There are arena concerts scheduled in London (Nov. 25 and 29) and Newark (Dec. 13 and 15). There are documentaries new (on HBO) and old (on DVD), as well as a comprehensive retrospective of Rolling Stones films and videos at the Museum of Modern Art from Nov. 15 to Dec. 2. 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 Mr. 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, 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 Dec. 15 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, Mr. 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,” Mr. 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 20 years.
By then Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards had forged a catalog of great songs as diverse as — for starters — “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. Mr. Richards’s 2010 autobiography, “Life,” topped The New York Times’s 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 Mr. Jagger over the crowd. (Now Taylor Swift rides one.)
It doesn’t hurt ticket sales that Mr. 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, Mr. 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,” Mr. 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 Oct. 25 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’s drumming the band’s two guitars share a musical cat’s cradle, constantly twining, unraveling, reconfiguring. “We’re always sliding between rhythm and lead,” Mr. Richards said. “It’s an intuitive thing, instinctive. You couldn’t map it.”
by Jon Pareles, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Credit: Bob Gruen
