"Sit up, fed up, low down, go 'round
Down at the bar at the place I'm at
Sitting, drinking, superfic'ly thinking
About the rinsed out blonde on my left
Then I said 'Hi' like a spider to a fly…"
- The Rolling Stones, The Spider and the Fly
There is a line in the old Rolling Stones song – from back
when they were a great band: The Spider and the Fly. The singer is describing a
lady he met in a dive bar: “She was common, flirty, looked about thirty”
This was on their album Out of Our Heads, released in 1965. Those were the days you didn't trust anybody over 30.
Then I downloaded it a while back, I got the version of this
same song from the album Stripped, recorded live from their Vodoo Lounge Tour
in 1995. That line now sounds something like this:
“She was drifty
grifty, she looked about fifty.” I’m not sure of the adjectives but I’m sure
of the age.
So between 1965 and 1995 fifty became the new thirty. I was
younger than the skank in the 1965 dive. By the time the lyrics changed, I was
barely younger than the 1995 skank. When I first heard the song, the woman
described was way past her prime. By 1995 we'd come such a long way (baby) that we aren't considered rubbish until we're in our fifties.
I shudder to think how the Stones would change that line if they
played it in 2013. Thanks to Obamacare, the “ladies” that sit in bars like
spiders hunting flies will continue to age. This could get very very ugly.
