Show Business: Roll Away the Stones

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Four solid reasons to pass up the rock tour of the year

The Rolling Stones have taken the field for the first time since 1978, and if careful attention is paid to the hoopla, the gate, the crowd and the ticket sales, any one would believe they were the only game in town.

This three-month tour is about equal parts musical revue, social occasion and sporting event. The Stones are playing vast arenas almost exclusively, the kind of concrete coliseums built to carry the cheers and groans of as sorted jockathons up into the air; acoustics were hardly a consider ation. This may not matter, any how. Crowds in the hundreds of thousands are turning out to hear the boys run some numbers and watch Mick Jagger strut his stuff.

The Stones audience is paying for, and getting off on, the same thing any football fan does: the chance to watch the home team beat the odds. In this particular contest, the Stones are squared off against heavy, probably insurmountable, opponents such as age and apathy, and the fans who are turning out in such record numbers are, in a sense, joining in a celebratory defiance of the inevitable. No wonder, then, that the Stones crowd looks like some woolly amalgam of American Bandstand, Altamont, an Armani fashion show and the reopening of Studio 54. Stars! Lights! Celebrities! And rock 'n' roll! After a fashion.

For anyone interested in resisting the social pressure of showing up when the Stones pass through town, the following reasons are offered as a public service:

Time Waits for No One. When he was younger, and could afford to talk tougher, and figured too that he was likely going to wind up a movie star or some kind of landed grandee, Mick Jagger allowed that he would not be caught dead singing Satisfaction at the age of (pick one): 30, 35, 40. "I think I said 32," Jagger said recently.

"But I've always said, 'I'll never do this again.' I never meant it. I just said it." For some time, it has been an open question whether Jagger, snow 38, means anything at all, especially what he sings.

He is in strong, wild form in concert, but no one has ever disputed his status as rock's shrewdest showman. On Tattoo You, the Stones' new No. 1 album, Jagger's voice has the rough resilience of a scouring pad, and Keith Richards keeps on playing what is, in all senses, the meanest guitar around. The new record sounds like their best in years—many years—but a little attention to the lyrics shows that the Stones are still stuck in the same territory without a passport. The album is supposed to be a return to their strong, singed-around-the-edges blues base, but Jagger and Richards, as songwriters, have pioneered a new form.

They have made over the blues into the lassies. Tunes like Start Me Up, Slave, Little T & A and Black Limousine are full of lassitude, of a kind of weary passivity and sated cynicism.