“I hit the bottle, I hit the sack and cried.”

The Stones’ song, “Memory Motel,” from their 1976 album, “Black and Blue,” is an overlooked and underappreciated masterpiece. This story-song is well worth looking at and listening to again. And again and again. One of their very best works, it’s a shining, enduring example of the Anglo/English ballad tradition which was incorporated into the black American blues idiom and then re-worked again by white singers and groups like Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, and later on to the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, Van Morrison, and Eric Clapton, leading to crucially important artists of today like Nick Cave; Lana Del Rey; Taylor Swift (“All Too Well (Sad Girl Autumn Version)”); Snoop Dog; Eminem; Bonnie “Prince” Billy; Conor Oberst (of Nebraska); and Wilco.

These cross-cultural exchanges, sometimes violently resisted by mainstream society, were moral acts which led to more than just rock and roll, bending the arc of the human universe toward greater justice by vastly increasing integration and racial equity throughout the world. Real music isn’t just music, from Bach, Beethoven and Mozart to now.

“Memory Motel” is a song which connects everyone by exploring the gnawing ache in the bones of lost love and the passing of time which all humans experience, no matter their race, creed, income levels or gender. In seven minutes and seven seconds, in a song recorded in Germany, the Stones tell the tale of a heartbreaking, breathtaking love affair starring a beautiful, hazel-eyed, long-haired, wild-haired woman who grabs the guitar from the hands of her man; drives a green and blue, broken-down pick-up truck; and sings genius songs in a bar in Boston. The narrator is an equally brilliant rock singer on the road. The setting a haunted motel on a remote seashore.

Shakespeare’s Juliet, Robert Burns’ Highland Mary, William Wordsworth’s Lucy, Keats’ Fanny Brawne, Mary Shelley, and Byron’s half-sister Augusta Leigh are all somehow drawn together in this intense mini-drama told in the idiom of the English blues.

Long-haired, unshaven, shirtless, piratical Richards, holding a Jack Daniel’s bottle and a cigarette, absconds on the guitar and only sings for most of this piece, which means he’s bringing everything he can to his vocals; while long-haired, unshaven, checkered sport coat-wearing, show-biz Jagger pounds the piano keys as if they were a typewriter and he were trying to write an entire Emily Bronte romance novel within one song (bottle of Jack Daniel’s next to his ankle and his red socks on).

Richards enters the song half way through as a third character in a shadowy performance worthy of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s rival, establishing an emotional threesome in the song’s situational dynamics that lends a profound layer to this public closet drama. His voice continually praises the intellectual and emotional uniqueness of this special woman, never expressing jealousy or anger, but sometimes grief at her loss. The mainstream cliches about Keith are completely undercut by his progressive feminist perspective and his depth of emotional expression in this autobiographical story performance, which is heart-breaking, realistic and long-enduring in human terms.

(Keith only sings co- or lead vocals on a double handful of Stones tunes. Almost every one of them is one of their best works.)

Richards co-wrote a fascinating, Hemingwayesque autobiography called “Life.” He was an obsessive reader of Byron at one point. The Byron who went around the higher levels of English society with gigantic dogs, a laudanum bottle, and sometimes a monkey (or a trained bear at college). Byron’s girlfriends and friends were collaborators, competitors, and rivals. One of his beautiful, regal, and intellectually intimidating ladies labeled him, the great lord, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

“Memory Motel” implies this kind of tragic history, as surely as Mick Jagger read aloud portions of Shelley’s elegy for Keats, “Adonais,” in honor of Brian Jones. (Jones is a member of the eternal 27 Club. Keats was 25 upon dying. Percy Shelley was 29. Wordsworth was 80. At this writing, Jagger and Richards are 81 and 80, recently on tour here in Chicago, home of Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and where the Stones recorded their second album sixty years ago in 1964.)

“I hit the bottle, I hit the sack and cried.”

As I grow older, every time I go back to my own Memory Motel, I hear more.

I had become a failed literature professor at the age of 52, because they took my job away. Also, another relationship had ended. I couldn’t bear to keep the photos of her and us, nor place them in the dumpster either. So I took one of the small, black-and-white, photo-booth photos of beautiful, genius, red-haired her from when we were on our trip to Nashville seeing a retrospective of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash at the Country Music Hall of Fame. And I placed the photo deep in the middle of a library book which I put in the middle of a bunch of other library books I returned.

A librarian named Veronica called the next day and returned the photo to me.