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Friday, November 29, 2002 Out of Gas Though still packing arenas, Rolling Stones just a shell of former selves By DOUG ELFMANREVIEW-JOURNAL
When the four aging members of the Rolling Stones perform in stadiums and arenas, they beef up the band with horn players, keyboard players and other musicians. "It's like a vaudeville troupe," says Stephen Davis, author of the unauthorized tome, "Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-Year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones." "Is this the Rolling Stones or a Las Vegas act?" It's fitting then that the Stones play an intimate show at the Hard Rock tonight, followed by a big extravaganza on Saturday at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. Davis, who has followed the Stones since the 1960s, witnessed the band's one of the most recent, Vegas-y concerts in Davis' hometown of Boston. "It's not the Rolling Stones I remember as a callow youth," Davis says. Bassist Bill Wyman is 66 years old, Davis points out. And when Wyman goes on solo tours, even Wyman slags the Stones as an oldies act. "In 10 years, we're going to be seeing Mick (Jagger), Keith (Richards) and Charlie (Watts) on stools doing the blues, doing Howling Wolf songs," he says. "The Stool Tour of 2112 will be a gas. People will be paying $3,500 a ticket to sit in a room with those guys, and it'll be good, too." As things stand, the Stones didn't even release a new album of all-original material before touring. Instead, the new best-of compilation, "Forty Licks," includes just four new songs. Davis says the remastered old songs sound greatly detailed. But the subsequent tour has sparked less press interest than have previous Stones outings. Making the band seem even older was the way it announced the tour, by flying around in a zeppelin. "That was all old, London showbiz. It's like P.T. Barnum in the digital age," Davis says. "And other than Keith (appearing) half-naked on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, and in Fortune magazine, there's not that much buzz." In a very real sense, the aging of the band led Davis to name his book "Old Gods Almost Dead," a "loving poke" at his heroes, he says, named partly in ode to a Robert Graves poem, but also because the Stones "are godlike, and they kind of look almost dead." Davis thinks the last great Stones album, 1983's "Undercover," which featured one of the band's most arresting rockers, "Undercover of the Night," was also the last time the Stones sounded like the Stones of old. In the time since then, the Stones have been bypassed by musical inventions of time, as have other old rock bands. "The long-haired rock virtuoso has been replaced by the bald turntablist," Davis says. "The ritualistic rock concert has been replaced by the democratic rave. And now the record store has been replaced by downloading a file. The mystique is gone. There used to be an incredible mystique about rock and roll. You had to drive to a concert to see what a band looked like. Now you just turn on a TV." Even so, the Stones remain even more influential than the Beatles, Davis argues. "Because I'm very pro-Stones, I think the least-told truth is to say how important they are. It's easy to slag them for their decadence and how immoral they are. But they are really the linchpin of pop culture, post-war. They intersected with Allen Ginsburg and Andy Warhol and the Beatles. And they sort of energized Bob Dylan to go electric." Davis hears the Stones influence in the new, vintage sound of the Strokes, the Hives and the Vines. Critics have often ascribed those bands' core influence to the spare sounds of the Velvet Underground and other rock bands of that era. "But I think the Velvet Underground came out of the Stones," Davis says. "The Velvet Underground formed in 1965. They were obviously looking for their own sound. They went dark." And the Stones were proto dark. "That's how the Stones were pitched to us in the '60s, as the anti-Beatles. And it worked. The Beatles were these insolent, cheeky kids who were clean. The Stones were sold to us as a street gang with attitude." Likewise, Davis thinks of the Strokes movement as a reach-back to the time of early Stones. And the Stones were themselves influenced by the heritage of blues forefather Robert Johnson. "When the Stones started in the '60s, they were 30 years removed from Robert Johnson. Now, these groups are 40 years removed from the Stones." How far the Stones have journeyed from London is evident in the band's evolution into a money-making machine. Tickets to tonight's Hard Rock show top out at more than $1,000, the biggest ticket in high-priced Vegas, perhaps ever. Davis says a recent article in Fortune tracks the band's move from blues to green. "They started out as five, young teenage guys on an improbable quest to rescue the blues, and," Davis says, "ended up 40 years later as a plutonian, offshore business." The Stones are so conscious of money that guitarist Ron Wood, who joined the group in 1976, has said in an interview that 1992 arrived before he was finally granted a cut of the band's royalties. And even then, Jagger voted against giving Wood royalties, Davis says. The band's calculated financial moves go less reported than the seedier stuff: Richards' longtime addiction to heroin, Wood's alcoholism and rumors and confirmed stories about other drug use in the band, he says. "I think most of the propaganda is just press bullshit about how much drugs they took and how debauched they are," Davis says. Otherwise, they'd all be dead. As the Stones push on, the band is caught in the position of growing old in a young man's field. "In the end, what's rock and roll really all about? It's a mating dance," Davis says. But Richards, for one, has tried to find a place in the world for his graying group, Davis says. "People say (to Richards), `When is rock going to be over for you?' And he says, `I want to make this thing grow up.' " That mature angle helps the Stones, as well as other old bands such as Aerosmith, to keep moving, Davis says. Well, Davis says, maturity is one reason, "other than money and ambition." |
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