 MGM Grand, Las Vegas
on Saturday, November 30th. 2002. This was the final show for the first part
of the Forty Licks tour 2002/03.
Now we are waiting for the tour dates for Asia and Far East and then Europe
later in December.
Set list:
Street Fighting Man - Start Me Up - If You Can't Rock Me - Don't Stop - You Got
Me Rocking - Wild Horses - Dead Flowers - Bitch - Neighbors - Tumbling
Dice - Slipping Away - Happy - Sympathy For The Devil - Rocks Off -
Honky Tonk Women - Can't You Hear Me Knocking - Satisfaction - Mannish Boy -
It's Only Rock'n'Roll - Brown Sugar - Jumpin Jack Flash
 JAGGER
AND COMPANY: Stones shows a study in contrasts
Saturday concert trumps Friday effort by Doug Elfman
The Rolling Stones were supposed to play an intimate little show for 2,000
fans at the Hard Rock on Friday. But someone managed to squeeze 1 million people
into the Joint. One million? Is that right? Hmm. ... Yeah, I think so. Quite a
feat.
We sardines stood in place forever because the Stones started playing close
to 11 p.m., about 90 minutes late.
I couldn't get five feet past the entrance. I stood pinned to the door, there
in the back, where the floor slopes down and obscures the view. So, when I say I
"saw" the Rolling Stones, I guess what I mean is that I watched a live
feed of their concert on a TV over a bar. I did hear them, though. Bully for me.
Maybe the blind-sardine show was a blessing in disguise. It gave me a chance
to judge the music without the visuals. The Rolling Stones in their twilight are
all about visuals.
According to the TV feed, Mick Jagger danced, pranced, strutted and jutted
his arms out, like, "Check it out, man, I'm a cat, and I know aerobics.
Rowr!"
The Stones played more obscure songs, but that didn't work because the Stones
are a hits band. Complex music acts, like Radiohead or the Deftones, do their
best work on album cuts that aren't accepted for radio play. Simple, hook-driven
acts such as the Stones and Madonna do their best work on hits because simple is
as simple does. Simple either sticks in your brain, or it evaporates into
nothingness. Poof.
 So,
"Live With Me," "You Got Me Rockin' " and "When The
Whip Comes Down" were small, dull and repetitive in the same ways. They
featured forgettable guitar licks and vocal blahs. Poof.
The two standout songs were the hits "Gimme Shelter" and "Midnight
Rambler." Keith Richards gave "Gimme Shelter" its endearing,
slurring guitar. Mick Jagger and one of three backup singers yearned out a
confident ache, "War, children; it's just a shot away."
"Midnight Rambler" retained most of its old, blues-powered rock.
Jagger blew a mean harmonica. And the Stones had the boldness to perform the
song's raw and rambling, stop-and-go climax, even if they did add a striptease
rhythm to sex it up.
But "Satisfaction," a song that helped change music, was so rote,
it would have been better off in the hands of a band playing an island bar in a
hotel. "Brown Sugar" wasn't much more inspired. The players gave it an
extended rock cliche of a final, 25-second drum outro that led slowly to a
final, ka-ka-ka-ka ... ba-da-boom.
Richards, ill-advisedly, sang. He fronted the mid-tempo void, "Slipping
Away" and the dead-pulse, "Thru and Thru." Richards' voice
slipped off target like bare feet on stream sludge. He sounded like Sting might
on sleeping pills.
I was minding my own business, but people who had paid up to and over $1,000
per ticket kept coming up to ask me to report how upset they were.
"I got general admission tickets for $1,800, and we can't even get up
front," one rich guy who flew in from Houston complained. A woman huffed,
"Are you writing about this? It's ridiculous."
I asked a guy following the Stones tour whether all of the other small shows
have been this packed. He said they were even fuller in New York and Los
Angeles.
After the show, I walked to the nearby Double Down Saloon, where I listened
to an all-woman tribute band to Cheap Trick called Cheap Chick. They were rough.
They hurt my ears. And their first song was more fun and interesting than
anything in the Stones' two-hour set.
The next night, the Stones played the MGM Grand Garden Arena and did what
they do best. They staged a visual spectacle built for a hits parade.
Giant video monitors behind the stage showed live close-ups in which the
cigarette dangling from Richards' lips appeared larger than any person in the
building.
Fans bought and wore lapel pins shaped like the Stones' trademark lips logo.
The pins blinked red and blue in the dark. That made the arena a starry night.
Pretty cool.
Jagger pranced and danced, but looked less catty and more like a food-starved
runway model because he had room to strut across a wide stage and up a catwalk
that led through the center of the arena.
The Stones performed a shade less tightly than they did just five years ago.
Richards dropped some lead lines, even if he looked more energetic than in the
past, which is to say he wasn't slumped in one spot all night.
Jagger didn't say much to the crowd beyond applause lines like, "Are you
feeling good?" And on "Jumpin' Jack Flash," he talked the phrase,
"It's a gas, gas, gas," as if he were out of gas. That was the encore
finale after two hours of hard work for the 59-year-old singer. It was quite
forgivable.
There were only two basic flaws at the MGM show, a bargain at up to $350 a
ticket. The lesser flaw was that there was a break in between each song. Maybe
that gave the Brits time to drink water (we hope) and for Jagger to change
shirts. But it made the show a trifle choppy.
A bit more annoying was that the Stones extended a lot of songs with one
trick. "Brown Sugar" clocked in at just over two minutes, but then the
band played basically the exact same last four bars of the song, over and over,
for three minutes. They did that at the Hard Rock, too.
That grew tiresome. And the addition of four horn players on "Jumpin'
Jack Flash," and on other songs that didn't need horns, puffed out the air
of a Vegas showroom.
But despite quirks, like Richards' singing again at the MGM, the
imperfections seemed minor, compared with the Stones' boilerplate-solid
performance.
The set list was indeed smarter than it was at the Hard Rock. Who wouldn't
prefer the MGM performance of the relentlessly brooding "Wild Horses"
to the Hard Rock coma of "Worried About You?" Who wouldn't prefer the
solo-fest, fan favorite of "Can't You Hear Me Knocking?" to the Hard
Rock's silly "Monkey Man?"
The Stones played a handful of songs at both shows. "Start Me Up"
and "Tumbling Dice" certainly sounded bigger at the MGM. Why? Because
the Stones played most songs as echoey, arena arrangements at both venues. And
echoes had more room to reverberate in the cavern of the arena.
At the MGM, there seemed to be only two minutes of free-form fun. Jagger
introduced guitarist Ron Wood as, "On the cigarette: Ronnie Wood."
Funny. And stepping up to the mike, Richards saw Wood joking around and
playfully flicked his cigarette into Wood's chest. They laughed.
The MGM concert was a reminder that the Stones wrote some amazing songs, once
upon a time. But try as they might, they cannot control the past. They can
control only the presentation of the past.
And the presentation was a control-freak's dream. Every moment had a place in
a schedule, no differently than at a Cher show. That's what the Rolling Stones
excel at now: routines.
 Las Vegas Sun
story:
When the Stones finally hit the stage at 10:45 p.m., additional problems were
immediately evident. Most notable was the extremely poor sound mix, which made
it nearly impossible to hear the twin guitars of Keith Richards and Ron Wood.
Consistently overpowered by a four-piece horn section -- an overkill in such an
intimate setting -- as well as the work of bassist Darryl Jones, Richards and
Wood appeared displeased throughout.
Fortunately, Mick Jagger saved the night from being a total loss.
The man who first defined the term "charismatic frontman" gyrated,
danced and strutted around the small stage for two hours, modeling an array of
flamboyant outfits and maintaining an intense energy level.
Jagger and company served a heap of seldom-played numbers, including "All
Down the Line" from "Exile on Main Street," "When the Whip
Comes Down" from "Some Girls," and "Monkey Man" and
"Live With Me" from "Let it Bleed."
During "Worried About You," Jagger showed off his revered falsetto,
proving that, at age 59, his voice remains on one of the most powerful in music.
His smoking harmonica work also ensured "Midnight Rambler" -- which
came, appropriately, as Friday turned into Saturday -- was a memorable
experience.
Still, the band was far from crisp, as such hits as "Gimme Shelter"
and "Honky Tonk Women" never locked into consistent grooves. Even
normally reliable drummer Charlie Watts, perched just above and behind his three
longtime bandmates, lost the beat on a couple of occasions, leaving songs to
dissolve messily.
With the previous night's disappointment as the backdrop, the Stones also got
off to a somewhat sluggish start Saturday. "Street Fighting Man" and
"Start Me Up" should have been a perfect double-shot opener, but the
distinct absence of guitars in the mix once again threatened to derail the
performance.
That problem was soon corrected, as Wood finally pierced through with a fiery
slide solo during "You Got Me Rocking."
But it wasn't until Jagger announced, "We're going to do some songs from 'Sticky
Fingers' now," that Las Vegas finally got a taste of what makes the Rolling
Stones such an enduring live act.
In the course of three songs, the band demonstrated its tremendous range with a
heartfelt ballad ("Wild Horses"), a countrified number ("Dead
Flowers") and a straight-ahead rocker ("Bitch"), the last with
thunderous horn accompaniment.
What followed was mostly magical.
Richards took the microphone for a pair of songs, "Slipping Away" and
the ever-popular "Happy," showing off a voice that can only be
described as an acquired taste. Though the 58-year-old's guitar licks gradually
became more audible, they never quite soared above the din, leaving fans to
wonder if the Stones' Keith-Lite sound mix is actually by design these days.
Jagger ran from one end of the stage to the other during the Vegas-appropriate
"Tumbling Dice," connecting with audience members and keeping the
crowd involved in the show.
Watts reverted to his steady self, directing a bouncing take on "Sympathy
for the Devil" with assistance from rhythm partner Jones.
And Wood all but stole the show, displaying a light touch on steel guitar during
"Happy" and following a grand Bobby Keys' sax solo with a long guitar
solo of his own during "Can't You Hear Me Knocking."
The core quartet, supplemented by Jones and keyboardist Chuck Leavell, also made
their way down a catwalk to a small stage near the floor's center, playing a
stripped-down bluesy segment: Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy," and their
own "It's Only Rock & Roll (But I Like it)" and "Brown
Sugar."
Most importantly, in contrast with the previous night, everyone onstage appeared
in good spirits, with Jagger, Richards and Wood sharing laughs throughout the
show.
As Jagger danced relentlessly and Richards performed his trademark low-down
guitar swoop move, the chain-smoking Wood seemed particularly upbeat, swinging
his hips, dancing with backing vocalists and giving Leavell the finger in a
hilarious attempt to distract the one-time Allman Brothers' pianist.
Fans who saw both Stones' shows, just a night apart, would have been struck by
the contrast in the performances. Perhaps the Stones are simply too large in
sound and stature for a club as small as The Joint.
Or maybe the order of the shows should have been reversed. In Boston, Chicago,
Philadelphia, New York and Los Angeles, the band worked its way from stadiums to
arenas to clubs, stripping away layers each night.
Either way, Friday's show never came close to matching its $500-$1,000 price
tag.
Was Saturday's concert worth $125-$350? Difficult to say.
After all, it's only rock 'n' roll.
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