Torn and frayed, but still punching their weight
The Rolling Stones in the Olympic Stadium are anything but dull
By Jarkko Jokelainen
...and the champ is DOWN, in the 5th!
Keith Richards, the Human Riff himself, is on the canvas!
After a routine enough first twenty minutes, mid-way through She's So Cold, the Rolling Stones gig in the Olympic Stadium has taken a new turn.
The band's legendary lead guitarist is flat on his back on the stage.
But Keef gets up again, brushes off the dust from his sleeves, glances around him - and sluggishly picks at his guitar once more. Front-man Mick Jagger gives him a withering glare over his shoulder. The normally oh-so-composed Charlie Watts is cracked up laughing after the number grinds to a close - so much so that he has trouble staying upright on his stool behind the drums.
Well, there's a turn-up for the book, eh? The world's greatest rock'n'roll circus is in town, but this is no seamless, antiseptic spectacle.
This - is - The - Rolling - Stones.
In a way it is quite incredible how the band manage to pull it together and get through the gig at all.
Wednesday evening kicked off ordinarily enough with the two warhorses of Start Me Up and Let's Spend The Night Together, but over the next hour or so there were only a handful of monster Stones hits served up.
Yes, we do get Tumbling Dice from Exile on Main Street, but thrown in alongside it are two less obvious cuts: the flat-out boogie of All Down The Line and a "singalong-with-Mick" Sweet Virginia that the traditionally staid Finnish audience doesn't really pick up on.
Can't You Hear Me Knocking from Sticky Fingers is given an extended jam workout, and instead of the title track from the 1983 album Under Cover, we get I Wanna Hold You included in Keith's short spotlight section.
All the big hits of Let it Bleed are passed over. No Midnight Rambler, no You Can't Always Get What You Want, no Gimme Shelter (off the list since April 2006). Instead, Keith pulls out a blues-tinged You Got The Silver.
Anyone knows that the Rolling Stones could string out a back-to-back greatest hits setlist night after night that would keep people on their feet for three hours straight, but they have chosen a different path.
Instead of tossing off the most hackneyed numbers, the band keep their interest alive by working out on some less familiar tracks from their large back catalogue. And the set-lists are slightly different every night: on this tour the Stones have so far served up 47 unique songs within a framework of gigs that generally run to 19 or 20 numbers.
It is good for the punters, too. It is clear from the stage that the band have come to play and not simply to dial it in or go through the motions. For instance, the sight of Keith Richards genially and charismatically mumbling his way through You've Got The Silver to Ron Wood's acoustic accompaniment is a rare and welcome treat at a stadium gig.
It's also hard to swallow the way the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world actually play these numbers.
The rhythm stutters and teeters and wobbles dangerously from side to side. In places the chords seem to be pulled out of a Dadaist hat. I mean, they must have nailed that riff from Satisfaction a thousand times and more, but on the night, when the song surfaces on the B-stage in centrefield, it proves to be more than the guitarists can manage.
Keith Richards struts around the stage like a swaggering old Farmer Giles. He puts his hands behind his back and thrusts out his stomach. Every so often, when he remembers, he throws in a chord or two, not always the right one.
An impish grin is plastered across his face throughout the gig. And apropos of plastered, it would not surprise me in the least if the riffing farmer himself had been slipping away now and then to have a belt from a bottle kept stashed behind the woodshed.
Ronnie Wood fills in on his guitar between Richards' occasional forays up and down the fretboard and he, too, is grinning like a wrinkly Dennis the Menace.
Charlie Watts has always professed to want to be a jazz drummer, and these days he lays down a beat that is increasingly light-years distant from the conventional rock fare.
The only exception to these lords of misrule is Sir Michael Jagger, 64 years young, whose voice has kept its shape and does not show a ragged edge even on the high notes. Jagger's entire stage presence is just as sharp as it was twenty-odd years ago. He's on duty and working his socks off.
By all sensible standards, a ragged and dirty rhythm'n'blues band like this ought to be performing in a smoky intimate club, but here they are - out in front of 36,000 people in a sold-out stadium. It doesn't quite compute, and the fact is that no other band could dream of pulling off such a stunt.
And this is precisely the reason why The Rolling Stones, warts and cock-ups and shortcomings and all, ARE the very bone-marrow of rock.
When you put them alongside the rest of the sanitised and programmed stadium mega-acts, even in their sunset years the Stones still exude that dirty and dangerous edge about them. You never quite know what is coming up next.
Yes, what you get might be an embarrassing pratfall, but it sure as hell isn't going to be bland and boring.
On the other hand, it was pretty predictable that the Helsinki audience would get the high-tide hits they came for in the end. The last forty-five minutes of the gig is a flat-out cavalcade from Miss You to the closing Jumping Jack Flash, before the audience are given a "Yeah-Yeah-Yeah-Whoo-Oooh" arms-in-the-air encore workout on Brown Sugar.
The old standards get a decent enough treatment, with the notable exception of that messy Satisfaction, and by this stage of the proceedings the band demonstrates that it is worth all the fame and notoriety it has accrued in over forty years on the road. And it is not all routine, even now: the intro to Sympathy for the Devil looks to have been given a new arrangement for this tour.
By the latter part of the gig, the much-talked-about staging has also come into its own as the August evening grows dark.
In the cold light of day the massive structure looks at best like a copy of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and at worst like some Espoo apartment block. The band have stood out in front of better stage designs in the past.
The evening's warm-up act, Toots and the Maytals from Jamaica, find themselves in the usual unenviable position of playing for people who are either still looking for their seats or tanking up in the bar.
The band go for broke by opening up with their biggest hit Pressure Drop, and at the end of their short set we also get two more hits in Monkey Man and 54-46 Was My Number.
The eclectic mix of reggae and ska, all the way through to afrobeat and gospel, does not really transfer well in the half-empty stadium milieu, but under different circumstances Toots Hibbert's energy would have hit the spot.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 3.8.2007
More on this subject:
 Set-List 1.8.2007, Helsinki Olympic Stadium
Previously in HS International Edition:
Rolling Stones blow into town as storm blows out (1.8.2007)
Links:
Rolling Stones Official Website
JARKKO JOKELAINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
jarkko.jokelainen@hs.fi
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| 7.8.2007 - THIS WEEK |
Torn and frayed, but still punching their weight
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