Mike Bell has offered to bet me five bucks that when the
Rolling Stones come out to play, they will commence their sixth Memphis concert
appearance in the last 40 years with “Start Me Up,” a 1981-vintage rouser that
has made its way into Americana as a marching-band mainstay at football games,
both collegiate and NFL.
I don’t bet, because that’s my thinking, too, and, anyhow,
I wouldn’t want to cost Mike any more than he’s already spent – $750 apiece for
two scalped tickets to this sold-out affair so that he and his 15-year-old daughter
Hillary can sit on the floor of the FedEx Forum, right under the noses of those
seemingly ageless English sexagenarians who evidently will go on playing rock
and roll music as long as Father Time, who’s obviously determined to look the
other way, will let them.
The Bells, father and daughter, hail from Nashville, where
Mike Bell has seen the Stones twice before but which the Stones have skipped
this time around. “I was about eight years old, I think, when I first heard them
– ‘Satisfaction,’ ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’ and all those – and I’ve
never stopped liking ‘em since,” says Mike, who runs a helicopter charter
service. This will be the first Stones concert for daughter Hillary, who attends
prep school at Battleground Academy but has a sensibility that derives more from
hip-hop.
That’s a genre that’s supposed to be about real things but
has turned too “flashy and posey” to maintain its street cred, says Hillary, an
Eminem fan who goes on to deliver a critical rap on the intellectual appeal and
acrobatic skills of Los Lost Boys, Saturday night’s warmup group. Mike should be
proud; he’s raising a charmer whose own persona runs all the way from Hillary
Duff to Greil Marcus.
And suddenly, after a brief video intro featuring
interstellar images, followed by the familiar guitar chords of (yep) “Start Me
Up,” there they are in the stage lights, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards up
front, both wearing sport coats, just as they did when they first played the
Coliseum back in 1965, guitarist Ron Wood and bassist Daryl Jones appearing
next, and Charlie Watts back there on the drum stand.
During the next couple of hours, their positions will
change, so will their wardrobes and stage arrangements (about midway of the
concert they’ll ride a mobile runway into the middle of the floor and then back
again), and they will be joined now and then by keyboards, by a Stax-sounding
horn section, and by a backup vocal trio, all these supportive groups classy
and accomplished and unpretentious, just like the Stones themselves.
For that’s surely the point of this ongoing Faustian epic
that is the Rolling Stones, who are, of course, superb performers but
whose life-work depends less on any musical virtuosity that than on their
fidelity to an adopted folk history – one made up of blues riffs and E chords
and plain but archy vernacular, even when, as in the great anthem “You Can’t
Always Get What You Want,” it’s accompanied by operatic choruses, Old
World-style.
There’s a moment on the DVD that’s included with their new
CD A Bigger Bang (the ostensible reason for the current world tour) when
vocalist Jagger and guitarist Richards, the band’s main songwriters, name
various African-American blues masters as their role models and opine hopefully
that, in their fifth decade of trying, they’ve almost got it right finally.
Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. They’re as good as they
ever were, anyhow – which is as good as anybody gets at rock and roll. The
current Stones lineup is marginally changed from the original one. Co-founder
Brian Jones died long ago, of course; guitarist Mick Taylor came and went (to be
succeeded by Wood); and Bill Wyman, who’s pushing 70, finally hung up his bass.
In the course of doing “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll” Saturday night, Jagger made a
point of thumping his chest when he got to the line “Can’t you see this old
boy’s getting lonely?”
Four or five serviceable tunes from the new album were
mixed in Saturday night with what amounted to a medley of the old songs (a
partial list: “Shattered,” “Tumbling Dice,” “Angie,” “Miss You,” “Gimme
Shelter,” “Brown Sugar,” “19th Nervous Breakdown”) and homages to the
likes of Ray Charles and Otis Redding.
Results of the physical: Keith looked and (on his two
obligatory lead vocals) sounded haggard, and he moved like Vincent Price on reds
– just as in 1965, 1975, 1978, 1994, and 1999; Charlie was white-haired, serene,
and crisp; Mick’s dervish-like stage strut and sluttish posturing were on point;
and Ronnie looked the right degree of Rushmorian. No reason why this act can’t
go on forever.
After all, as
the second of their two encores suggested, they still can’t get no
(satisfaction). Thank God. That means these old boys’ll keep trying.
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