Fifty years... “You can’t get away from that number,” Keith Richards said with a chuckle by telephone from Paris, where the Rolling Stones have been rehearsing for arena concerts and have played guerrilla club and theater shows. The Stones, led by Mick Jagger and Richards (although the other members have changed), played their first gig in 1962. And with less than two months remaining in this anniversary year, the machinery of commemoration and promotion has swung into motion.
There are arena concerts scheduled in London and Newark. There are documentaries new and old, as well as a comprehensive retrospective of Rolling Stones films and videos at the Museum of Modern Art. There are even two new Stones songs recorded this year: Doom and Gloom, a Jagger song that mentions fracking, and One More Shot, written by Richards.
In one way, the Stones have been doing the same thing for half a century: playing obstinately unpolished rock ’n’ roll. It’s American music— blues, country, R&B, gospel— refracted through English sensibilities while ditching decorum and riding the backbeat. Yet around that music, every conceivable meaning has changed.
What once was taken as radical, wanton, and even dangerous has become old-school and privileged; tickets for the band’s two shows at the Prudential Center in Newark run $95 to $750 plus fees. (The show will also be a pay-per-view broadcast.) The songs that once outraged parents are now oldies to pass on to the grandchildren. “You’d gone all the way from ‘It’s too dangerous to go’ to people bringing their children” to shows, Jagger said from Paris. “It became a family outing.” And a band that was once synonymous with a riotous volatility has become— despite all commercial, cultural, and chemical odds— a symbol of stability. Members now describe the band with an unexpected word for the Rolling Stones: discipline. “It requires quite a bit of discipline to be a Rolling Stone,” Richards said. “Although it seems to be shambolic, it’s a very disciplined bunch.”
Interviewed separately, the guitarist Ronnie Wood, who joined the band in 1975, agreed. “No matter what was going on the outside, no matter how much we whooped it up,” he said, “we felt a responsibility, and we still do, to make great music.”
Simple familiarity, through the passage of time and generations, is one reason the Stones’ popularity has endured. Yet since the late 1980s, when the Stones pulled themselves together to make Steel Wheels and return to the stadium circuit, arguably every tour and album has been largely a victory lap for what they accomplished in their first twenty years.
By then, Jagger and Richards had forged a catalog of great songs as diverse as The Last Time, (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, Ruby Tuesday, No Expectations, Honky Tonk Women, Brown Sugar, and Gimme Shelter. There’s no naïveté in Stones songs; they have worn well.
The band’s box office potential is unmistakable. Latter-day Stones studio albums, when they get around to making them— the last one was A Bigger Bang, back in 2005— have each sold at least a million copies in the United States without major hit singles. Richards’ 2010 autobiography, Life, topped The New York Times’ best-seller list, and deserved to, with its frank and kaleidoscopic mingling of music lore, drug chronicles, romance, strife, loyalty, score-settling, and improbable survival. The Stones dependably sell out arena tours. The fascination continues.
Nostalgia and durable songs are part of the Stones’ perpetual appeal. So are the big-stage rock spectacles that the Stones helped pioneer, with inflatable appendages, pyrotechnics, or perhaps a cherry-picker lifting Jagger over the crowd. (Now Taylor Swift rides one.)
It doesn’t hurt ticket sales that Jagger, at 69, is still limber enough to prance, twitch, and shimmy all over a stage; when Maroon 5 had a hit with Moves Like Jagger, younger listeners needed no footnote. In a heartening sight for his less spry contemporaries and baby boomer fans, Jagger had enough rock-star rambunctiousness to steal the show completely from hit makers less than half his age at the 2011 Grammy Awards. (“That’s pretty easy,” Jagger said from Paris. “If you’re only doing one number, you can tear anything up.”) Video from the Stones’ first concert since 2007, on 25 October at the club Le Trabendo in Paris, shows a band that’s grizzled and scrappy but still game.
Onstage and, far more often than not, in the studio, the Rolling Stones keep their sound loose: it’s practiced and not to be mistaken for sloppy, precisely imprecise. Above Charlie Watts’ drumming, the band’s two guitars share a musical cat’s cradle, constantly twining, unraveling, reconfiguring. “We’re always sliding between rhythm and lead,” Richards said. “It’s an intuitive thing, instinctive. You couldn’t map it.”
Don Was, who produced A Bigger Bang and the band’s two new songs, said: “It’s a beautiful conversation that they have going. Keith will get something that Charlie plays on the high-hat, and it will make him react a certain way, which inspires something Ronnie will do. They’re constantly interacting.”
But songs and showmanship still don’t fully explain the Stones’ hold on their audience. Soon after forming, they made a choice as fateful as their musical tastes. Their early-1960s manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, urged them to become the anti-Beatles: the opposite of an ingratiating, uniformed, clean-cut pop-rock band.
“The Beatles being so squeaky clean, they were obviously wearing the white hat,” Richards recalled. “The other role to play was putting the black hat on. The more the press played up to it, the more you found yourself thrust into the role of the villain. And then you got used to it. It was easier. You could actually be yourself in the Stones.”
That attitude not only freed the Stones to look, behave, and write as they pleased, but also made them rock archetypes, living out a freedom— and license— that most fans could only wish for. Of course there had been earlier R&B and rockabilly wild men, and Jagger clearly studied them, but their careers were briefer or far less celebrated. The Stones, improper Englishmen, breached the mainstream, creating an example for every rock wastrel, talented or untalented, that followed. Decades later, on giant stages amid computer-controlled effects, the Stones’ distant whiff of anarchy is still a draw, especially because it’s underscored by the tight-but-loose sound of the band, the way even venerable songs sound up for grabs.
The Stones’ seizing of their outlaw archetype is the through line of Crossfire Hurricane, a documentary that hurtles through the band’s first twenty years on HBO. “They start off playing this role, they become the role, and then the role nearly kills them,” said the director, Brett Morgen. Yet eventually, as Jagger says in the film, the Stones change from being “the band everybody hated to the band everybody loves.”
Crossfire Hurricane draws on older Stones documentaries that now look startlingly candid. Early material comes from Charlie Is My Darling, Peter Whitehead’s documentary of a chaotic 1965 Stones tour of Ireland that found concerts regularly cut short as audiences stormed the stage; that entire film has just been released on DVD, along with crackling live performances from the same era. The youthful Rolling Stones are earnest, thoughtful, and amused by the frenzy their performances set off. “We were such nice children, underneath it all,” Jagger recalled. “It’s the blowback from Andrew Oldham: The Rolling Stones are the rebels. And the blowback was quite intense, because you got labeled with this and it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Violence gave way to decadence. The Stones ended an American tour with the bleak 1969 Altamont concert in California, where four people died, and largely withdrew to studios to record two of their masterpieces: Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street. (The run of great albums began with Beggars Banquet in 1968 and Let It Bleed in 1969.) Cameras followed them to the Exile recording sessions— stoked, as Richards wrote in his book, by cocaine and heroin— and onto the road in 1972, where Robert Frank shot a rarely shown film with an unprintable title. Crossfire Hurricane includes uninhibited outtakes from that film, with casual nudity and open drug use. “I was a very well-adjusted” addict, Richards said. “I never felt that it hindered what I did. But it was a strange place to find yourself in and an experiment that went on far too long.”
It couldn’t last. After a 1977 arrest in Toronto threatened to imprison him and break up the band— and inspired one of his best songs, Before They Make Me Run— Richards ended his heroin habit. “I don’t miss it anymore,” he said. “But I do dream of it sometimes.” He was reminded his new song is One More Shot. He replied: “You can shoot a lot of things.”
After Wood joined the Stones, the band had its best-selling album with Some Girls in 1978, kicking back at the disco and punk coming out of New York City. Yet, by the early 1980s, the band’s camaraderie was disappearing; “World War Three” was how Richards has described his friction with Jagger. “It was a very difficult time,” Jagger said. “Everyone had had enough of it— a bit bored, really. Not so many great things in there.” Jagger, and then Richards, started bands of their own while making desultory Stones albums.
But with Steel Wheels in 1989, the Stones re-emerged in its current guise: a band that does flashy megatours about every five years, tied to a new album or, this time around, a hits compilation with the two new songs (titled Grrr!).
“People say, ‘Oh, it’s a business,’” Jagger said. “It’s not really the business of it. It’s the creation of the whole thing. Of course the money thing is part of it, but the most important part is getting the thing on the road, with hundreds of people and tons and tons of equipment. It’s an interesting undertaking.” Jagger added: “When you’re at the beginning of your career, you’re in the band 24 hours a day. But, as you get older, you don’t want to be doing that. I think the band is fine being in the band, and the band rather likes not being in the band, too. That’s a good balance.”
The Stones say that morale is high at the Paris rehearsals. “Once the guitar straps are put over their heads, it’s back into it,” Watts said. “We’ve been doing it so long now, it’s what we do.”
The band is delving into its catalog, but Jagger knows the audience expects hits. “I don’t want to be totally predictable, which is kind of hard when you’ve been doing something for fifty years,” he said. “It’s the Rolling Stones onstage. You know what it’s like. They do Honky Tonk Women. They do Satisfaction. People coming to a fiftieth-anniversary show want some kind of predictability.”
Richards pronounced himself “amazed” at the band’s longevity. “There is a certain magnetic glue that pulls us all together, that overrides any other peripheral things,” he said. “Once we get behind our instruments there’s something bigger. The sum is greater than the parts. There’s just a feeling that we were meant to do this, we have to do this, and we’re just following the trail.”
Rico says he's never seen the Stones live, and wouldn't pay what it'll take to do so, but he'll abscond with 'grizzled and scrappy but still game' as his self-description, even though Mick is nearly a decade older...
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