Der Spiegel
Golden Boys – flying high
DER SPIEGELThey've been on stage for over 40 years, many critics would like to send them to retirement. But in their first European shows the Rolling Stones were better than ever.
It was shortly after midnight, when a little rain fell from the skies over Munich, just a little refreshment on a hot night – highly welcome so that people didn't even bother to close the tops of their convertibles. Let the leather suffer a little.
The door of the restaurant Lenbach designed by the British designer star Sir Terence Conran according to the seven mortal sins jealousy, greed, lust, fury, vanity, gluttony and laziness, was guarded by a black man built like a strongbox. "It's simple", he said in polite English. "Either you have a personal invitation from Mick or you don't get in here".
Inside, his boss was keeping court. Nothing special, only a little amusement, maybe 60 guests wandering about the hall with capacity for 300 people. "Mostly models and pretty girls", the organizers whispered, a description, of which Jenny Elvers, desperately low-necked down to her belly-button and Gloria von Thurn und Taxis seemed to think it referred to them. A few tables were put aside and Jagger engaged in his second favorite pastime, dancing. At around four o'clock his bodyguard tapped his watch. Bedtime for Jagger, leaving a night of which he and a black-haired model had expected a bit more.
No trace of the rest of the band. Probably Keith Richards and Co. had settled down comfortably in front of their mini-bars. 25 suites at the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten were charged to the Stones' credit cards. The amount of alcoholic beverages stocked there should be enough to make it through the night without any big problems and without the models.
A few nights before, the Rolling Stones had started a tour of Europe that will take them through clubs, arenas and stadiums of the old continent until mid-September – and with this start they left all those critics looking old who have been trying to make their lives miserable for almost 30 years with always the same reproaches: Again they were considered too old and, of course, in totally puritanic madness made in Germany, too rich for their job.
A special excess of strangely smelling halfzware-bitterness came from the "Süddeutsche Zeitung", where someone writing under the heading "our dead are still alive" thought it was original to accuse the Stones of the fact that they didn't kick the bucket 30 years ago because of their drug abuse. All we need now is another writer-flagellant reproaching the musicians with their inclination for beautiful women – freely changing the motto: "It's only Rock'n'Roll, but we hate it!"
But let's go one after the other. In fact, the Rolling Stones did celebrate their 40th anniversary on stage last year; in fact, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood together reach the biblical age of 236 years - and sometimes it looks as if it were 336. But still their hips are so narrow that they could buy their jeans in the kid's department. "I don't like 60-year-olds who go on stage in cropped t-shirts", someone complained in Munich. He was in his mid 30's and his own t-shirt stretched too tight round the middle as if he was carrying a cushion under his belt.
No matter, important is: The Stones have in over 40 years of music compiled a treasure of songs like no other band and no other hero in the history of Rock 'n' Roll could or would. The Beatles have been dead for 33 years. Bob Dylan shows no great interest in walking through his own museum. Neither does David Bowie. Prince has lost his identity to conspiracy theories. Madonna – have you listened to the latest album?
That leaves the Stones. And that leaves "Sympathy for the Devil", "Brown Sugar", "Sweet Virginia", "Gimme Shelter", "Get Off of My Cloud", "You Can't Always Get What You Want", "Wild Horses", "Honky Tonk Women", "Anybody Seen My Baby", "Memory Motel", "Shattered", "Jumpin' Jack Flash", "Midnight Rambler", "She's a Rainbow", "Worried About You" and about 200 other songs written by the Stones during their career. About 130 of them are part of the current repertoire – always ready to be played. Every night they change the setlist. And it helps that the Stones are in a good mood on most of those nights.
So good that one gets the impression that they are wise Knights, steeled by battles, matured through scars, only now reaching the summit, as if only now they had the perspective to look at their work – brilliant, sometimes ironic, calm, passionate: rolling stones in search of "Satisfaction" - even now.
They never fit the often messy Rock 'n' Roll business, they were always outsiders, but always feeling they were the elite, always wanting one thing: to be rebels. Not just any rebels, but the best.
"I didn't want to play Rock on the weekends, I wanted to play Blues", says Mick Jagger about the early days of the band. "Rockstars at that time, those were Cliff Richard or Pat Boone and all those mediocre, boring types playing in dreadful theaters for people having fights. An atrocious, loose business – you didn't get paid and everywhere you could smell stale beer and unwashed clothes. For people like me, young snobs if you want, Rock 'n' Roll was not the right thing".
So, they had to invent their own world, had to fight and when during their first US-tour they saw their great idol, the black Blues musician Muddy Waters painting a wall in the boss's studio because he needed money, they knew that this fight could take quite a while.
The rest is legend, an artist's biography in Cinemascope.
The first act, their rise during the Sixties and Seventies, when they were ahead of the spirit of the age, toying with the counter- culture's dionysiac dark side, honored by Jean-Luc Godard with a documentary; went bankrupt, fled to the south of France in exile, Keith Richards disappeared for days with a pack of heroin, Jagger and Richards quarreled in Munich on Apo-starlet Uschi Obermaier's stairs about who was allowed to spend the night with her.
The second act, the crisis in the Eighties, when Jagger complained to David Bowie that he didn't want to be the slave of the Stones for the rest of his life and at his castle organized balloon flights for the jet-set. And Richards? He was carried out of small clubs at four in the morning on the shoulders of his fans, his shirt torn, always the eternal Rock 'n' Roll animal, murmuring: "What do you want me to do? I can't force Mick on stage with a revolver and play the guitar at the same time."
The third act, the Taming of the Shrew, the life as classics. By the end of the Eighties, Jagger phoned Richards inviting him to the Caribbean; when Richards hung up the phone, he told his wife Patti: "Either I'm back tomorrow or in a couple of weeks." The two squabblers sat on the terrace, drinking half a bottle of vodka and strumming their guitars. 14 years later they're still doing it.
In real life as during the interviews in Munich, the Rolling Stones are now a collection of eccentric characters, some sort of ambulant sitcom, like the "Golden Girls": only they're the Golden Boys.
There's Ronnie Wood, 56, the eternal greenhorn of the band, because he's been with them "only" 28 years, wrinkled and silly like someone who's been drinking Guinness for half a century and got up from his bar stool only to throw darts on a board. Asked how he liked being on stage sober for the first time this tour, he said: "Great, finally I see the audience and know what we're playing."
There's Keith Richards, someone of whom US-comic Bill Hicks once said that together with cockroaches he'd be the only living creature who could survive a nuclear war. An eager Swedish journalist in Munich asked him about the equally eager Swedish young wild-man-band The Hives supposed to be the supporting act for the Stones. Richards stared at the Swede in wonder and without having the slightest clue. At some point it seems to get boring to be interested in the copy of the copy of the copy of yourself.
There's Charlie Watts, the drummer, a man who would prefer to always stay at home, who walks through the constant quarrellings of his buddies like a sleepwalker and justice of the peace, his gaze lost as if he could see only one thing: his horses in Devon
and his wife Shirley, the only human being, with whom he's been married for almost as long as with the Stones. He enters the room dressed in a brown tailor-made suit and first thing brushes cigarette ash off the white tablecloth, murmuring with pursed lips: "My God, this must be Keith's place."
And there's the boss of bosses, Mick Jagger. First he says that he wants to save his voice and doesn't want to talk. Then his huge ego talks all the time. Questions he doesn't like are ignored, sometimes he's brilliant at self-irony. In answer to the remark that the Stones have to start their show in Italy in the sunlight, he says: "Oh you mean the Dracula effect." He leaves the answer to the question how he would describe his love-hate relationship with Keith Richards in one word to Charlie Watts, who simply says: "hell". Jagger's grinning comment: "Thanks, Charlie."
Probably it's exactly this banter and jokes that has kept the Stones together for over 40 years and those who are lucky enough to see them live this summer will be rewarded with the poetry of the greatest pirate gang of Rock 'n' Roll: the leader Jagger, turning 60 in July, who still bursts out onto the stage vibrating with energy, like a 4-year-old refusing to go to bed – a man driven, who, it seems, would fly away if it weren't for his buddies holding him down to planet Earth. While the riffs rip through a century of popular music, through Blues and Soul and Rock, Jagger sometimes finds a moment of calm: There's still hardly anyone who can sing Otis Reddings' soul song "That's How Strong My Love Is" with more power and huskier voice than this white-skinned grandfather, who once studied at the London School of Economics.
In the Sixties they were called "the world's greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band" – now they're the eternal one. Even the critic of the "Süddeutsche", who had mocked them a few days before as living dead, wrote about the Circus Krone Show in Munich that "this was not a young or old band on stage, but a fascinatingly good one, maybe the best I have ever heard live". And the man with the cushion-belly, touched, typed into the display of his cell phone: "I have witnessed the birth of Jesus."
Don't worry. It's only Rock 'n' Roll – but one that on a good night makes you feel it's a musical novel: as if the whole world was flowing together suddenly in one big, true story.