| 23rd September 2006 10:15 AM |
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| moy |
Rolling through life as a Stones fan
Connecting with the music, from the '60s to their 60s
BY STEVE PARKS
Newsday Staff Writer
September 23, 2006
Forty years later, they still make a grown man rock.
And I don't mean in a chair.
The first Rolling Stones tour I caught didn't have a name. Not like the post-apocalyptic "A Bigger Bang," which brings the band back to Giants Stadium Wednesday night.
This also has been my personal Rolling Stones Nostalgia World Tour. In less than a year, I've caught them in San Diego, Baltimore and, last month, in Cardiff, Wales.
On Nov. 13, 1965 - the date of my first-ever Stones gig - tickets were $4.75. Last time, I paid 555 pounds for three. That was $333 each. I bought them online even before booking the trip. My wife, Liz, complained about the expense, but not about vacationing in the United Kingdom. If we had trouble getting a flight or a room, we could always sell Stones tickets on eBay.
What makes a grown man, AARP-eligible, stick his neck out like this? Dragging his wife (a Dylan fan) and daughter (she swoons for Dane Cook and Ashton Kutcher) 3,500 trans-Atlantic miles to see these living relics of rock and roll?
It's still fun
No one says it out loud, but I can hear what they're thinking: Aren't you too old for this?
OK, yeah, I am too old to fulfill my oldest fantasy. I was 10 when I first saw Brooks Robinson play third base for the Orioles; 18 when I first saw the Stones. A few seasons back, I gave up my dream of becoming a major-league ballplayer. Although Mick Jagger once said famously he wouldn't be caught dead singing "Satisfaction" after age 30, I still sing it in the shower.
But lately, I've grown partial to a lyric Keith Richards now sings with exultant poignancy. One of his solos on the current tour is "Before They Make Me Run." It brought tears to my eyes in Cardiff when he sang, "Gotta move while it's still fun." Richards will be 63 on his next birthday, Dec. 18.
Meanwhile, Jagger, who turned 63 on July 26, for the first time resorted to a voice coach to keep his vocal cords in shape. (He also employs two personal trainers, which only begins to explain why he can prance like an adolescent on speed and still have breath to sing, "Lord, I miss you!" without missing a beat.) Jagger and Richards - who both look their ages, and in Richards' case, then some - each gave me a scare before we flew to London, canceling shows on the continent due to Jagger's laryngitis and Richards' convalescence from a head injury. The old joke Richards greets us with has acquired a new edge: "It's good to be here; it's good to be anywhere!"
That's part of the geezer allure, no doubt. The Stones and me: '60s survivors.
Back in the day - say, 18 years before I met my wife of 22 years now - the girls I dated (or tried to) favored "bad boys." They'd go out with guys who sulked like James Dean after being celebrated for getting suspended from school. Jagger, who spurned the London School of Economics to join a rock band, and Richards, recovering choirboy/art-school dropout, became my unrepentant teen idols. Mostly because they weren't so adorable as the Beatles. And, unlike the Fab Four, they survived - never outgrowing their bad-boy reputations. Like gray-beard Peter Pans with an attitude.
New and relevant music
If the Stones had evolved into an oldies band, coming out of retirement every few years for a shakedown, I would've lost interest. But for all the jokes about their age and the steep price for their concerts, the Stones still make new and relevant music. They're the only band I know of that wrote an anti-war song about the first Persian Gulf war. And "Sweet Neo Con," on their latest CD, is as blunt an indictment of the Bush-Blair axis as you'll hear outside of hip-hop.
The Stones still speak my language - first articulated in the ardent maelstrom of the '60s - and they still make me want to dance like there's no tomorrow.
I was just out of high school, anticipating my freshman mid-terms at the University of Maryland, when I first saw the lads from London. Four years my senior, the Stones seemed almost of another generation. And, indeed, they still are counted as part of the generation that preceded us baby boomers. "Satisfaction," the all-time rock classic with the "can't-get-no" subtitle, was released in the States between my high school graduation and first day of college. I'd worn the grooves out when the Stones dropped in, live, on my world.
They hooked me with their blues cover, "Mona" ("hey, hey, hey Mo-oan-ah"). As a writer, I was charmed by the revelation that if you kept repeating a lyric, you didn't need no stinkin' rhyme.
At my first Stones concert, the lung-amps of squealing, pubescent females obliterated the music. Friends who'd seen the Beatles reported a similar phenomenon: You couldn't hear a note after the opening chord. But, unlike the Beatles, who abruptly gave up touring and soon disbanded, the Stones went on to invent the modern rock concert.
After 1966, I didn't see the Stones until Thanksgiving Eve 1969, a moonless wedge between Woodstock and Altamont. In advance of the tour promoting their "Let It Bleed" LP, Jagger brazenly declared them "The World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band." Even I was skeptical until the Nov. 26, 1969, concert, which played like an unscripted rock opera, complete with sets, costumes, props and the band's own sound system. Tickets were $10; scalpers got $25.
"Pigs" - cops in '60s protest parlance - threatened a teargas evacuation of the Baltimore Civic Center even before the Stones took the stage. Defiance came in the form of an insurgency fueled by Timothy Leary cubes and ubiquitous joint-passing. So when Jagger appeared in a reversible black and red cape, showering fans with rose petals and crooning, "Pleased to meetcha, hope you guess my name," we played Lucifer. Danger was as palpable as the marijuana canopy hanging over the arena. Especially during the incendiary "Midnight Rambler."
In retrospect, Altamont, the Stones' free concert remembered for a stabbing death, was an inevitable end to the '60s. The "peace, love and understanding" of Woodstock gave way to the real world.
When I flew to the UK last month for my 22nd Stones concert, real-world terror alerts stalked us in airport security lines.
It's been 40-plus years since my first encounter with the band. A few personal highlights:
Self-employed and deep in debt, I skipped the 1972 "Exile on Main Street" tour - the only gap in my Stones resume. By 1978's "Some Girls" tour, fortunes had improved. I splurged on a Winnebago rental and took seven friends along for a concert overnighter to Philadelphia. While thousands camped out in the rain outside JFK Stadium, we slept high and dry, though sleeping arrangements were awkward. Taking the "Some Girls" title literally, I'd invited two women I was dating - separately before that weekend, not at all afterward.
After 1981's "Tattoo You," featuring "Start Me Up," the Stones didn't tour for another eight years, as Jagger and Richards' dueling solo albums threatened a break-up. Meanwhile, my wife and I moved to Long Island. When tickets went on sale for "Steel Wheels," Liz promised to join me. But pregnancy complications hospitalized her. She said it'd be OK for me to "take another date" to see the Stones at Shea Stadium. My wife was still in the hospital a month later when I ordered a Stones pay-per-view. The volume was cranked up so loud on my TV that I couldn't hear the phone call from obstetrics. Liz was in labor, one of several false alarms. So I didn't miss the birth of Rachel, who considerately waited a few weeks - until the tour was over.
On the 2002-03 tour, I shared the Stones with my progeny. I took Rachel, then 12, to Madison Square Garden, where the numbskull seated next to us passed me a joint - give me a break! - which I allowed him to Bogart. I pulled our son, Tyler, out of school for a Stones field trip to Pittsburgh. As cover, we visited Carnegie Mellon, for which I still have college brochures as proof.
And now, "A Bigger Bang." My wife decided she'd sit this one out, too, despite her "right-on" approval of "Sweet Neo Con." But it wasn't politics that propelled me to catch the Stones in November in San Diego. I flew cross-continent to see Jagger, Richards, Charlie Watts, 65, and Ron Wood, 59, with my old (make that former) college girlfriend whose hand I squeezed on the first notes of "Sympathy for the Devil" in '69. (The same girl to whom I later dedicated "Dead Flowers." Maybe that's why I won my wife's permission, though I neglected to mention that "Dead Flowers" is a sweet, if perverse, love song: "Send me dead flowers to my wedding/and I won't forget to put roses on your grave.")
'This is a seated event'
Liz declined again, in February, when I saw the Stones in Baltimore, where they hadn't played since that pre-Altamont date. But all I needed to persuade her to join the UK leg of the tour was a promise to visit Dylan Thomas' birthplace in Swansea, just down the road from Cardiff. (The Welsh poet was inspiration for both the work and name of Bob Dylan, née Zimmerman.) And when we watched the Stones shake the foundations of Millennium Stadium like football heroes, as robust and ribald as ever, this grown man rocked like it was 1969.
Well, almost. Ushers who showed us to our seats passed out slips of paper announcing, "This is a seated event." We were asked not to stand or dance, out of consideration for those seated behind us. That was enough to keep the polite Brits in their seats. I confess that, considering my age - and travel-weariness - I didn't mind. But the Stones, in their 60s, played every bit as nasty as they did in the '60s.
On the drive back to our B&B in the Welsh countryside, hugging the left side of the dark, narrow road, I promised my wife that Cardiff would be the last stop on my Rolling Stones Nostalgia World Tour.
I admit that I don't really need to see them Wednesday in New Jersey. Still, I want to. Why? I don't gamble or do drugs. I gave up smoking 25 years ago. I don't womanize and I don't drink to excess. I even exercise and count calories. The Stones are just about the only vice I have left.
If you happen to see me at Giants Stadium as the lights go up on "You Can't Always Get What You Want," don't tell my wife. |
| 23rd September 2006 10:27 AM |
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| gimmekeef |
Thanks for posting..a great read..... |
| 23rd September 2006 12:02 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
What difference does any of this actually make? The Stones are transendental because good music is transendental. |
| 23rd September 2006 12:22 PM |
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| gimmekeef |
quote:
Ten Thousand Motels wrote:
What difference does any of this actually make? The Stones are transendental because good music is transendental.
Well the guy had a column to do.....nice work I guess if ya can get it... |
| 23rd September 2006 12:22 PM |
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| nankerphelge |
Been to a show yet TTM???
[Edited by nankerphelge] |
| 23rd September 2006 12:35 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
quote:
gimmekeef wrote:
Well the guy had a column to do.....nice work I guess if ya can get it...
Well, I got no problem with the column. The guy's a good writer and a true fan....you can feel the passion between the lines. Just no balance....if I'd've written it I might have at least thrown in one or two clinical lines at the end. But its his piece and I'm sure he got what he wanted...it's a great piece of writing. |
| 23rd September 2006 12:45 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
quote:
nankerphelge wrote:
Been to a show yet TTM???
I'll take the 5th.
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| 23rd September 2006 02:00 PM |
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| SweetVirginia |
"I pulled our son, Tyler, out of school for a Stones field trip to Pittsburgh. As cover, we visited Carnegie Mellon, for which I still have college brochures as proof."
Uh-oh...I hope my daughter's HS principal does not read Newsday! He'll figure out what we were doing in Foxboro. 
[Edited by SweetVirginia] |
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