Roll Away the Stones

By JAY COCKS

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.

It's Only Rock 'n' Roll, But Do They Like It?The kind of half-baked, burnt-out worldliness the Stones are stashing inside their songs dices up a large section of what is best and strongest in the rock spirit: the self-renewing energy, the evocation and defiance of the darkness at the edge of town. The first side of Tattoo You is great dance music, close to the best old Stones tradition, but, unlike their best vintage stuff, it will let you down after a close lis ten. The second side, which is well-crafted make-out music, sounds collectively like a white silk scarf sliding on a waxed dance floor, a below-the-belt fugue for the disco generation. The exception to all this is Waiting on a Friend, the album's last song and its best. With a graceful Jagger vocal, an almost easeful melody and a couple of gorgeous riffs by Jazz Saxophonist Sonny Rollins, Waiting on a Friend is a valedictory to the naughty-boy ennui that infects the record. If it is not a solid promise for better things to come, that one song is at least a reminder of how great the Stones still can be.

Far Away Eyes. Or, what can you see from the grandstand, what can you hear in the upper tiers? There are ways of stag ing a rock event so that both music and the audience are served well, but setting up concerts as if they were a floating World Series is not one of them.

The Stones are also appearing, like the Dukes of Hazzard, with a sponsor.

Unlike the Dukes, they are not interrupted by commercials, but the group management has struck a deal with Jovan Inc. for what the fragrance company calls "a multimillion-dollar involvement." In return for the bucks, Jovan--manufacturer of such odoriferous items as Andron and Sex Appeal--gets to have its name stamped on concert tickets. Although the Stones are not endorsing any Jovan products, a company executive says, "We think their fans and our fragrance users are the same people."

The scent around a Stones concert used to be more like sulfur. Even though this tour may be Big Business, it is ultimately about something more than just "multimilliondollar involvements"-more, even, than the music. The Rolling Stones have partly staged, and partly stumbled into, a willed act of reaffirmation.

Can't Get No Satisfaction. Elvis expired of excess; Lennon was a victim of envy and celebrity. There is a great dead center in the rock culture, not so much a void as a vacuum, and it is a fearful thing to the generations who invested so much in the music. Streamlined, efficient, mechanical, the Rolling Stones are like a five-man Electrolux, sucking everyone into a massive contained space that makes no heavy demands on the past, the future or themselves.

There are better bands around certainly, even stronger survivors--like the Who--but none have ever been so emboldened by their own myth and the commercial potential of their own legend. Yes, the tour will have pulled in between $30 million and $40 million when it winds up.

And it is difficult to argue with Concert Promoter Jim Rissmiller, who brought the Stones to the Coliseum last week, when he says, "It is no secret that rock concerts and records aren't doing very well. The Stones tour is good for the rock business. There is no other group like them." More than anything, the Rolling Stones, 1981, are about continuity and loss.

For the teen-agers who come to the concerts--and at some shows they make up the majority of the audience--this tour is a way to ease into the slipstream of a myth, to check it out firsthand. For their elders, who were teen-agers when the Stones first sang Play with Fire and Satisfaction and Jumpin' Jack Flash back in the high '60s, it is a way--for some, now, the only way--to rejustify and perpetuate the myth. The Rolling Stones are living out, maybe stringing out, the legend, coasting, even capitalizing on it. But the foundation of the myth is the music, and the Stones cannot make the old songs quite new again. They have lost the heart for it. The new songs have no heart at all.

They are sounds from the emptiness that these vast crowds have come to chase away.

--By Jay Cocks

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