The Stones: Just Rolling on Nostalgia? : Already a hit, the tour now aims at proving band’s relevance

Even after all these years, nothing shakes the rock world like a Rolling Stones tour.

The Who may be as prized by hard-core rock fans, and it may have sold out as many concerts (two) at 56,000-seat Veterans Stadium here this year, but the Stones generate more heat, especially outside the rock world.

Both bands landed on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine with their tours, but only the Stones made the cover of Time.

And there was no contest in terms of how many people were willing to shell out big bucks, according to Philadelphia ticket brokers.

“The demand for Stones tickets was so much greater. It was like the Who never happened,” said a spokesman for Entertainment Plus, a local broker. Chris Lipton, owner of Good Time Tickets, agreed. “The most brokers around town were getting for top Who tickets was around $200. With the Stones, you could double that.”

Similar excitement is expected on most of the stops on a 36-city stadium tour that will be seen by an estimated 3 million people before it ends in mid-December. That figure includes nearly 150,000 for Oct. 21 and 22 shows at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

Anticipating this demand, the tour’s promoter, Michael Cohl, president of BCL Entertainment Corp., reportedly guaranteed the Stones more than $65 million to do the tour. At an average ticket price of $28.50, the concerts will gross approximately $85.5 million at the box office alone.

And that’s just the beginning. T-shirt and merchandising income from the tour (applying the industry norm of $12 per person for a stadium tour) could bring in another $36 million. There will be additional millions from a pay-per-view TV special at the end of the tour and a “fashion clothing collection” due this fall from the Brockum Group, a division of BCL. The Stones line will include jackets, shorts, sneakers, sweat shirts and various accessories--all designed under the direction of Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts.

As Keith Richards asked in a pre-tour interview, “Why is everyone making such a fuss about a bunch of middle-aged madmen on tour?”

The answer, in large part, can be traced to the appeal of the Stones’ body of work--a history of great singles that stretches from “Satisfaction” and “Get Off My Cloud” to “Tumbling Dice” and “Start Me Up,” as well as less consistent, but occasionally magnificent albums. “Exile on Main Street,” the band’s 1972 two-record set, has frequently been hailed as the all-time rock album.

But there is another reason for all the interest in the Stones, and it’s an issue that faces a lot of veteran bands these days: the nostalgia factor.

You can almost see Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, both of whom will be 46 by the end of the year, wincing at the term.

Nostalgia is a quaint enough concept under most circumstances. No one objects to the nostalgic overtones at an old-timers’ baseball game. Fans love the chance to cheer once more for Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax and the other great names from sport’s past.

But nostalgia is an unsettling term in rock ‘n’ roll--the idea that music, rather than speaking to you in a new way, simply encourages you to reminisce about what the songs once meant to you.

Indeed, the real test of this tour isn’t how many tickets the Stones will sell--that issue was largely a foregone conclusion before the shows were put on sale.

The challenge of this tour is whether the Stones, after a quarter-century, can be more than nostalgia. If they can, the Stones will accomplish something that has eluded virtually all the band’s own earlier rock heroes.

The great fear connected to aging in rock hasn’t turned out to be expanding waistlines or receding hairlines, but being viewed as nostalgia.

That term has long been a buzz word, like “Las Vegas” or “lounge act,” to the revolutionary young rockers of the ‘60s--the symbol of show-biz hacks, or at least the end of the creative line.

One reason Mick Jagger insisted on a new album to accompany the Stones’ first U.S. tour in eight years was to combat the nostalgia inherent in doing just your oldies, a la the Who shows.

While the Stones performed only three songs from the new album, “Steel Wheels,” in the tour’s opening shows here, more songs from the album will be added to the set as the tour proceeds around North America. Meanwhile, the band has carefully designed the show to make sure all aspects of the Stones’ past are represented in the song selection--not just the most nostalgia-rich mid-’60s.

The 28 songs performed by the Stones on opening night Aug. 31 included seven from the mid-’60s (including “Satisfaction” and “Paint It Black”), five from the especially creative late-’60s period (“Honky Tonk Women,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”), nine from the ‘70s (“Brown Sugar,” “Dead Flowers”) and seven from the ‘80s. Six of the latter, including “Undercover of the Night” and “Harlem Shuffle,” were recorded after the 1981 tour, and thus hadn’t been performed before in concert.

Richards acknowledged the nostalgia issue in interviews when he outlined the challenges facing the Stones at this point in the band’s career.

“Rock ‘n’ roll is still only about 32 years old and it is still getting over its (preoccupation) with teen-age themes. The Stones are in a good position to help it grow up.”

Inherent in Richards’ statement is an anti-nostalgia provision. To “grow up,” the Stones have to find a way to avoid the nostalgia tendencies of so many of their ‘60s counterparts and virtually all of their ‘50s predecessors.

As great as they once were, almost every important ‘50s rock act has been reduced to nostalgia. It’s true of Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Carl Perkins. The artists haven’t progressed. They simply go on stage night after night and do the old songs pretty much the same way they always have done them.

Similarly, a lot of ‘60s acts, including the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons, have become extensions of this nostalgia mentality. They both tend to treat the music as hits rather than art.

The revolutionary thing about post-’50s rock is that the best artists--from Bob Dylan and the Who’s Pete Townshend to the Beatles and the Stones, from David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen to Prince and U2--approach rock as a medium as capable as literature or film of exploring social and personal issues in an artful way.

In recent years, Dylan’s shows have suggested that material, even though in rock it has often seemed tied to the pulse of a specific generation, can live on and touch new generations. Dylan has also combatted nostalgia by dressing songs up with new arrangements, a move that has frequently led to cries of foul from his more tradition-minded fans.

The recent Who tour was another encouraging sign that veteran rock artists can sidestep nostalgia. As the band demonstrated, quality material can resist the nostalgia tendencies, especially if presented with a sense of continued passion and if the artist feels free to reinterpret the material. But the Who tour, for all the majesty of the Townshend songs, was a limited victory, a holding action of sorts, because it didn’t deal with the issue of new material.

That’s what adds an extra dimension to the Stones tour. There’s not only new material, but a different attitude. Where the Who all but came on stage with their hands in the air saying don’t be too hard on us because we aren’t, after all, pretending to be a competitive band anymore, the Stones came out here with guns blazing.

They demanded to be judged by the same standards that would be applied to any new band. They wanted to show that musicians over 40 could compete and the songs could still connect.

The point wasn’t lost on critics here, and the notices were uniformly positive.

The New York Times’ Jon Pareles noted: “In a summer of reunion tours, the Stones can’t rest on their fans’ nostalgia--and they don’t have to. Under the stadium trappings is a band that still kicks, hard.”

Agreed Edna Gundersen in USA Today: “There’s no rust gathering under these wheels. . . . No mere ‘retrospective,’ the Stones have geared this boisterous and bludgeoning show for the present tense.”

Jonathan Takiff, writing in the Philadelphia Daily News, concluded: “The Rolling Stones set out to make a grand statement with this show: that they’re alive and relevant to today’s audience and today’s music. Last night, they proved the point.”

The Stones can do even more on the rest of the tour to combat nostalgia tendencies than the band did in the two shows here. Some songs in the set don’t hold up, so they tend to connect only on a nostalgia level. Some songs are no longer relevant because they are tied to images (the sinister Stones of the “Midnight Rambler” period) or because the songs are simply too slight (“Play With Fire”).

In their place, the Stones could offer some of the more wistful and introspective songs that reflect the changes in the band members’ lives and attitudes since the bad-boy days--songs such as “Black Limousine” from the “Tattoo You” album or “Slipping Away” from the new album.

But the band ultimately can do only so much to control the nostalgia issue. The fans, too, play a part. One reason the ‘50s acts have kept doing the old hits the old way is that the fans don’t demand more.

At most ‘50s oldies shows, in fact, fans seem more intent on celebrating an era than saluting a particular artist. It doesn’t seem to matter all that much which of the stars are on a given bill, or even if the original members of a group are singing the tunes.

Many of the older fans in the Veterans Stadium audience, too, seemed to look at music chiefly as a way to reminisce about the good old days.

Carol Perry, 41, said she paid a broker $75 each for two Stones tickets just to hear the old songs. “It was great,” she said after the opening-night concert. “I just wish they would have done more of the older songs, like ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together.’ To tell the truth, I didn’t even know they were still making new albums. I don’t follow rock much anymore. The last concert I went to see was the Moody Blues.”

But Perry seemed the exception. For one thing, the over-30 segment was outnumbered. As much as 75% of the two crowds at Veterans Stadium appeared to consist of teen-agers, and the theme that emerged from interviews with more than two dozen of them each day was that they view the Stones as still contemporary.

“I’ve been a Stones fan since I started listening to my brother’s Stones records five or six years ago,” said Tony DeFazio, 17. “But it’s not like I’m coming to see a ‘golden oldies’ act. I like their new stuff, too.”

Tony Pollinas, 14, added: “A lot of today’s bands were recorded before I was listening to records. . . . Van Halen, Aerosmith, Def Leppard, maybe even Motley Crue, and no one calls them nostalgia acts. You could put ‘Start Me Up’ or any of the Stones records on the radio today and they’d still sound great. It’s the music I’m interested in, not the age of the band.”

Kevin Morrison, 17, said he likes a lot of ‘60s music, including the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and the Doors. But he said he puts the Stones in a different category because the group is still active.

“Besides, it’s not just their ‘60s songs that I like,” he added as he put on a tour T-shirt, the one with the bright red tongue logo on the front. “I didn’t like the last album much, but I liked Keith Richards’ solo album a lot.”

But are the older Stones songs at all relevant to today’s teens?

Chris Barden, 17, nodded vigorously when asked that question.

“Absolutely,” he said, sitting at the end of the stadium opposite from the stage. “Lots of Stones songs express how I feel at different times. Take here tonight,” he said, smiling. “The song that I think of is ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ because what I want is a ticket up near the stage, and here I am in the back of the stadium.”