Stones keep on rolling
Senior citizen rockers evolve into '60s super group
Sunday, September 25, 2005
BY BARRY FOX
Of The Patriot-News

With all due respect, the Rolling Stones are freaks.

Cancer, drugs, personal dramas and/or age could have done them in years ago, but here they are in their 43rd year with a new album and a new sense of purpose.

Many years past their prime, their current "Bigger Bang" world tour, which comes to Hersheypark Stadium Saturday, with its exorbitant ticket prices would appear to be doomed to failure, but is sold out in nearly every city it visits.

Their new "A Bigger Bang" disc, as critics have done for years, is being hailed as their best work in decades.

"They've made a career out of never doing what they're supposed to do, and won," said Jon Mertz, a state worker and a nearly lifelong Stones fan. "Now they're breaking the laws of nature putting on this spectacle at their ages. I'm not a sports fan, but it's like the Yankees have always been your team and Babe Ruth is still playing."

Mertz, 48, who has seen the Stones on every tour since 1975, will be taking his 14-year-old son to his first in Hershey, a personal marker of the band's longevity.

"It's inexplicable that this right of passage is still going on," he said.

Defying convention and logic has become a way of life for the Stones whose youngest member is 58-year-old Ron Wood. Drummer Charlie Watts is 64, Mick Jagger is 62 and Keith Richards is 61.

"It's really a phenomenon," said Billboard magazine's Melinda Newman, who recently wrote a cover story on the band. "They just keep on, keeping on."

Throughout their career the Stones' album sales have been sporadic, but in concert is where they made their fame.

"There is a very wide chasm between the ticket-buying audience and the record-buying audience that is baffling," Newman said.

Through the years the Stones have refused to sell a tour as their last, but their age and health (Watts is recovered from throat cancer and Wood was recently in rehab) make the end more of a possibility now.

On this tour, however, fans and journalists agree the Stones are as good as ever theorizing that Watts' cancer might have been a catalyst to reinvigorate them.

Marilou Regan, a former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who has written more than 100 articles on the Stones and co-authored the book "Love You Live, Rolling Stones: Fanfare from the Common Fan," attended her 112th Stones show this month.

"After following them for this long you get a cynical viewpoint, a 'You're going to have to show me' kind of thing, and they showed me," she said. "Their shows are absolutely amazingly the same. I listen to them, and I'm 12 again."

That's now a significant part of the Stones allure, an older fan base (who can afford the expensive tickets) seeking a bit of nostalgia but expecting much more than a greatest hits show.

Mike Rushlander, a college counselor by day and "Ron Wood" in the tribute band, Jumpin' Jack Flash, by night, sees the Stones as "the last connection 21st-century culture has with a genuine '60s cultural phenomenon ... they are the last vestige of that."

An interesting viewpoint but what does all that Stones significance get you for your $175 concert ticket?

"The whole aura of sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll cliche makes for great reading when you're 16 years old; now it's about the music," said Skippy Shay, a Philadelphia photographer and co-creator of www.stickyfingersjournal.com, an online Stones newsletter. "This is the best they've been since 1978. They've been relying on horns and backup singers and one of the biggest complaints from fans is that they wanted the five piece rock 'n' roll band back ... This tour there is a lot of guitars, really in your face. They are really playing hard, they are not messing around."

Jagger's swagger, Richards' and Wood's interplay, Watts' steady hand and conveying a joy in their work has made many Stones' loyalists.

Bill Janovitz, the longtime vocalist of the Boston band, Buffalo Tom, and the author of the book "Exile on Main Street," about the famed Stones' album, saw the band last month in Fenway Park.

"To see these guys giving their all making millions and millions, obviously they have a big incentive, but that takes a lot of energy," he said. "To see Jagger, who's the same age as my father, running around and still be able to give such a soulful performance on such a grand scale is impressive."

"Obviously, the Stones have achieved the status culturally and musically that they could do anything," Rushlander said. "But they are still in it in a genuine way."

BARRY FOX: 255-8225 or bfox@patriot-news.com

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