When the Rolling Stones take the stage at Barclays Center on Saturday for the first of three US concerts marking their 50th anniversary — which follow a pair of similar shows in London last month — it’s a safe bet that few of the fans who witnessed the group’s first American appearance in 1964 will be there to greet them.
In those days, the audiences for the self-styled “World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band” were made up almost entirely of screaming teenage girls. When the group appeared at Carnegie Hall, a matinee performance (yes, in those days pop groups gave matinee performances) was stopped after three songs because fans got out of control.
These days, the only screams the group will be likely to attract from teenagers are ones emitted in horror. Meanwhile, older fans may well let out their own shrieks of disbelief at the prices being charged for the anniversary shows.
At the box office, tickets for the sold-out Barclays show, and a pair of others to follow at the Prudential Center in Newark, went for about $100 for the nosebleed seats up to about $750 — well more than $800 once you tack on Ticketmaster’s “convenience charge.” Then there are the various “VIP Packages,” which in Newark topped out at a staggering $2,450.
Of course there’s a lot of expense to cover: For their total of five shows in Britain and America, the Stones are reportedly being paid about $25 million.
Not that any of this comes as a surprise. They may be long spent as a creative force, but the Stones are a thriving corporation, steered by a CEO — Mick Jagger — who’s demonstrated a mix of shrewdness and business acumen that makes him the peer of any strait-laced captain of industry.
We can put aside Jagger’s blithe explanation that when it comes to ticket prices the group is merely a hapless victim of market forces — or Ronnie Wood’s shrugging dismissal that, “We’ve got to make something.” The Stones long ago set the benchmark for shameless cynicism when it comes to exploiting “the brand.” Among the luxury items on offer when the box set of “Exile on Main Street” was released two years ago was a limited-edition box of three lithographs, “signed individually by Mick, Keith or Charlie,” priced at $2,500.
If that’s too rich for your blood, you might opt for the “Brussels Affair” box set that Ticketmaster is offering bundled with Barclays tickets for a relatively paltry $863.
By one account, the biggest crush of the opening-night concert at London’s O2 Arena was not at the front of the stage, but at the merchandising stand, where eager customers were spending more than $300 on a poster of a gorilla’s face — the artwork on the cover of the band’s new greatest hits album, “Grrr!”
It’s not only the price of the tickets, but the online lottery by which they’re dispersed. A devoted fan camping outside a theater the night before tickets went on sale used to see loyalty rewarded with a decent seat. Now, devotion requires deep pockets, faster broadband speeds and useful corporate connections.
This tour has been accompanied by a marketing campaign — a deluge of radio and television appearances, photographic exhibitions and documentaries — that has pitched the Stones’ appearances as akin to the Second Coming.
“The world’s greatest rock and roll band” has become one of the greatest advertising slogans of all time — not unlike a man telling me how white my shirts can be, but he can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me. (Hang on, there might be a song in there somewhere.)
It is an odd paradox that while the Stones have not made an album worth listening to since “Tattoo You” in 1981, they are a bigger business now than they ever were — the prime example of ’60s and ’70s rock music as heritage industry. The Stones trotting out their greatest hits, Brian Wilson performing “Pet Sounds,” Van Morrison singing “Astral Weeks” — these are rock music’s equivalent of the blockbuster Jackson Pollock or David Hockney retrospectives.
Some manage this trick better than others. It is a tired and familiar trope to point out the irony of old rockers, who can barely make it to the stage unaided, singing the anthems of their rebellious youth. Take The Who, for example, singing “My Generation” at the Olympics closing ceremony (or to be more precise, half of The Who, the rhythm half having sadly fulfilled the song’s prophecy “Hope I die before I get old”).
The counter-argument is equally familiar. No one demands that the veteran bluesman B.B. King should hang up his guitar because he has reached a certain age. On the contrary, while the youthful fire may have gone out of his playing, there is still pleasure to be derived from a more relaxed and seasoned approach to his repertoire. And the blues are the blues, at whatever age you may be playing them.
Both Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen continue to write and perform songs that reflect the people they have become, as much as the people they once were, and in so doing become peculiarly timeless.
But the Stones seem to be a special case, subject to the curse that no matter how much their artistry may hold up — and their London shows were, by all accounts, superb — their music is essentially and inescapably defined by the times in which it was made.
To listen to these songs is to immerse oneself in a legend of rock music as a vehicle of danger and subversion. “Gimme Shelter” and “Sympathy for the Devil” are potent reminders of our younger, more idealistic, more reprobate selves, when, as Wordsworth put it, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!” (or in the Rolling Stones’ case, with their delicious whiff of brimstone and debauchery, flirting dangerously with the prospect of going happily to hell). It’s the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected not in tranquillity, but in a noisy attempt to hold on to the last, vanishing specter of youth.
The songs still sound marvelous, of course, but it is the disjunction between the group who first performed them and the group who performs them now that seems so peculiar and incongruous.
Watching the splendid new documentary “Crossfire Hurricane,” on HBO, reminded you of just how glamorous, how dangerous, how romantic the Stones were in their prime — a different species altogether from the cadavers who emerged, as if from creaking coffins, onto the O2 stage.
It was always said of Jagger that his ambitions were to mingle with the aristocracy. He achieved that and more; in a sense, the Stones became the aristocracy themselves, in the process exhibiting some of the more disagreeable characteristics of their caste, with all the air of entitlement and barely concealed disdain for the paying rabble.
Another song comes to mind. “Let’s drink to the hardworking people/Let’s drink to the lowly of birth/Raise your glass to the good and the evil/Let’s drink to the salt of the earth.”
The song is “Salt of the Earth” by . . . the Rolling Stones. It is not a song that they have, so far, found time to perform on their anniversary swing. In London, however, they did perform a chestnut that dates back to that same year they first set foot on American shores — their cover of Bobby Womack’s “It’s All Over Now.”
Surely, now, it’s really time it was.
Adapted from a story that ran in The Telegraph in the UK.
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