To be honest, when by a stroke of heaven I found cheap tickets from some dude named Steve on Ebay five days before the show, I was convulsing with excitement not because I was expecting a fantastic concert, but because we were going to see the Stones. To be a part of history. In the presence of legend. Taste the near-dead, barely lingering strands of the time when the whole music scene appears to have been damn cool. I was expecting them to rock my world on an existential, and not a bodily, level.
I was wrong, of course. The stadium darkened, the stage lit up with obnoxious neon lights and then they stormed out with more vigor than any other near-septuagenarians I can think of.
They were all there-Charlie Watts, looking surprisingly attractive (or, alternately, sexy as all hell) in a red muscle shirt with short-cropped, bleached hair; Ron Wood, with the familiar shag cut and ironic smile; Keith, looking terrifyingly like Freddy Krueger but not seeming to care; and finally Mick, live and in person and living up to every bit of his reputation as an irrepressible showman.
I think it took us to about halfway through the opener, "Brown Sugar," to realize what was happening. The prevalent source of joy wasn't nostalgia, but rather a tangible, in-the-moment exhilaration.
The Stones stuck, for the most part, to greatest hits, with what seemed like a good 80 percent of the songs coming off of two albums, "Let It Bleed" and "Beggar's Banquet." The stage shot flames during "Sympathy for the Devil"; the encore was, as everyone knew it would be, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." But these renditions didn't have the air of indulgence that I've seen at other shows, instances in which the band knows what the audience wants and obliges without much enthusiasm, sometimes as a reward for sitting through other, less popular, songs.
Not the Stones. At one point, during "Honky-Tonk Women," they had the giant screen lit up with an animated cartoon of a topless woman riding the famous red Rolling Stones tongue, brandishing a whip and moaning with pleasure. I can't think of anyone else with the blatant audacity to pull such a thing off. It was strikingly apparent, throughout the show, that they couldn't give a fuck what the audience thought. The only people they were bothered about pleasing were themselves.
It's this factor, I think, that saved the Stones from being in any way pitiful. They weren't performing because they used to be the Stones-they were just performing because they damn well wanted to.
I was remembering the feeling I got at a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers show I went to last summer. While it was enchanting and utterly memorable, the show had an unmistakable tone of wistful, affectionate nostalgia. Petty's set list was pretty much straight off their "Greatest Hits" record, and there was a sort of camaraderie between them and the audience, as though everyone were saying, 'I know it doesn't exist anymore, but let's all go back to the time when we made and loved and lived this music.'
The difference with the Stones is that not only do they not make excuses, they don't stride around pretending to be 24-year olds, either. On the one hand, I don't think there was a moment when Mick wasn't in motion onstage, leaping, dancing, swiveling his hips, hollering at the audience-and you can't fake that energy, not at the age of 59.
On the other hand, when he got cold, he donned a hoodie-and then, completely without apologies leapt rapaciously into the next song. The result is that no one in their right minds could presume to feel pity towards the Stones-you just wouldn't have the right.
Which leads us to the main reason the Stones still work: the absolutely inexhaustible Mick Jagger. His sneer is intact, his gusto undiminished. Dressed in tight black pants, a see-through black rhinestone-studded shirt and various outrageous jackets, the man performed as though actually possessed by the devil.
There are literally no words to describe the charisma and impudence he brought to the stage, nor can his effect be undervalued. Case in point: at one point Mr. Jagger decided he no longer needed his microphone-both hands were necessary to thrust at the audience.
Rather than running over and replacing it into the stand, he simply stuck it into his pants and swaggered on. At one point during the show my co-editor Allie turned to me and summed up what every person in that audience had to have been thinking: "Tia, right now he could have any woman in the audience he wanted. And half the men, too."