|
|
| CS |
A senior moment
he Rolling Stones fend off questions about their advancing years as they mount yet another mammoth tour.
By BERNARD WEINRAUB
The New York Times
Ask Mick Jagger about growing old - and everyone does ask - and he grimaces.
"Musicians don't think about this very much," said Jagger, 59, seated in a hotel room in Chicago, where the Rolling Stones performed three recent sold-out concerts.
"Rock 'n' roll requires a certain amount of energy," he explained. "You just can't do rock 'n' roll sitting on a bicycle going 10 miles an hour. You really have to wind the energy level up - that's part of the main ingredient. It's not like you have to be a brilliant musician, but you need a kind of explosive kind of musical energy to play rock 'n' roll well. And we have that."
The Stones will bring that energy to Southern California for three shows, beginning Thursday night at Staples Center in Los Angeles. They'll also play Nov. 2 at Edison Field in Anaheim and Nov. 4 at L.A.'s cozy Wiltern Theatre.
Keith Richards, the Stones' legendary guitarist, put his view of aging another way. Seated backstage at Comiskey Park before one of the Chicago concerts, Richards, also 59, sipped a glass of orange juice. Incense burned beside an ash tray as he lighted a cigarette.
"I want to do it like Muddy Waters - till I drop," he said.
The Rolling Stones, who have defined rock 'n' roll as much as any group for more than 35 years, insist, almost defiantly, that their creative vitality and, yes, their health are thriving. Having become enormously wealthy as members of the most successful rock band in history - the Stones' 1994 "Voodoo Lounge" tour grossed an industry record of $124 million - they said they had no desire to settle down in their mansions.
"This is not something you retire from," Richards said. "It's your life. Writing songs and playing is like breathing - you don't stop."
Richards lives in Weston, Conn., with his wife, former model Patti Hansen, and their two teenage children. (He also has two older children from his long relationship with actress Anita Pallenberg in the 1960s and '70s.)
"The Stones are incredibly strong and a well-oiled machine," he said. "Ideas keep popping up. After every tour - you've been on the road maybe three years - you go home and forget about it for, like, a year, and then after about 18 months, you start to expect a phone call. And after a few weeks, it'll be like Mick or Charlie saying, 'Are we going to do anything?'."
Charlie Watts, 61, the band's quiet drummer who has served as a mediator in the periodically strained Jagger-Richards relationship over the years, wasn't defensive about his age.
"I think about the age issue myself," he said. "It doesn't upset me when journalists talk about it. I do know that I saw Duke Ellington when he was in his 70s, and he was fabulous. And he toured every day of his life. We lead a cushy life by comparison."
In the cities they have visited in their North American tour - Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia - the Stones have performed in locations of different sizes. The variety enables them to play contrasting shows. Richards called it "the Fruit of the Loom tour - small, medium and large."
Even the Stones are impressed by their ability to do what many other rock stars and bands could not: physically survive the '60s and '70s. But they almost didn't. Brian Jones, their most musically adventurous member, who left the band while battling drug problems, was found dead in his swimming pool on July 3, 1969. The coroner's report cited "death by misadventure."
Richards has acknowledged that he spent most of the '70s as a heroin addict in a narcotic haze. He said his arrest by Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1977 in a Toronto hotel room finally led him to beat his addiction, though the charges of heroin and cocaine possession hung over him for 18 months, threatening to land him in prison for a long time and end the Stones' career. (He was given a one-year suspended sentence.)
"I know I was the most likely to die," said Richards, his famous face heavily lined by years of hard living. "It was an experiment that went on far too long, and it's the only thing in the world that ever beat me. And I put up a hell of a fight.
"I think what dope sort of initially gave me was a certain barrier between myself and what was actually going on," he said, taking a long drag of his unfiltered cigarette. He described a kind of dual existence.
"I really wasn't living in a rock 'n' roll jet-set fantasy. I was down in the street, trying to get my stuff and meeting very, very interesting, bizarre characters as a result. In that way it was like another life."
As he put it: "OK, one half of you is famous. You can have this Rolls-Royce and all that, and the other is like being in the gutter, and always keeping one foot in it."
The lives of the Stones - especially Jagger's marriages and affairs - have threatened, at times, to overshadow their music. But even after four decades, they seem intensely engaged in their work as musicians.
Richards said his sometimes-tense relations with Jagger were, for the moment, smooth. He once called Jagger "a lunatic with a Peter Pan complex." He had also been critical of Jagger's knighting this year, saying it distanced the band from its scrappy roots. And he has made blunt comments about Jagger's solo project last year, "Goddess in the Doorway."
But whatever their ups and downs, the two musicians have been in each other's lives since childhood. They went to the same elementary school, and then ran into each other at the Dartford, Kent, train station in 1961.
Jagger, on the way to classes at the London School of Economics, was carrying some American rhythm and blues records he had bought via mail order from Chess Records in Chicago. Richards was bound for Sidcup Art College. They became friends, and the Rolling Stones formed the next year, taking their name from the classic Muddy Waters blues tune "Rollin' Stone."
Richards said his relationship with Jagger was complicated but that they were inextricably bound to each other.
"I mean I don't know the man for nothing - once in a while he needs to be put in his place," Richards said with a smile. "We've known each other since we were 4 years old. We are very different people in many ways. It's strange. We know when to stay apart and when to let things bring us together. We can't get divorced. You can get rid of the old lady, but I can't get rid of Mick, and he can't get rid of me."
� Where: Staples Center, 1111 S. Figueroa St., Los Angeles; Edison International Field of Anaheim, 2000 E. Gene Autry Way; Wiltern Theatre, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles
� When: 8 p.m. Thursday (Staples Center); 7 p.m. Nov. 2 (Edison Field); 8 p.m. Nov. 4 (Wiltern Theatre)
� How much: Some $90 tickets are still available for Edison Field. Other shows are sold out.
� Call: (714) 740-2000
� Online: www.ticketmaster.com
|
|
CHAT ROOM aka THE FUN HOUSE] [
RESTROOMS]