| October 18th, 2005 07:58 AM |
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| LadyJane |
I like Joss Stone but NO ONE needs to take the spotlight from Lisa during Nightime.
LJ. |
| October 18th, 2005 08:03 AM |
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| Nellcote |
Someone once said: "Variety is the spice of life" |
| October 18th, 2005 08:43 AM |
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| VoodooChileInWOnderl |
Review: Ageless Stones still show fans rocking satisfaction
By Charles Passy
Palm Beach Post Arts Writer
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
MIAMI ? It's easy to dismiss the commercial entity that the Rolling Stones have become: a band of preening, posturing rockers in the almost-eligible-for-Social-Security age range.
Throw in the price of the top ticket for their latest tour, a hard-to-fathom $400, and your contempt can grow larger by the minute. Or dollar.
And yet, the sold-out crowd that made their way to the AmericanAirlines Arena for the Stones' Bigger Bang tour on Monday night got their money's worth.
Say what you will, the Stones defined the rock concert-as-event concept, and they keep on perfecting it tour by tour.
They wed spectacle ? in this case, a futuristic stage dominated by an incredibly large video screen ? with soulful showmanship. The boys, in other words, still rock.
Indeed, to see guitarist Keith Richards, in all his perennial vagabond-like glory, come roaring on stage for the opening number, the aptly chosen Start Me Up, is to realize that the Stones have no intention of growing up.
Frontman Mick Jagger followed immediately behind, singing the words with his usual cocky fervor. (And yes, he's as impossibly skinny as ever, the only man whose pants size is best defined in negative numbers.)
And for good, reliable measure, guitarist Ron Wood and drummer Charlie Watts rounded out the key ensemble, honoring their roles as solid, time-tested musicians there to do a job.
The main band was complemented with a plentiful array of backup musicians and vocalists, including a horn section.
The show blended bits of old and new. The band freely sampled from their new Bigger Band album: A highlight of the first half of the show (an early deadline prevented this reviewer from catching more) was Oh No, Not You Again, a song with an uptempo, Buddy Holly-like vibe. Less successful was Rain Fall Down, which has a hip-hop and funk-flavored feel that's not quite in the Stones' more blues-based vein.
But the classics were served up in abundance as well. Songs such as You Got Me Rocking and She's So Cold were given a gritty treatment that made them seem hardly the least bit dated.
(And speaking of hardly seeming dated: When the video screen flashed pictures of the younger Stones, they were barely indistinguishable from the current group.)
Still, if one had to settle on a high point, it was perhaps Jagger's slithering, slinky take on Ruby Tuesday.
This was great rock 'n' roll not served up as nostalgia, but as a living testament to a band that continues defying time. You got me rocking indeed.
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| October 18th, 2005 08:46 AM |
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| VoodooChileInWOnderl |
NAMES & FACES
We all need a Stone who can move on...
There'll be more sympathy for these old devils when they whip up excitement and change things up a bit.
Jon Bream and Chris Riemenschneider | Minneapolis Star Tribune
Posted October 17, 2005
JEFF CHRISTENSEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS)
So, they're the biggest, richest band in the world. So what? We're finding it hard to get pumped up about the Rolling Stones' tour [which makes a stop Wednesday at Tampa's St. Pete Times Forum].
Even if the new CD, A Bigger Bang, really is their best thing since 1981's Tattoo You, as Rolling Stone magazine claims, that won't be enough to have us storming the gates.
Here are things that could get us excited about seeing the Stones again:
Skip the spectacle and play a theater. The arena/stadium routine has become routine. Take a chance and play naked, so to speak, and focus on the music, not the running around.
Play one classic album straight through. If the Who can keep its crowd enthused for the duration of Tommy, the Stones would have die-hard fans enraptured with full performances of Exile on Main Street, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Aftermath or Some Girls.
Bring back Mick Taylor. The Roger Moore of Stones guitarists (sandwiched chronologically between Brian Jones and Ron Wood), he's actually the Sean Connery of the lot, some fans say. He fueled early-'70s albums Exile and Sticky Fingers before quitting the band in 1975, after which the Stones were never as great.
Let Charlie Watts be the boss. The Stones' quietest and least-egotistical member could steer the ship in new and interesting directions.
Scale back the prices. Seats start at $61.75. Dylan charges $50 with Willie Nelson. U2 asks $50 for the main floor.
Don't do "Jumpin' Jack Flash" or "Brown Sugar." They haven't played these songs well since they recorded them.
Add bandmates or touring partners with clout. Can you imagine the rabid reaction if, say, someone such as Bob Dylan or Eric Clapton toured with the Stones? How about Bruce Hornsby, Steve Winwood or even Elton John on keyboards with the Stones? Or maybe a big-name third guitarist such as Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Buddy Guy, Rich Robinson or Clapton.
On the other hand, lose some of the extra players. Does the band really need a fleet of anonymous backup musicians and singers? Trim that fattened lineup. Besides making the shows more personal, it might cut into their vices: Ron Wood and Keith Richards would have to play more and chain-smoke less, and Mick Jagger wouldn't have female singers around.
Play the blues, for real. The Stones started as a faux-blues band and have toyed with it for decades. How about a set full of their best trips to the crossroads, including "Little Red Rooster," "I Just Want to Make Love to You," "Walking the Dog," "Shake Your Hips," "Stray Cat Blues" and "Ventilator Blues."
Find a new hairdresser. Nitpicking, maybe, but what a distraction: Jagger should switch to a new color of Clairol so his too-dark dye job doesn't put the focus on his deepening dimples.
Copyright © 2005, Orlando Sentinel | Get home delivery - up to 50% off
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| October 18th, 2005 08:48 AM |
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| VoodooChileInWOnderl |
Posted on Sun, Oct. 16, 2005
Time's still on their side
BY HOWARD COHEN
No rocker has sold sex better, lived its excesses with more zeal, or gotten in more trouble because of it, than the ageless Mick Jagger, who once rode a 20-foot-tall inflated phallus on a concert stage just for jollies. He also once told TV interviewer Dick Cavett he absolutely could see himself still rocking after 60.
He was 29 at the time.
Give the ol' devil his due. Jagger's band, the Rolling Stones, rolls on, shattering records with every tour -- Miami's AmericanAirlines Arena was a fast sell-out for Monday night's concert -- and the group's new CD, A Bigger Bang, is the Stones' best CD in 25 years.
But is time still on their side?
Jagger is 62 now. Guitarist Keith Richards is 61, drummer Charlie Watts is 64 and Ron Wood, the baby of the group, is 58. Last year, Watts battled throat cancer and injuries from a car accident, and personal demons limited Wood's studio time during the recording of A Bigger Bang -- he appears on 10 of the 16 tracks.
And the Stones insist this isn't a farewell tour.
''I've said it before -- this is all I can do. I'm a lousy plumber,'' Richards told British rock magazine Q in its October issue.
PLAYING THE NEW STUFF
The Stones aren't one of those bands of aging rockers who depend solely on nostalgia for concert sales. The Eagles, for instance, offer rote versions of old songs in concert and haven't released a new album in 26 years. Paul McCartney's recent tour opener in Miami was another trip down memory lane, liberally salted with one Beatles classic after another. He's made dozens of records in the past 30 years, but only four of those songs found their way into his 38-song set.
The Stones, God love 'em, play four new Bigger Bang songs, including Oh No, Not You Again -- which Watts has joked should be the tour's name -- and the naughty Rough Justice , which finds Jagger up to his old horndog ways. In previous cities, the Stones pulled out the rarely performed '80s New Wave-era She's So Cold, '90s album tracks You Got Me Rocking and Out of Control, and saved its '60s hits like Jumpin' Jack Flash and (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction for encores.
The tour, with ticket prices topping $400, is expected to gross a heady $200 million.
Reviews, so far, have been stellar, with The Baltimore Sun echoing the consensus: ``The Stones still rock harder than many bands less than half their age.''
When the Stones appeared as friendly rivals to the Beatles in 1962 under the sobriquet England's Newest Hit Makers (long before the World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band tag came into being), the group epitomized the political climate of its period.
Just listen to the foreboding opening of Gimme Shelter and you're sent hurtling back to a time when the '60s peace and love movement was overshadowed by Vietnam, political assassinations and the Altamont disaster.
Oh, a storm is threat'ning / My very life today /If I don't get some shelter / Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away / War, children, it's just a shot away.
''Music does have a huge emphasis on the way a culture interacts,'' says John Lennon, 30, a visiting assisting professor of American Studies at the University of Miami. (Yes, that is his name.)
That era theoretically ended with the Altamont concert in 1969, when members of the Hell's Angels gang served as security -- and one of the bikers stabbed a fan to death during the Stones' performance. Around this time, the blues-based Stones answered The Beatles' old-fashioned swan song Let It Be with the deeper, darker and more potent Let It Bleed.
THE ANTI-BEATLES
''The Stones took over, became the anti-Beatles and the darker side of what rock can represent,'' Lennon says. ``They were a reflection of the time and from the begining they were good marketers and still continue to be good marketers. That is part of who they are.''
The image cemented itself in the '70s, arguably the Stones' creative heyday in the studio.
The band epitomized the excesses of the '70s during a time when New York hotspot Studio 54 challenged President Carter for newspaper headlines with tales of rampant drug use, a throbbing disco soundtrack and sex on display. Jagger was a jet-setter, married, but with a succession of groupies, and Richards' heroin use resulted in an arrest in Canada.
No album in the Stones' canon better represents this decade than the scabrous Some Girls in 1978, a disc many point to as the last great Stones release. When rock needed to marry disco, the hot trend of its day, the Stones responded with Some Girls' No. 1 single, Miss You, Jagger's lusty ode to his then-partner Jerry Hall.
''Their sexuality was perfect for the pre-AIDS times, before feminism took hold, machoism and all that stuff,'' Lennon says.
SIR MICK
Somewhere along the way, however, the Stones took a turn from Satanic Majesties to meeting Her Majesty.
Jagger was knighted by the British monarchy in 2003, much to Richards' chagrin. ''I'd turn it down,'' he says in the Q interview. ``You have to kneel and I'm not going to kneel for no one.''
It's a long way from the anti-establishment days in which the Stones got started. Jagger went ''from being this icon of rebelliousness to being a grandfather shaking his hips and bringing in millions of dollars,'' Lennon says.
But some things never change. When the Stones played black music in segregated America during the Kennedy administration, they were dubbed subversives. Today, Pope Benedict XVI, locked in a time warp of his own, calls the Stones music ``evil.''
Curiously, as the United States grew divided under both Bush administrations, the Stones' music has become more direct and outspoken.
Street Fighting Man, in 1968, musically captures the tumult of the times but its politics are vague, noncommittal: Well then what can a poor boy do / Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band / 'Cause in sleepy London town / There's just no place for a street fighting man.
Contrast that with 1991's obscure Highwire and its commentary on the Gulf War: We sell 'em missiles, we sell 'em tanks / We give 'em credit, you can call up the bank / It's just a business, you can pay us in crude / You'll love these toys, just go play out your feuds.
The new CD's Sweet Neo-Con blasts the current administration: You call yourself a Christian / I think that you're a hypocrite / You say you are a patriot / I think that you're a crock of [expletive].
''The thing is, when we started we sort of were the politics without ever intending to be,'' Jagger told Q. ``We were endangering civilization supposedly by not smiling. But Neo-Con is my perspective on elements in America.''
There may be another reason for the band's long-lived success. Maybe the late Frank Zappa nailed it when he said, ``Rock music is sex. The big beat matches the body's rhythms.''
The Stones' music is anapestic, meaning two short beats, a long beat, then a pause, the exact opposite of our heartbeat.
'Beatles songs are typically -- though not always -- more harmonious . . . whereas the Stones' anapestic rhythms hit the nervous system in a more discordant, exciting, well, frankly sexier way,'' says Miami marketing strategist and Stones fan Betsy Flanagan, 50.
''The difference comes through in the emotional response the listener feels,'' she says.
'It's sex. Sex! That's an important component of rock 'n' roll and it's timeless.''
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| October 18th, 2005 09:06 AM |
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| jb |
Miami is now a Stones town!!!! Ther Argentinian fans behind me in the fan club are , arguably, the greatest people I have ever sat near..they want me to greet them in Argentina next year!!!!!!!!!!!
By the way, H. Cohen replied to my e-mail..the guy is a huge Stones fan..you should e-mial him and tell hin how great his article was......
P.S.-The most interaction b/t Mick and Keith since 89 IMO..having fun and laughing!!!!!! It is just getting better..do not miss this tour!!!!
[Edited by jb] |
| October 18th, 2005 11:04 AM |
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| glencar |
Joshy, PM me his email! |
| October 18th, 2005 11:33 AM |
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| jb |
quote:
glencar wrote:
Joshy, PM me his email!
Did you get my PM..I am extremely hung over and busy!!! See you in Tampa and Charlotte...You are a great guy and I was thrilled to meet you.....It was an honor.........
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/
[Edited by jb] |
| October 18th, 2005 11:39 AM |
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| eXiLe oN 2nD sT |
was Shaq in attendence, or mr wade? |
| October 18th, 2005 11:50 AM |
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| jb |
quote:
eXiLe oN 2nD sT wrote:
was Shaq in attendence, or mr wade?
LOL...Mikch saiD "SHAQ is here tonight-glad we have a full house to pay his salary for next year"..... |
| October 18th, 2005 11:51 AM |
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| glencar |
Joshy, I did get yer PM & responded. Now, I'm off to do some errant errands... |
| October 18th, 2005 01:13 PM |
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| StonesChick |
quote:
eXiLe oN 2nD sT wrote:
was Shaq in attendence, or mr wade?
Mick said that Shaq was in the house.
It was a great show, they sounded awesome, my seats were great! People here told me I was crazy for paying $450 for a ticket, but I don't at all regret buying them. It was great to be so close to the stage....so much fun!!!!!!
The Stones sounded and looked great. The new songs were awesome. Best version of Satisfaction I've ever heard. Midnight Rambler was GREAT!
Recognized a couple of faces from this message board sitting behind me!!! You seemed to be having a blast! lol
What a great night!!! |
| October 18th, 2005 03:03 PM |
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| jb |
Yes. we were!!! |
| October 18th, 2005 03:32 PM |
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| StonesChick |
quote:
jb wrote:
Yes. we were!!!
LOL
Yes, I recognized josh and waved but he didn't know who the heck I was! lol I did check now and then to make sure you are the fan you say you are!! You made me proud!! lol
It was a great show! |
| October 18th, 2005 04:13 PM |
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| Saint Sway |
quote:
VoodooChileInWOnderl wrote:
NAMES & FACES
We all need a Stone who can move on...
There'll be more sympathy for these old devils when they whip up excitement and change things up a bit.
Jon Bream and Chris Riemenschneider | Minneapolis Star Tribune
Posted October 17, 2005
JEFF CHRISTENSEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Add bandmates or touring partners with clout. Can you imagine the rabid reaction if, say, someone such as Bob Dylan or Eric Clapton toured with the Stones? How about Bruce Hornsby, Steve Winwood or even Elton John on keyboards with the Stones? Or maybe a big-name third guitarist such as Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Buddy Guy, Rich Robinson or Clapton.
I agree 100% with everything in this article. It is 100% accurate assesment of what the Stones need to do to shake things up and improve on an otherwise solid show.
The Rich Robinson mention only reafirms that the author is one of the true brilliant minds of our time.
Best and most HONEST Stones review EVER. |
| October 18th, 2005 05:10 PM |
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| winter |
Elton John on key boards? Are you frickin' serious? It would be like the ghost of tours past, except 10X Chuck.
You think SOL is shite, Elton would make the ballads sound like Disney soundtrack songs.
wintah
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| October 18th, 2005 08:35 PM |
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| LadyJane |
Finally found some pix
LJ. |
| October 18th, 2005 10:45 PM |
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| VoodooChileInWOnderl |
I guess those pictures are all by Jeff Christensen as one of them is the very same posted above
Great pix LadyJane, thank you
Here some stand-stills from Miami TV with thanks to Monica
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| October 18th, 2005 10:57 PM |
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| VoodooChileInWOnderl |
One more, same source as Ladyjane's
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| October 18th, 2005 11:29 PM |
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| SweetVirginia |
quote:
LadyJane wrote:
My Mick story is a classic and shall be told to you IN PERSON in NYC!!!!!!!!
A total gentleman....one of the greatest moments of my life. Greatest 20 minutes I should say.
LJ.
Please share this story with us....
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| October 18th, 2005 11:46 PM |
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| khalil78 |
Yeah!!! We wanna know about that incredible moment LadyJane!!!!
Cheers... |
| October 19th, 2005 07:30 AM |
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| LadyJane |
Hmmmmmm...perhaps I need to write that book. 
Okay.....It'll take some time to collect my thoughts. It HAS been 27 years!!! 
Coming soon to a thread near you....LJ's Mick Story.
Apologies NOW to those who have heard this story ad nauseum.
LJ.
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| October 19th, 2005 11:12 AM |
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| SweetVirginia |
quote:
LadyJane wrote:
Coming soon to a thread near you....LJ's Mick Story.
Yipee!
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