The Baddies

ROCK 'N' ROLL

In Zurich, 12,000 rock 'n' roll fans rioted and began tearing apart the seats in the local stadium until police piled in with clubs. In Warsaw, 8,000 teen-agers crashed through police barriers and stormed the iron gates of the Palace of Culture. In the resulting barrage of bottles and bricks, police sprayed the mob with tear gas, called in steel-helmeted reinforcements with machine guns, dogs, and two armored cars mounted with water cannons.

Wherever they went during their three-week tour of Europe, the Rolling Stones ignited havoc and hysteria. Now that the Beatles have retired from the road, the Stones have become the big squeal on the international pop-music circuit. They have a unique appeal. Like most British rock 'n' roll groups, they began by imitating such hard-rocking blues merchants as Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters (whose Rolling Stones Blues inspired their name); the result was a musically roughhewn sound sung in mock Negro dialect. In 1964, the Stones decided that if the Beatles were the goodies, they would be the baddies. They scowled, talked surly, and sang such suggestive leerics as:

Well, I'm a king bee, buzzing 'round your hive . . .

Yeah, I can make honey, baby, let me come inside.

Rebel Image. A paternity suit here, a fine for urinating on a building there, and pretty soon the London papers were asking: "Would you want your daughter to marry a Rolling Stone?" With each blast of adverse publicity, their recordings edged higher on the pop charts, until the boys suddenly found themselves the champions of the teeny-bopper revolt against adult authority.

Perversity pays. The Stones have sold 40 million recordings and currently have three albums on the U.S. bestseller charts. Though they deny that they consciously play up their rebel image, they bill themselves as "five reflections of to day's children," write songs about "trying to make some girl," with supposedly coded allusions to menstruation, marijuana and birth-control pills. For their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in January, they reluctantly altered the words of their recent hit, Let's Spend the Night Together.

Says the Stones' recording manager, Andrew Oldham, 23: "Pop music is sex and you have to hit them in the face with it." That pleasant chore falls to Mick Jagger, 23, the Stones' heavy-lipped lead shouter, who in performances bumps, grinds and jiggles his pelvis like a spastic marionette. Jagger also has a summons to appear in a Sussex court next month on a charge of possessing drugs.

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