 Las Vegas, The Joint
on Friday, November 29th. 2002. A complete sold out for 1700 entusiastic
fans.
Set list:
Jumpin' Jack Flash - Live with me - It's Only Rock'n'Roll - Don't Stop - Worried
About You - Beast Of Burden - All Down The Line - Monkey Man - Can't Turn You
Loose - Gimme Shelter - Tumblin Dice - Slipping Away - Thru And Tru - You Got Me
Rockin' - When The Whip Comes Down - Midnight Rambler - Honky Tonk Women - Start
Me Up - Satisfaction - Brown Sugar
 Jagger & 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.
 Sun
Review:
With four decades behind them, the Rolling Stones have a tremendous history
to cover during stops on their 2002 anniversary tour.
Fun as it might be to look back, however, two weekend Las Vegas shows proved the
band is at its best when it remains firmly fixed in the present.
Friday night the Stones attempted to return to their roots, playing the smallest
venue on their schedule, the 1,500-capacity Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel. The
results were borderline disastrous, as the wildly anticipated event failed on
almost every level.
On Saturday the Stones were back on more familiar footing, capping the tour's
first leg at the 13,500-capacity MGM Grand Garden Arena. Visibly more
comfortable, the group reminded fans again why it retains exclusive rights to
the moniker World's Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band.
Even before the opening riff of "Jumping Jack Flash," Friday night's
show had the makings of a letdown for many in attendance.
The Joint's seating arrangement left little room for hordes of general-admission
ticket holders, who were left jostling for position near the two bars at the
back of the room.
Considering that bunch spent $500 apiece (with brokers getting upward of $1,000
for GA tickets), the ugly, semi-violent vibe that ensued hardly seemed
surprising. Observing such celebrities as Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Randy
Johnson and Owen Wilson making their way to and from $1,000 seats up front only
fueled the mood.
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