RSFCO

The 21000 big audience had a great warm-up this night by John Mayer trio. The Stones played two new songs this evening, Angie and Rain Fall Down from their new album.

Start Me Up - You Got Me Rocking - She's So Cold - Tumbling Dice - Oh No, Not You Again - Angie - Rain Fall Down - Rocks Off - Get Up Stand Up - Intros - The Worst - Infamy - Miss You - Rough Justice - Get Off Of My Cloud - Honky Tonk Women - Out Of Control - Sympathy For The Devil - Brown Sugar - Jumping Jack Flash - You Can't Always Get What You Want (encore) - Satisfaction (encore)

The concert at the Wachovia Center last night kicked off with video screens showing images of a humongous interstellar explosion, as if the creation of the cosmos and the Rolling Stones were simultaneous.

It sure feels that way. The Stones have been touring every three years or so, it seems, since at least the Pleistocene era.

"We keep comin' around," a goblinlike Keith Richards croaked before gargling out "The Worst," one of his two appointed vocal numbers, along with the new "Infamy."

The latter song was one of a handful off the Stones' new album, A Bigger Bang, their first in eight years and best in many more. The new stuff held its own: "Oh No, Not You Again" was lean and mean and "Rough Justice" appropriately rugged.

But nobody goes to see the Rolling Stones to hear the new stuff. They go to see Mick Jagger - lithe like a ballet dancer but as leathery as an iguana from the neck up - sneer and leer, slither and snarl. (They also go to hear him thank people who had come from "everywhere - places like Morristown" - and claim he had eaten two cheesesteaks yesterday. Fat chance.)

They go to hear the barbed-wire tangle of Richards' guitar with that of his trusty sidekick, Ronnie Wood. And they go to admire gray-haired drummer Charlie Watts, who, recovered from throat cancer, played with as much crisp, swinging economy as ever.

At the Wachovia - where the Stones are scheduled to play a return engagement tomorrow - the band served up warhorses such as "Start Me Up," "Honky Tonky Woman" (which started out rickety but soon righted itself), and a high-powered "Sympathy for the Devil."

But there were also surprises. Richards' acoustic playing on "Angie" was a bit ragged, but Jagger - in excellent voice all night - had the song's bittersweet heartache down cold. Richards' souped-up Chuck Berry licks fired up hot on the swaggering "Tumbling Dice." Four horn players and three vocalists were put to winning use on the licentious "Rocks Off" and a skanking cover of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh's reggae anthem "Get Up, Stand Up."

Stones stadium shows used to rely on fireworks and props like giant inflatable women to provide over-the-top spectacle. But at the Wachovia last night, the only gimmick was a mini-stage that carried the band to the back of the arena, where they played three songs in closer proximity to their multigenerational audience and one another.

Sure, they're dinosaurs, and what they do so well has little connection to what's going on in the rest of the musical universe in 2005. But when they get on stage, the Stones are still frisky, and flawed, musicians, entertaining their audience with a catalog that's as essential to the history of rock and roll as anybody's. It's the band that's the spectacle.