Rolling Stones Unzipped is a flashback to the gloriously decadent ‘age of the rock star’

Immersion in all things Stones reveals the history of the band and how they have come to embody an era

This is a story about a rock and roll band called The Rolling Stones.

Long ago, before computers and social media, when scruffy, longhaired guitarists and pouty-lipped singers ruled the world and pop music was every teenager’s obsession, there was an intense rivalry between this scowling group of English malcontents and a rival, more wholesome group, The Beatles. Light vs. dark. Good vs. evil.

If The Beatles were pure, inspired, incorruptible, The Stones were dark, brooding, defiant.

“Would you let your daughter go with a Rolling Stone?” That was the question in 1964.

Music historians would argue The Beatles won this battle of the bands, their songcraft as revered today as that of Beethoven and Mozart.

Their decision to break up at the precise moment their alchemy lost its lustre was, in retrospect, a brilliant move to ensure their legacy would remain forever intact, untainted by middle age malaise or disco.

The Stones? Well, they never really grew up, never broke up — other than a brief period in the ’80s — never embraced their status as hallowed rock pioneers.

For 60 years, they just sort of hung around, the self-proclaimed World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band, riding out musical trends, putting out albums — some of which flirted with disco — soldiering through one concert tour after another until, in 2021, they’ve become carbon copies of the aging blues legends who inspired them.

Impassive, implacable and yes, still in need of haircuts (especially Keith), they exude a jaded majesty that transcends the whims of musical fashion, stubbornly tethered — after 60 years — to the glowing embers of a fading rock revolution.

This, more than anything, is the take-away from TheMuseum’s mammoth exhibit “Unzipped,” a 300-object, thematically arranged survey of six decades of art, music and fashion by a band known for its talent, ambition and shrewd, chameleon like marketing savvy.

By the time you exit the building after two hours of cultural immersion, you’ll have a keen understanding not only why “the sensational Rolling Stones” — as they were once billed — are one of the longest running acts in rock history, but how they have come to embody an era that, in the wake of MeToo and Black Lives Matter, seems as archaically out of date as the big band

ensembles and crooners with megaphones who preceded them.

What “Unzipped” documents, on its lone Canadian tour stop, is a band “of its time,” for all time, a strategic flashback to an era when white male rock stars were pop culture conquistadors, roaming the earth in Lear jets with groupies galore, the world at their feet.

“The age of the rock star ended with the passing of physical product, the rise of automated percussion, the domination of the committee approach to hit making, the widespread adoption of choreography, and above all the mystique destroying rise of the internet ,” writes David Hepworth in his book “Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars.”

“All things must pass. Now, like the cowboy, the cavalier, the wandering minstrel, the chorus girl, the burglar in the striped sweater, the top-hatted banker, the painter with his beret and the writer in his smoking jacket, the rock star must vainly be consigned to the wardrobe of anachronistic stereotypes.”

“The rock era is over. We now live in a hip hop world.”

But what an era: a gloriously decadent, glam inflected, cultural Caligula that signified the apotheosis of postwar ambition with boundary pushing, gender bending experimentation and some pretty awesome guitar hooks.

Because the Stones are still on the road, bashing out hits, you might assume this exhibit is a valiant attempt to make them seem hip, trendy — relevant — as its members round the corner for 80.

But that’s not what it’s about. Wandering through one thematically arranged compartment after another, spread over several levels and 10,000 square feet, what you experience is history — of the Stones, rock music, pop culture — in all its decadent, politically incorrect glory.

The highlight, hands down, is Edith Grove, a painstaking re-creation of the band’s first habitat, a squalid Chelsea flat shared by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and early leader Brian Jones in the days when they were scraggly blues loving nobodies angling for a break.

What is the point of this, you may wonder, as you gaze upon filthy, guk-smeared dinner plates, empty beer bottles, overflowing ashtrays and cupboards crammed with canned Spam and stewed steak?

How is this dilapidated garbage dump — which should have a “condemned” sign over the door — any different than student housing on Waterloo’s Ezra Street?

It isn’t. Which is part of the Stones myth, the idea that penniless (but talented) ne’er do wells who listen to Howlin’ Wolf records and play grimy R&B cover tunes could catch lightning in a bottle and, a few short years later, be dressed in cheetah print fur jackets and sleeveless velvet jumpsuits on massive stages shaped like Lotus flowers.

They’re all here, the stages (in miniature), set designs, posters, personal diaries, fashions (including Jagger’s famous puffed sleeve white dress) and album covers that, when grouped in chronological succession, form a defiant middle finger salute to what used to be known as The Establishment.

From the banned record sleeve for “Street Fighting Man” — with its incendiary shot of police violence — to the censored cover of “Beggars Banquet,’ with its graffiti-lined toilet stall, to the zippered crotch on the “Sticky Fingers” album that gives this exhibition its name, the Stones loved to push buttons and test limits.

There are also guitars — lots of them — a re-created recording studio with a tape looped conversation that makes you feel like a fly on the wall, and a Charlie Watts drum set that may elicit a hard swallow for anyone lamenting the late drummer’s demise a few short months ago.

There are 1964 handbills filled out by a youthful, on-the-cusp of stardom Jagger, who lists his personal “likes” (girls, eating, clothes) and dislikes (intolerant people, having my hair cut).

And there’s director Martin Scorsese narrating a short film about the Stones on celluloid, including a notorious behind-the-scenes doc that was never released and shall remain nameless in a family newspaper.

All of which speaks to the exhibit’s unacknowledged subtext: the passage of time.

As we watch band members evolve from pouty lipped insurgents to the craggy faced survivors they are today, as Jagger’s winking insouciance calcifies — like the rock head figures on Mount Rushmore — into an iconic lascivious sneer, it’s clear the main reason the Stones are deserving of an exhibition like this is the mere fact that they still exist.

With no plans to retire — a position they staked out in 1989 — “Unzipped’s” final stop, fittingly, is a three-dimensional, surround sound mini concert from a 2016 excursion to Cuba, where the boys proved as sinewy and unrelenting as ever, churning out “Paint It Black,” a 55-year-old song about darkness of the soul, like a Dorian Gray painting come to life (in their sixth decade of touring, they certainly look the part).

“First you shock them,” a sardonic Jagger cracks in the multi-screened newsreel that kicks off the exhibition. “Then they put you in a museum.”

With “Unzipped,” they achieve both: perfectly preserved but endlessly provocative, glowering postwar malcontents whose rock and roll dreams came true . . . and then some.

“Unzipped” runs at TheMuseum Nov. 30-Feb. 27. For more information, go to www.unzippedkw.ca

‘Unzipped’ is a 300-object, thematically arranged survey of six decades of art, music and fashion