Rolling Stones. - Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, Washington, D.C - concert reviews

National Review, Oct 27, 1989 by Joseph Sobran

TOOK MY daughter to- see the Rolling Stones Steel Wheels tour when

it hit Washington. She wanted to see it more than I did, even though she hadn't been born the day I first heard "I Can't Get No Satisfaction." As a matter of fact, I've never been a Stones fan. My attitude toward them has mellowed from strong distaste to simple indifference, with a continuing curiosity about their appeal. To me they're the Stony Rolls: hard to get into, not much flavor.

The Stones filled Robert F. Kennedy Stadium both nights they performed. We luckily went the first night, a cool clear evening: a chilly rain drenched the second night. As we

filed into the stadium I noticed wryly that the crowd's spirits seemed undepressed by the previous day's news that Irving Berlin had expired. The great majority were no older than my daughter.

You have to give the Stones one thing: they've set a record for protracted trendiness. These kids hadn't been drawn by nostalgia: they like the Stones right now. I'd thought of this event as a farewell tour, Mick Jagger being 46 and all, but it's by way of promoting a new album, Steel Wheels. It's said to be their best album in several years, by those who

can make distinctions I    can't.
  The opening act, in      the twilight,
was a black rock band      called Living

Color. The lead singer, a little guy with dreadlocks that hung to his shoulders, bounced around, his hair flying, trying to occupy a huge stage, more than 250 feet wide, whose full resources were being reserved for the main act. In other circumstances, Living Color would be the featured attraction, but in the fading sunlight, with too much space to fill and most of the crowd inattentive, they looked rather pitiful, desperate.

When they'd finished, there was a long, long hiatus as stagehands rearranged the furnishings and darkness thickened. At several points the crowd stood and roared, thinking the Stones were coming out. The false

alarms intensified a tremendous sense of excitement, palpable even to the recusant. When the Stones finally made their entrance, the roar that went up was the sort of thrilling noise you hear when the home team takes the field for the seventh game of the World Series. The enormous stage was filled with multicolored light from hundreds of bulbs. Jagger plunged into "Start Me Up," the backup instruments amplified at bone-shuddering volume. Your basic rock concert wouldn't be entirely lost on Helen Keller. Even from relatively choice seats on the field, Jagger was a small, distant figure. The best way to watch him was on one of the three big TV screens overhead. In fact, that was the best way to make sure it was really him. He doesn't do anything lots of others couldn't simulate plausibly, from a certain remove.

By now Jagger is simulating himself, as if Elvis had lived on to make a second career as an Elvis impersonator. His bad-boy antics have become conventional, like a professional wrestler's. His motions-snapping head, thrusting arm, skipping across the stage-are the same ones he was doing on The Ed Sullivan Show nearly a generation ago. Now as then, he's vocally and physically limited, self-repetitious, self-consciously funky.

Actually, none of the Stones except Keith Richards seems to have any real interest in rock any more. Jagger told one interviewer he can't listen to their early records and doesn't have any favorites among current groups. But he knows the value of a dollar, having attended the London School of Economics once upon a time, so he and Richards overlook their famous differences long enough to do the occasional album, the tour. This year they may gross $100 million. Jagger is really a prudent soul whose longevity is due to bourgeois habits at odds with the rock ethos: he's avoided the usual pitfalls of drug overdoses, crooked managers, marriage to Yoko Ono. Limited though he is, he comes onstage trim and fit, ready to give value for money. He's preserved his demeanor of hard-bitten callowness.

For any reader who may still be unclear about the difference between rock and cabaret singing, the Stones' amplifiers and lights were powered by four generators putting out 2,400,000

watts, enough to sustain forty city blocks. During "Honky-Tonk Woman," two gigantic inflatable honky-tonk women, each 55 feet tall, ballooned on either side of the stage. As countless combinations of colored lights flashed, the sweet odor of marijuana wafted into my nostrils. My daughter traced it to a middle-aged couple in the row in front of us. Like most of the crowd, they were singing along with the more familiar songs, mimicking even Jagger's hand gestures. If anyone in that stadium looked as if they should have been in mourning for Irving Berlin, it was these two.

The rowdiness of Stones fans is legendary, but this was a long way from Altamont. The audience was overwhelmingly young, white, middleclass, and well-behaved. Raucous whoops seemed to be obligatory, but they were the sort of thing you might hear from Lee Atwater after a couple of beers. They peaked when Jagger flirted with one of his backup singers, a pretty black girl dressed up to look like a piece of Harlem harlotry. Maybe I'm jaded, but to me it was about as daring as cutting shop class.