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Posted on Sun, Jan. 12, 2003 story:PUB_DESC
What keeps the Stones rolling along?
By TIMOTHY FINN
The Kansas City Star
Last May, in a New York park, the Rolling Stones announced their 2002-2003 tour.
Beth A. Keiser/AP Photo
One of the earliest concert photographs of the Rolling Stones was taken in 1963 by Gus Coral at a show in Cardiff, South Wales.
The photo captures three of the five Stones bassist Bill Wyman, guitarist Brian Jones (on blues harp) and Mick Jagger on stage and in uniform: black trousers, white shirts, dark neckties, black shoes, matching hound's-tooth jackets.
The Stones in 1963 were a picture of fresh-faced, clean-cut innocence, looking like a university glee club, virtually indistinguishable from dozens of other British pop bands destined for one-hit wonderdom and the unforgiving craw of oblivion.
Things hardly turned out that way for the Stones. They would soon shuck those uniforms for something more conspicuous: a cynical, bad-boy attitude that separated them from all other pop bands of the era, including their friendly rivals, the Beatles. They would also start recording their own songs, blending their British pop roots with their genuine love for African-American blues and R&B into a sound that was both visceral and cosmic.
Three years after Coral took his photograph, the Stones were too big for places like clubs in Cardiff. They were already the greatest rock 'n' roll band on the planet, on the fast track to celebrity and mythology and the slippery slope to infamy and notoriety. Unlike most bands who ride those rails, however, the Stones have managed to remain essentially intact and relevant well into another millennium.
Last year the Rolling Stones celebrated their 40th anniversary, and they did it in atypical fashion for a band its age: with a celebrated and successful world tour; with "Forty Licks," a two-CD hits package; with a slew of cover stories in magazines and newspapers all over the Western world; and several hefty commemorative books.
That celebration continues into 2003. Saturday night almost 40 years to the date after drummer Charlie Watts officially joined the band the trendsetting cable TV network HBO will air live coverage of the Stones' second concert in two nights at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Any band can throw itself a birthday party, but very few can provoke the immense response the Stones have been getting. "Forty Licks" has gone gold in the United States; Abkco re-released remastered and repackaged versions of its Stones catalog (16 albums); and critics are praising the tour, which is drawing huge crowds of fans from three generations and attracting younger, stylish opening acts like the Strokes, blues prodigy Shemekia Copeland and Sheryl Crow.
All of which raises a question: Why the hoopla over a band of multimillionaires who have been feasting off their own legends for nearly a quarter of a century?
Jagger and Keith Richards will both turn 60 this year, crossing a threshold that prompts most men to daydream about waders and fly-fishing in Canada or Bermuda shorts and canasta in southern Florida.
Not the Stones. "Every time (Richards) rallies his addled old troupe and they crank up that time-honored Stones lurch one more time, it's like giving the reaper the finger," Adam Sweeting wrote in a December 2002 cover story about the Stones in Uncut magazine.
Temerity and profane stubbornness are virtues in rock music, but they don't guarantee career longevity. How have the Stones outlived and outlasted other bands of their generation, bands who, unlike the Stones, couldn't survive deaths or addictions or in-house acrimony?
The seemingly obvious answer: the music. "Forty Licks" is an imperfect anthology erratically organized and fraught with omissions but it nonetheless showcases at least two dozen essential rock songs, each immune to antiquity or obsolescence. On top of that, the Stones have always maintained their musical integrity, starting with Charlie Watts, the best rock drummer ever.
But plenty of accomplished bands from the '60s and '70s have compiled catalogs of indestructible rock songs Creedence Clearwater Revival, Led Zeppelin yet haven't survived one decade, let alone four. Again: Why the Stones?
The answer starts with Richards and Jagger, whose partnership constitutes something deeper than mere friendship or a lucrative business union. Theirs is a yin/yang cartel more complex and interesting than, say, the Lennon-McCartney marriage.
The Glimmer Twins, as Jagger/Richards once called themselves, not only wrote timeless and pure rock 'n' roll songs typically built on Richards' galvanized guitar riffs but they trafficked in themes that were threatening, liberating, rebellious and, often, taboo, including interracial sex.
The Stones consciously turned away from their days of neckties and hound's-tooth jackets when their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, decided that they'd be more conspicuous and attractive if they affected a rebellious cool, something detached, darker and more threatening than the image projected by their peers at the time the Beatles, Dave Clark Five, Herman's Hermits. He was right: It separated them from the pack and made the Stones the Beatles' diametric competitors.
Tom Wolfe once said, "The Beatles want to hold your hand, but the Stones want to burn your town." At least that's what they wanted people to believe that they promoted deviance, decadence and delinquency.
And to a point they did because it serviced their image as a Rock 'N' Roll Band Inc., one that, off stage, lived in a jet-setting world of excess Stones fans could only imagine: lots of women, drugs, liquor, money.
The Stones wanted to be the rock band that lured teen-agers and young adults not by merely making parents nervous, like Elvis did, but by scaring them.
That image and lifestyle nearly sank the band. Nearly. They endured drug addictions, arrests and convictions, banishment from the United States and the brutal horror of Altamont, where a fan was stabbed to death by the security force, which happened to be a horde of surly Hell's Angels.
Somehow the Stones emerged from that a better band, one that wore all those scandals and detriments like battle scars or prison tattoos. Barely two years after Altamont, they released "Exile on Main Street," one of the best rock albums ever recorded. They also committed themselves to industrializing the rock-concert world, improving and standardizing sound systems and security forces.
Just as important, the Stones survived several internal losses Brian Jones, then Mick Taylor and then Bill Wyman and some ugly marital strife. When Jagger went solo in the 1980s, Richards went ballistic, charging Jagger with co-opting the band's prestige and image for his own benefit.
Most onlookers figured the estrangement would kill the band. Instead everyone reconciled and, in 1989, the band released "Steel Wheels" and launched a stadium tour, a pattern that has repeated itself every three years or so.
The Stones are still together because Richards and Jagger won't let them fade away, because they won't let anything else get bigger than the band, not a defection or death of a band member, not even another Jagger solo album.
In Blender magazine this summer, Richards ridiculed Jagger's recent "Goddess in the Doorway" album, calling it "Dog (Poop) in the Doorway," but allowing that Jagger has developed thick skin when it comes to criticism like that.
Richards' hide is pretty tough, too. More than any of the Stones, he has taken the brunt of ageist jokes about the band. In October, Rolling Stone magazine broke its habit of featuring airbrushed portraits of half-naked pop queens on its cover by displaying a gritty portrait of Richards, shirtless, embracing his guitar.
It is an arresting photo, to say the least. He looks like something otherworldly: a charming antagonist from some Spielberg adaptation of a Tolkien book or like a corpse that has been exhumed for another autopsy. Ironically this image of a hard-bitten, hard-living survivor is exactly what burnishes the band's image.
When the issue of age comes up, Jagger likes to mention blues legends like Muddy Waters, who performed into his 60s, or B.B. King, who still performs in his late 70s. But the Stones' survival is different: Like a child actor in a popular sitcom, they will forever be compared with their brash and handsome days of drugs and glitter and a supermodel in every port. No one cares or remembers what B.B. King looked like when he was 24.
Yet the Jagger and Richards of today represent exactly why the Stones are still together and why people couldn't care less about their ages but care enough to shell out $120 a seat to see them reprise 35-year-old, 18-karat rock tunes.
The "Forty Licks" tour was the second top-grossing tour of 2002, its $88 million second only to Paul McCartney's (his first in nearly 10 years), which grossed $103 million. And it's all because of Mick and Keith.
Jagger is still the band's age-defying flash point a lean, charismatic mop-haired bundle of libidinous energy who lives up to the very logo he inspired: a tongue lolling between two fat, red lips. We should all be so sexual and vital at 60.
Richards is the band's living monument, his gnarled face and grizzled torso a testament to his lifestyle (a diet that includes lots of cigarettes and vodka), which has always celebrated to an extreme the very aesthetic the Stones helped create. In a year where music's biggest bad boy, Eminem, is reportedly on the Atkins diet and a rigorous fitness regime, Richards continues to flip off fate and common sense. There's nothing more rock 'n' roll than that.
It's eerily and cosmically fitting that the Stones' 2002 tour would come in second to a former Beatles'. The difference between the two is instructive. At McCartney's show, the air is all nostalgia, sweet longing for another era: Couples slow-dance as if they're on a honeymoon cruise. Parents sing along with their preteen children. Grown men weep openly.
There is no crying at a Stones concert. At least half the crowd is as old or older than the parents the early Stones were trying to frighten and offend. Yet the Stones are more than a classic-rock/greatest-hits band because they have no patience for sentimentality. Their songs are still too pertinent and true tempered, perhaps, but not embalmed by the passage of time.
Yes, it is only rock 'n' roll, but at a time when the definition of "rock" is so ambiguous and so abused, it's deeply satisfying to know that the band that coined the spirit of rock 'n' roll and buttressed it with some phenomenal music has survived the process and is still standing.
To reach Timothy Finn, pop music writer, call (816) 234-4781 or send e-mail to [email protected].
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| jb |
It was only second b/c of less dates!!!! |
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| telecaster |
quote:
jb wrote:
It was only second b/c of less dates!!!!
"There is no crying at a Stones concert. At least half the crowd is as old or older than the parents the early Stones were trying to frighten and offend. Yet the Stones are more than a classic-rock/greatest-hits band because they have no patience for sentimentality. Their songs are still too pertinent and true tempered, perhaps, but not embalmed by the passage of time."
This is the best paragraph from that article.
JB-this 2nd leg of The Stones will be HUGE $$ wise since
they got a running start on 2003.
Why do you have a NY ticket for sale?
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| jb |
Because I had to buy pairs...could not get a single in the section I wanted....I do not take my wife to these shows and I usually take a friend...but being in New York, no one I know...I will probably have an extra for saturday as well.... |
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| nankerphelge |
How much do you want for the ticket jb??
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| Fiji Joe |
That was nice work...Good to see there are some people here in KC who don't think Aerosmith is the best Rock group of all time |
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| jb |
For which show Nanker? |
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| Stones |
1. The Stones played less dates than McFartney
2. Forty licks has gone more than Gold, it is Triple Platinum and very close to 4 x's Platinum. |
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| jb |
Stones..you are absolutely correct and a welcome addition to thios site.. |
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| corgi37 |
that was a lovely article. It really hammered home how special this band is. Not just to us cluey cunts on a fan site like this, but to impartial people. I hope everyone is thankful the Stones are still around. Fuck, it could be worse, it could be the 25th anniverary of the Clash or something! |
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