You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
The Rolling Stones.
50 years of rock and roll supremacy.
If rock and roll was a superhero, the Rolling Stones would wear a cape.
If iconic music could be celebrated for eternity, Gimme Shelter would be in a glass case in the Louvre.
In the 60’s the Stones were the devil to the Beatles’s angel.
In the 70’s the Stones were speed balls and Hell’s Angels.
In the 80’s they were Steel Wheels and sold out stadium tours.
In the 90’s they were re-inventing themselves and still cranking out the classics.
Please allow me to introduce myself.
I am Mick Jagger and these are my Rolling Stones.
At 69 years old, he looks as athletic and wiry as ever.
I am watching the Hurricane Sandy concert dubbed 12/12/12/ and it is a who’s who of rockers. It starts with Eddie Vedder singing comfortably numb. Chilling. It moves to Eric Clapton and his slow hand magnificence. It moves on to The Who with it’s windmill guitar blasts and on Jersey boys Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen sharing the mic.
But for my money the stones are the headliner, worth the price of admission.
Mick took the stage at Madison Square Garden and rocked the house like, well like he always has.
Every word out of his mouth is a song you will hear on the radio today somewhere. Every note is a note you know the moment you hear it.
It’s part of the musical fabric of the Earth.
I don’t know if the band had a collective blood transfusion from the Justin Bieber blood donor program or if they are handing out the fountain of youth back stage, but these rockers in their 70’s rocked the joint like it was 1970.
The stones are, without exception, the greatest rock and roll band in the history of the world.
Sorry U2. Sorry Beatles. Sorry Elvis. Sorry Lez Zeppelin.
Charlie Watts on drums and Ron Wood on guitar looked preserved.
Moon crater face Keith Richards looks like an extra from a Pirates of the Caribbean film. His voice scratchy like Scottish wool. His hair white and thin and almost plastic as if it had been burned in a factory fire in Singapore. But still, he ripped that ax with the authority of a lunatic possessed by musical magic.
But this band is now and always has been about the iconoclastic Mick Jagger.
He is jumping jack flash. His band is a gas gas gas.
He is on stage at MSG strutting like a chicken. He is almost 70 years old, and he is grooving like a 30 year old. His hips are flying and his pelvis gyrating. Chiropractors all over the world are wincing.
He is a – dare I say it – sexual force.
ABC news interviewed the Stones for Night Line.
Bill Weir asked how the hell he keeps up the energy the intensity, especially for their new tour where the band is on stage for 2.5 hours a night.
“It is what i do,” Mick says his eyes so squeezed together, you wonder if he smoked a fatty back stage.
I don’t have a fitness regimen, He will say.
“I see a red door and i want to paint it black.”
Who doesn’t?
It’s sex and drugs and rock and roll as the crowd thumps in unison.
At close to 70, Ronnie Woods is now sober.
“We are hitting with clarity and focus now,” he says. “Before it was eyes down and oh no how we gonna get out of this.”
He’s talking about not always being on key or hitting the right notes.
“sobriety and harmony,” the reporter will bellow.
Why do they still do it?
“people still like us,” Jagger says innocently. “We like playing.”
The rolling stones. Simply the greatest ever.
And that is crazy.™