by David Holtzman
I see dead people. Well, at least old ones. On Saturday evening I saw four aging rock and roll stars turn back metabolic time and put on a hell of a good show. The Rolling Stones took to the stage in Halifax, Nova Scotia and proved that they still have it. Opening up with Paint It Black and closing with I Can't Get No Satisfaction, they hit their biggest and baddest top 40 tunes, but also rocked on some great album songs like Monkey Man and Silver and Gold. And of course, the eye-popping technology. More about that in a second.
Watching them play their 19 song set, I thought about how much things had changed from when I first started going to concerts. For one thing, the 50,000+ member audience was split evenly between baby boomers like me and the 18-30 year old crowd. Part of that may have been due to Kanye West opening up for the Stones, but clearly the majority were not there to see Kanye (or Alice Cooper). There was a little old lady in front of us that was at least 90 and had been taken to the show by her granddaughter. I should also mention that it rained through the entire concert and was cold in way that only the Maritimes can get. I think that the old lady might have bought it during Jumping Jack Flash, at least she stopped moving.
The rock group had pyrotechnics, a huge inflatable tongue and a bizarre hydraulic stage that actually moved out into the middle of the crowd at one point in the concert, but nothing that I hadn't seen at Blue Oyster Cult concerts twenty years ago.
Ironically, the most evident example of advanced technology at the show were the Stones themselves. I stared incredulously as the Brit rockers danced, pranced and leaped across the massive stage for two hours straight. These people are grandparents, for crissake. Keith Richards, who looked well-worn, but vibrant, could be a poster child for recreational drug use. The fact that this man looked that good after over 40 years of being a human crash test dummy for the underground pharmaceutical industry is a testament to high-tech medical advances.
The Stones are wealthy, powerful people and presumably are the recipients of state-of-the-art medical care, as much as anyone short of the Pope. Their mobility is obviously the result of unfettered access to medical technology--ambulation and spriteliness in your 6th, going on 7th decade of life. As I approach my own 5th decade, I feel better somehow.
I think of my own grandparents when I was in school, wispy white hair, no muscle tone and clearly old, mentally and physicallly. They were younger then than Mick Jagger is today.
And of course it was the best rock and roll concert that I'd seen in a long, long time.
Posted on September 25, 2006
