Rolling into Denver at the end of a week jam-packed with big-ticket concerts, the Stones delivered energetic renditions of their biggest hits to a stadium of eager fans, reminding the Mile High City that notwithstanding old age and an increasingly fragmented music scene, the Stones remain the biggest ticket of them all.
It almost didn’t happen. The North American leg of the “No Filter” tour was postponed by two months because Mick Jagger needed a heart valve replacement. Another month and they’d be competing for weekends against the Denver Broncos football schedule, not to mention the unpredictable Front Range autumn weather. But the gods often look kindly on the Stones. A common thread throughout their fifty-seven year history has been the overcoming of obstacles that have felled lesser bands: feuds; heroin; back taxes; disco; cancer; the Eighties; you name it. And now, old age. Mick just turned 76; drummer Charlie Watts is 78. Add in Keith and new kid Ronnie Wood and you get a cumulative age of over 300 years on stage. It’s no accident that a major tour sponsor is a financial services company specializing in retirement annuity products.
But another thread running through the history of the Rolling Stones has been the tendency to remain in perpetual motion, true to their name. In the early years this kept them cutting-edge: swerving from folk into psychedelia, correcting back into roots-rock, grabbing from disco and punk, in each case a couple beats ahead of their peers. In the twenty-first century such motion has kept them from fading away, pushing out albums of live and vault material but also some new tunes. And if the frequency of tours has slowed slightly, the intensity has not. Especially not here in Colorado, where the band hasn’t played for over a decade and fans have been waiting all summer. At least one local radio DJ eschewed sleep to play nothing but the Stones for two days leading up to the show. The pent-up energy in the Mile High bleachers is palpable.
The task of drawing the crowd to their seats falls to opener Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats, a talented soul revival outfit that gets nationwide indie-radio airplay but hails from Denver. Next week the Night Sweats are doing two nights at the hallowed Red Rocks out in Morrison, but tonight is arguably an equally memorable milestone, sharing the stage of the largest venue in the Mountain Time Zone with the world’s greatest rock and roll band. Rateliff et al. seem aware of this and sing their bearded faces off. The crowd digs it. As the horn section plays, the sun disappears behind the mountains and the August heat breaks. The old guys in front of me light their first joint–recreational weed is legal in Colorado, if theoretically forbidden in the venue–and pass it to the kids in front of them, who are young enough to be their grandkids.
And then, ladies and gentlemen, the Rolling Stones. The big yellow video displays with the tongue logo go black and suddenly there they are, the four of them, small on the enormous stage but enormous on the video monitors. There is a swell of recognition from the crowd–this is really happening, finally, after everything–and the band kicks into the first tune, “Street Fighting Man.” Almost immediately Mick’s bobbing and shifting and strutting is in full effect. He’s lithe and limber and exhibits no sign of any frailty whatsoever. Then it’s straight into “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” a promise aimed directly at the early Stones adopters in the crowd, and “Tumbling Dice,” their biggest number from Exile on Main Street. A quick smartphone glance at the setlist from the tour’s previous show in New Jersey erases any doubt that this is to be a greatest-hits night without much digging into the back catalogue. I’ve accepted this long ago. Would I have liked to see a deeper-dive into Exile? For sure. A night of jams and B-sides? I’d be down. But this isn’t a Phish show, and despite a certain on-stage looseness that Keith and Ronnie will rely upon to stretch an outro a few extra bars, the Stones have never been a jam band. And that’s not what the Stones, or probably the majority of their fans, are seeking at this point in the band’s trajectory. No, this night is to be a stadium-sized celebration of the Big Songs, the ones that still command substantial FM airplay even as radio stations nationwide get swallowed up by corporate multimedia companies focused on ever-narrower playlists. These are the Big Songs that comprise Honk, the compilation the Stones released back in April, a couple weeks after Mick made his heart-valve announcement.
But they do throw a few bones to rarity-seekers like me, and one such bone is the opportunity to vote, via the Stones’ website, for which deep track gets played tonight. Mick announces the winner: “Like a Rolling Stone,” the Bob Dylan cover that the Stones long ago made their own. It’s a stirring, uptempo rendition, anchored by big swells of sound from Chuck Leavell’s keyboard and Mick’s squealing harmonica. Ronnie and Keith hang back, saving their energy for later. The crowd is definitely into it, and so am I. Even if my vote was for “Live With Me,” the manic pulse of Let it Bleed.
The core four take the “B stage,” at the end of a narrow peninsula surrounded by the priciest ticket zones, for acoustic performances of “Dead Flowers” and “Sweet Virginia.” These are tunes that highlight one of the Stones’ key talents: the ability to sound loose and decadently sloppy while actually performing with utter precision. It’s a talent that nicely complements another important talent: the ability to sound tight and intentional notwithstanding genuine looseness in the interplay between Keith, Ronnie, and Mick. This is the dynamic of musicians who have played together for decades and so deeply internalized each other’s quirks and rhythms that they don’t have to worry about how it will sound. Trust each other and the music will follow. Thank you, Charlie Watts, for gluing the whole glorious mess together with your straight-faced beats. It’s an art that is often imitated but mostly never pulled off. Unless, of course, you are the Rolling Stones.
Per custom in these big shows, Keith gets his two vocal numbers, “You Got the Silver” and “Before They Make Me Run.” Keith has always been a master of understated playing, and up to this point in the show, he’s mostly hung back, strummed along and played fills, content to let Ronnie drive the riffs and take most of the solos. He’s Keith Richards, mad pirate of rock and roll, student of Muddy Waters and teacher to basically everyone who has picked up a guitar since 1967. What does he have to prove to anyone? But these two tunes, in which he carries the guitar leads and scowls the vocals, show that even if he’s not bouncing around the stage anymore he’s still Keef, full of swagger and defiance and cool.
“Miss You” brings Mick back onstage and gives Keith a brief rest; neon graphics on the big screen invoke New York City in the 1970s. But it’s the following tune, a lengthy and dynamic “Midnight Rambler,” that really delivers on the themes of grit and danger that have been such an important part of the band’s aesthetic. Sure, it’s 2019 and I’m surrounded by suntanned and cheerful Coloradans, most relatively affluent and mildly stoned. But close your eyes and we’re back there at Madison Square Garden in the fall of 1969, getting our ya-ya’s out. The Stones are in their late twenties, raw and coarse and playing loud through melty tube amps that are not yet vintage; they are just amps. Jimi Hendrix is rumored to be hanging out backstage, but the Midnight Rambler is on the prowl. The core of the song is the break-down interlude after the second verse: teasing and lewd, tiptoed and tentative, a stark contrast to the sure-footed build-up that launches us back to the chorus. The band is loose and raunchy and yet perfectly tight and the song seems to go on forever. I dig it, and so does my father, who was around then and is with me in Denver now and knows probably even better than I do that these guys more than anyone else are rock and roll itself.
So yes, there were a lot of options to choose from this week. Billy Joel sold out Coors Field. The Backstreet Boys sold out the Pepsi Center. The Zac Brown Band was in town; Joe Bonamassa was out at Red Rocks; Gov’t Mule will be along soon. August in Colorado is all about the big ticket shows, before the weather turns and everyone’s attentions turn to the ski resorts. But really this week there was only one show in town. Who knows when, or if, they will be back. But we’ll remember this one.
