form it ended up taking, playing the memorable bass part and the electric guitar solo, probably the only famous guitar solo he ever recorded. It’s so simple and open in structure that it has often been done in a boring or shoddy manner live. But when it’s good, it’s awesome.
Some time in 1968, Keith Richards started open-tuning his guitars and building songs around the kinds of chording those tunings allowed. And as Brian Jones lost interest in guitar, Keith started doubling and layering guitar tracks. The result was not just the best songs the Stones ever recorded, but a major leap forward in Keith’s own art. He was never a blazing soloist. It’s the rhythm work on these songs that make him so influential and hard to mimic. There are a lot of great ones from this period but the chords and the peculiar recording method on this one set it apart and established it at the center of their live sets ever after. The lyric is Mick’s, and they definitely capture a cultural and political moment, but the heart of the song is the music. It’s insane how well this song plays live. There are a lot of great live versions, but this is probably my favorite.
Another open-tuned, multi-part classic. The lyric, which is terrific, was apparently a real Jagger-Richards collaboration, and the Merry Clayton vocal part is huge. But the interaction of the single-note filigree and the propulsive chords make the song, and that’s all Keith.
It’s positively criminal how much fun this one is to learn and play. Mick worked out the lyrics for the verses, Mick Taylor added some guitar overdubs after he joined the band (I think), and Charlie Watts’s mistake on the cowbell gave it a distinctive opening, but the central riff and the chording are Keith’s and they’re perfection. This was another instant hit and live staple. This is a good live version.
The Stones had the lyrical range to do one thing per song—one mood, one-act stories, one gimmick—but they sometimes dabbled with song structure, and this was the best instance of it. The lyric is vile but the guitar changes are rather clever and subtle. This one really came to life as a live standard. They stretch out the sections, play with the down-tempo interlude, and do a lot of guitar and harmonica soloing. It’s hard to pick a favorite but here’s a great one.
At a certain point it becomes impossible to talk about Keith Richards without also talking about heroin. The last five tracks on this list were written and recorded after he began using, but before the addiction had started to severely blunt both his creativity and productivity. By the time Sticky Fingers was being recorded, the brilliance was still there but he had started missing more sessions. This song isn’t the band’s first clear reference to heroin use ("Dear Doctor” and “Let it Bleed” got there first), and certainly not their last (“Coming Down Again” and “Before They Make Me Run” are both about Keith’s habit), but it’s frank and makes this seemingly rather slight country tune much more heavy. I don’t know if Keith even wrote the lyric for this one, but he clearly inspired it, and the tune and instrumentation definitely sound like his (they reflect the influence of his friend Gram Parsons, the guiding light of the Flying Burrito Brothers). He and Mick Taylor trade lead parts, with Keith taking the main solo. It’s a really lovely, sad piece of work (memorably covered by Townes Van Zandt among others5) that nails the downbeat-but-fun ethos of their best songs from this period. It’s a reliable high point when they do it live.
Exile on Main Street has a little bit of everything: blues covers, country, blue-eyed soul ballads, fake Gospel, and whatever “I Just Want to See His Face” is. It’s a somewhat polarizing record, with lots of people (including me) considering it their best and a substantial group of dissenters who consider it a messy, incoherent missed opportunity (apparently Mick Jagger is among this group). No one denies that it has some great tracks, though, including Keith’s best rock-and-roll lead vocal number. But the one that really stuck was “Tumbling Dice.” It has a great central riff, a clever structure of verses, refrains, and choruses, and a brilliantly layered outro. Apparently Keith spent hours playing the riff over and over to himself trying to get it right (though he does not acknowledge remembering it), and Charlie never did figure out how to make the drum part work at the end, so producer Jimmy Miller takes over at that point. Keith wrote some great songs for this album, but this one represents his final plateau as a songwriter. Like “Midnight Rambler,” it was a minor hit that became a central pillar of their live repertoire because it’s so fun and you can play out the coda as long as you need to. There are too many great live versions to choose from, so here’s the one with Bruce Springsteen.
After Exile, Richards started spending lots of time in Jamaica and brought a reggae influence into his subsequent songwriting. I don’t think much of it worked, but the basic track for this one emerged from a pile of discarded 1975 takes that were in a more straightforward reggae style to become their last big hit on 1981’s Tattoo You. It’s a good example of how, at his best, he creates and controls a song with rhythm (he constantly says he prefers to “roll” to the “rock”). Unsurprisingly, this one gets played at basically every show.
Even after he stopped writing great rock and roll songs, Richards could still put together a killer ballad. He was, reportedly, surprised that people still wanted to hear “You Got the Silver” when they brought it back to set lists in the 90’s. He loves Hoagy Carmichael, even covering “The Nearness of You” live from time to time, which is probably the template for this one.6 I always assumed it was about the end of his relationship with Anita Pallenberg but I was wrong: this one is about Mick, written and recorded when their relationship had entered the nadir of burnout at which it has mostly stayed ever since. He went on to do some more really good work in this style, some of it even faintly self-reflective. “Slipping Away” is an above-par lament for creative decline, “Thru and Thru” is just beautifully written and constructed, and the new “Tell Me Straight” could be half of a conversation with a lover, an agent, or an oncologist at this point. But “All About You” is heartrending because it’s about the collapse of a friendship and creative partnership that, in the end, seems to have meant more to Keith than to Mick.7 Or at least that he had a harder time functioning without.8
I don’t know how much Richards really had to do with the genius of this track. He did write its very obvious and poignant refrain that could be about drugs and alcohol, womanizing, the unstoppable death-embrace that is the Rolling Stones, or music itself (there are smaller gifts in songwriting than being able to just say the thing). “How can I stop, once I start?” Good chording, a bit heavy on the sentimentality, but it takes off at the end: a duet between Wayne Shorter on sax and Charlie Watts using the full drum set. The story the producer tells (and that Richards quotes in his memoir) is that Charlie’s car was waiting, everyone was going home after the take and it was possibly the last thing the Rolling Stones would ever record together because Mick and Keith can’t stand each other and aren’t speaking by the end of each album’s recording sessions. But it achieved an effect unlike anything else in their overlong and increasingly redundant catalogue, a moment of transcendent beauty.
This is the last track on Hackney Diamonds, their 2023 album and first of new material since 2005. Mick, Keith, and Brian Jones started out playing blues and R&B covers for a laugh, and of course took their name from this Muddy Waters classic. Nothing that followed from those gritty, often amateurish early covers was intended, let alone expected. And whenever they needed a musical bail-out, the blues form was there for them. Over the years they became genuinely accomplished in the genre, both in covers and in putting an original lyric over a more or less standard set of changes. You could find a better instance of their blues playing than this particular track (I’m rather fond of the re-recording of “The Spider and the Fly” they did in the 90s, and most of the songs on Blue + Lonesome are terrific), but this is the only time they’ve committed that namesake song to an album. It’s just the two of them, doing what they set out to do a lifetime ago, and it feels like a valediction. They are showmen in their different ways and introspection is not the friend of showmanship. But every now and then, something real slips out in a sidelong way—which is the literary genius of the blues in the first place—and here it’s the melancholy self-acceptance of having come around full circle.
By analogy, things like “civic holidays with dubious foundations” and “trivia night with the fellas” and “November weather in Dallas” are moderate regime elements, too.
I do not engage in Taylor Swift Studies, but my completely amateur hunch is that the Swift phenomenon owes something to the decline of mass culture generally. It feels like a Last Pop Star moment.
The treatment of Mick Taylor and Billy Preston in Life is just shabby.
This is the mono version whose rights belong to the Stones themselves (their late manager walked off with the rights to all the original records through 1970). I prefer the stereo mix, but YouTube only has that in a lyric video and the lyric is just too awful to post that way.
Needs its own footnote: Keith Richards, Willie Nelson, Ryan Adams, and Hank III:
One of my favorite stories about the Keith Richards the terminal sentimentalist is that when he was in jail for a truly staggering drug bust in Toronto and facing a very long prison sentence and the certain end to his career, he sang Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home” to console himself. I guess the city jailers must have allowed him to borrow a guitar.
This was far from the last time Keith tried to roast Mick in song. There’s this one and this one, for starters, plus the make-up-and-be-partners track “Mixed Emotions.”
My thesis is that when rock-and-roll partnerships turn into feuds, the more publicly resentful and angry party is probably the one with a bigger dependency problem.
Thanks for the shout-out, Ben! I loved having you on the show—hope to see you back soon! (This is also reminding me I need to comment on your previous Liz Phair thoughts...)