On October 11th I saw Stew play music at Java Joe’s in Ocean Beach. He did something unusual for him as a solo artist, as even as part of his band The Negro Problem: he played a cover. The one he played was a song I had never heard before. A remarkable number from the Rolling Stone’s Beggars’s Banquet: it’s called Stray Cat Blues. He prefaced this with the note that this album came out in 1967 or 1968 – and given that the Stones were at the time the biggest band in pop, the lyrical content of the song is unbelievably. He said it was the kind of thing that maybe R.Kelly would write about if he actually had the guts to write about what he does. The song is pretty unbelievable when you think about it. Stew was right when he shared with the audience that any artist couldn’t put out a record like this, even the hardest rapper wouldn’t dare make allusions to sexual interactions with underage girls as boldly as this song does. And yet the Stones were huge at the time. You can check the lyrics to Stray Cat Blues here.
