STILL KINGS OF THE STONE AGE
SIXTY YEARS since their debut – and three founder members down – it must surely be All Over Now for the Rolling Stones? Loud in music business circles is the gossip, questioning again whether this current tour will be The Last Time. “They’ve been asking that,” scoffs Sir Mick Jagger, “since 1964.”
Back on the road performing European dates following their rearranged No Filter American outing last year, and heading for a huge gig in London’s Hyde Park this month, the band remain one of the most popular live acts in history.
Veterans of more than 2,000 concerts and counting, no group, not even the Beatles, continues to attract greater legend. And with the exception of The Who, also reduced to just two original members, no other rock band has lasted this long.
So how do they do it? What is it about them? What enabled them to deliver, for example, the highestgrossing music tour in history, A Bigger Bang, in 2005, when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were already well into their 60s?
That tour included a free onenighter on Rio’s Copacabana Beach in front of two million people, breaking records as the largest rock concert ever staged.
Any other band might have seized upon such a phenomenon as a fitting farewell to an incomparable career. Not the Stones. As far as they were concerned, it was just another night. Business as usual.
So the show goes on for these gnarled, greying caricatures, whose faces and voices are as familiar as our own. No mere seasoned performers, they are also songwriting and recording superstars, with estimated sales of more than 240 million units.
They hold three Grammys and a Lifetime Achievement Award. They are members of both the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the UK Music Hall of Fame.
And in September 2020, they broke the UK’S Official Charts record with the re-release of their 1973 album Goats Head Soup.
Not only do they now have 13 No.1 albums to their name, equalling Elvis Presley and Robbie Williams, the achievement made them the first band in history to score a No.1 album in six different decades.
With a combined age of 232, the band’s core line-up – Mick, “Keef” and new boy Ronnie Wood, who replaced the late Brian Jones’s replacement Mick Taylor only 47 years ago – continue to wield vast global influence.
Despite the sad, not unexpected death of their 80-year-old drummer Charlie Watts last year, they show no inclination to retire. Indeed Richards,
‘We depend on their presence’
who has survived numerous scrapes including heroin addiction and emergency brain surgery following a near-fatal fall from a tree, declared that the curtain will never come down until he drops dead live, as it were, on stage.
Long have we pondered the mystery of their magic. Yet to me it’s quite simple: the secret to their longevity is their longevity.
They have been around for so long, still a live band, still out there doing it, banging out the familiar hits to which we all know the words and tunes, that we depend on their presence as much as we rely on Her Majesty the Queen.
There has never been a time in living memory, for the vast majority, when the Stones have not existed.
Even during their darkest days of feuding – such as during 1985’s Live Aid, to which Mick’s contribution was a pre-recorded song-and-dance routine with David Bowie, while Keith and Ronnie accompanied Bob Dylan badly on stage in Philadelphia – we still had the Stones’ vast, indelible back catalogue to keep us warm.
Songs such as Jumpin’ Jack Flash, (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, Honky Tonk Women, The Last Time, Get Off of My Cloud, Let’s Spend the Night Together and Ruby Tuesday are never going away.
If there is such a thing as a soundtrack to our collective life, those songs and many more are dead-cert tracks on it.
Stones hits still fill the mixed-age wedding-reception dancefloor as few other recordings can. Yet in nine out of ten weddings, I’d wager the bride and groom were not even born when the singles to which they jig with such gay abandon were first hits.
FACTOR in their against-theodds ability to stay alive this long, despite lifestyles that would have put most of us below ground donkey’s years ago, and you begin to get the picture.
Recognising the need to tone things down in order to stay the course, Mick readily relinquished his earlier hard-partying incarnation to train harder than an Olympic athlete.
He still does. At 79, he boasts the physique and stamina of a teenage boy, with a reportedly undiminished sex drive.
Keith, otherwise known and loved as “the human riff”, quit heroin and
the equivalent substances that over the years had threatened with alarming regularity to relieve him of his liberty and life.
He has long looked as though he has been exhumed, or at least extracted from a microwave.
Yet he seems more at home than ever in his decaying-pirate skin.
AS FOR BEAKY, crowcoiffed Ronnie, who was relatively clean-living for years, he suffered a cataclysmic latelife crisis in the early 2000s when he turned back to the bottle and dumped devoted wife Jo for a 20-something Kazakhstani waitress.
Jo divorced him. His mistress faded away. He was saved by sensible Sally Humphreys, the theatre producer who became his third wife.
Their twin daughters were born in 2016, a 69th birthday present for the doting dad.
Another facet of their endurance, often overlooked, is that they never give up when one of their number dies or leaves. They simply replace him with a newer, younger model.
To a point. Bassist Bill Wyman’s long-serving replacement Darryl Jones is electrifying on stage, but he is still a mere session musician, a hired hand. Even though he has been with the Stones since 1993, he will never be a recognised member of the band.
The same goes for Steve Jordan, Charliewatt’s payroll replacement.
Compare and contrast with the Beatles. When Paul Mccartney walked in 1970, there could be no substitution. It spelled the end of the long and winding road for the Fabs.
Then there is the paradox of the Stones’ arrested development.
Did they implode creatively after albums Let It Bleed (1969), Sticky Fingers (1971), Exile On Main Street (1972) and Goats Head Soup (1973), or was the pulling up of the innovative Stones drawbridge deliberate?
Did it occur to them that their style and output had crystallised into such a unique sound that they’d be dicing with death to risk changing and adapting it further?
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, could be the reason why the Stones’ songwriting more or less dried up.
Nit-pickers will point to 1981’s Tattoo You as the last great Rolling Stones album.they forget that it was a trifle of outtakes and unfinished numbers assembled by producer Chris Kimsey at a time when Mick and Keith were barely speaking.
Yes, there has been more recent band output, as well as an abundance of solo offerings, but little of it compares to what they released during their heyday. Their most recent album, 2016’s Blue And Lonesome, was a collection of covers of their favourite blues songs by their earliest inspirations, the likes of Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf and Jimmy Reed.
Featuring Eric Clapton on a pair of tracks, it zapped to No.1 in Britain and debuted at No.4 on the US Billboard 200. Result.
But an obsession with money and shameless commercialism, not their music, were what made the Stones international superstars.
From band to brand was the makeor-break move: the biggest rock’n’ roll brand in the world. And they have moved with the times, harnessing digital technology and using it to further their reach and cause.
Young fans in thrall to the mobile phone become addicted by stealth, to both the extraordinary, cohesive chemistry of the band and to their peculiar brand of nostalgia.
For as much as the Stones still sound fresh and “now”, they also smack blatantly of there’ll-alwaysbe-an-england. There is a whiff of Branston pickle, malt vinegar and HP Sauce about them.
Their sound evokes a simpler era, long-gone but stretched like knicker elastic into the future, the old wooden-spooned as if by magic into the new.
Early blues and rock’n’roll influences combined with their own melodic and lyrical impulses and those of rudimentary rock’n’roll gave us a completely new musical category: the genre we refer to as “rock” today.
If the Stones did not invent this single-handedly, they have done more than any other group to cement its relevance.
‘They evoke a simpler era’
IF THERE is such a thing as the X-factor, it surely derives from the ability to regurgitate something that is already popular and make it sound like nothing anyone has played or sung before. No one has done this better than the Rolling Stones.
How much longer have they got? As long as Mick and Keith are still breathing.as long as there are fans to cherish their raunchily comforting sound, preserving its worth in the face of fuming cancel-culturists.their legacy is the fact that it’s only rock’n’roll.we like it.they are ours.
The Stone Age: Sixtyyears of the Rolling Stones by Lesley-ann Jones (John Blake, £20) is out now. For free UK P&P, visit expressbookshop. com or call
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