LA Weekly

That's not how long they've been around, though it seems that way, but, rather, Mick Jagger's age when Martin Scorsese filmed the recently released concert film Shine A Light, filmed at New York's fabulous Beacon Theater in front of about 2000 fans. The film was reviewed by our own Scott Foundas and can be found somewhere on this sight.
I saw it last Friday. It wasn't my idea, nor would it have been. I last saw the Stones on their Steel Wheels tour decades ago and thought they were pretty washed up money-grubbing old farts then. I pretty much wrote them off as no longer being relevant and I remember even that show as a nostalgia fest for Baby Boomers, a sort of Disneyification of the band that had once meant so much to me. Raised on the Beatles, I turned to the Stones in my very early teens as the embodiment of what I wanted rock and roll to be: mostly danger and sex with a heavy dose of insouciance. By the time I saw them in concert, they were well past embodying any of that.

I have to say, this film was a revelation. The Stones seem to have gone so far around the clock they've come back again to what they used to be — they're raging again. Everything about them in this footage seemed real — their love of music and their belief in the transgressive possibilities of rock and roll seemed all anew. What the hell was happening? At one point, in a close-up of Mick Jagger, I was sure he must have genuinely sold his soul to the devil and was the better for it. Looking like a rock and roll version of Nosferatu, Mick was sucking blood again. No longer with anything corporeal to rail against, he and the boys were fighting again. Not, this time, against an uptight establishment, against old people, like they did when they were rock and roll at its most primal, but against age itself. Against what we've become conditioned to thinking being older should mean. I felt like they were declaring, with every ounce of their still-formidable energy, that they would not go softly into the night, but would rather against its coming.

I had come to feel like Jagger embodied the worst, corporate aspects of rock, that he was about the business, and that Keith Richards was left carrying whatever soul the band might still have, but even he, it seemed, had been defeated by business of the Rolling Stones, and incredibly lucrative business that had become little more than a highly remunerative exercise in nostalgia. But seeing this, it was clear that Mick is simply a rock and roll animal. He seemed a prisoner of not just the music, but of what the Stones have symbolized — defiance. Check his blues harp playing in the cameo by Buddy Guy on "Champagne and Reefer." He's in an absolute rock 'n' roll animal zone — it's dirty, nasty and really good. And that's how he is for the entire show. As for Keith, he's simply a being from another planet. Far from a pirate or a devil, he's like an angelic, old man-boy, ageless and ancient, loving every note from every player. The most beautiful moment of all might have been his crooning of "You Got The Silver."

Some reviews have been less than kind, but I think they miss the point and have taken the easy view, the one I had during the Steel Wheels performance. This wasn't lazy or nostalgic, this was rock and roll as it should be, a rage against the machine of life that says you should be humble in the face of mortality. Humble? These guys? Hell fucking no, they seem to be saying, we're the fucking Rolling Stones. God bless them. Or, if not god, then the devil himself.

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