| October 8th, 2005 05:02 PM |
|
|
| FPM C10 |
Can't resist lure of the Stones
Mick Jagger
By DAVID NEWTON, Correspondent
At each of the 10 Rolling Stones concerts I've seen since Baltimore in 1969, I've paused during the madness and looked around. Everybody stands and screams the lyrics of every song, starting with Keith Richards' opening guitar riff.
Is this the makings of a new religion? Shades of 1930s Nurnberg? Nostalgia turned rabid? Or merely popular culture getting its yah-yahs out at full, mass-marketed howl?
The answer is obvious: The Stones still deliver hot, rock 'n' roll licks for the ages. And front man Mick Jagger, right, is a caterwauling dynamo of prance and sass, despite the 62-years on his spindly frame.
Which is why I'll be at my 11th concert tonight, $82.50 lighter and sitting in the back reaches of the field at Wallace Wade Stadium.
My 14-year-old niece and 12-year-old nephew will be in better seats. Their ears will be plugged tight against the "music." Their father (my brother) believes in raisin'em right with a sense of history and raw, unadorned rock 'n' roll.
Yes, the devil's music of youthful rebellion has come full circle and now snuggles comfortably at the breast of the American family life where it's been for several decades.
It wasn't always that way.
In Baltimore in 1969, when Jagger chop-stepped on stage in his black Omega rig, pancaked his black top hat flat and flipped it into the wings, the menace was palpable. His show-stopping, belt-whacking rendition of "Midnight Rambler" upped the ante. Seventeen speakers were stacked up behind the band, if anybody's into technical comparisons to today's mega-ton sound city needed for a stadium concert.
By the late '70s, the Stones' threat had ceded to frazzy fun: Jagger hovering over the crowd in a cherry picker, swinging on a rope or anointing the true believers down front with a bucket of water. By 1989 at Carter-Finley Stadium, the Woodstock generation had become Baby Boomers tailgating from their Subarus and Volvos and licking the leavings of fried chicken from their fingers.
The threat the Stones posed to society had become the antics of much loved, eccentric uncles, with the attendant apocryphal anecdotes.
Interviewer to Jagger: Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll. How do you keep it all together? Jagger: What makes you think I do?
Interviewer to Keith Richards: What about your drug problems? Richards: We never had any drug problems. There was always enough around.
By the late '90s, the bedrock logic of the German mind finally grounded my Stones obsession. After a Stones' concert seen from the fourth row at Charlotte's Bank of America Stadium, a German friend devoid of rock 'n' roll infection had this observation: "They weren't particularly melodic."
And I paid $100 plus for her ticket!
Between the stratospheric ticket prices and the fear that the Stones couldn't give a 58-year-old pre-geezer the accustomed rush, I figured the Stones could do without me this time around.
Ten years ago at the soccer stadium in Basel, Switzerland, I stood eight rows back as "Start Me Up" kicked in for the backstretch run. The fading smears of a sherbet summer sunset hung in the sky and the whole stadium seemed to turn on its side from the adrenalin jolt and soar skyward.
This is the top of the mountain, I thought. The Stones will never get any better than this. I was right. Just to prove it I saw them four more times.
It's hard giving up the Stones or the fond remnants of your youth.
|
| October 8th, 2005 05:33 PM |
|
|
| nankerphelge |
He is about to be amazed for the 11th time! |
|
