Satisfaction (At Last)

[poliphilo]

The Stones have a new album out and the critics are saying it's their best for 25 years.

Really?

Or is it just that the wheel has turned full circle?

I've been expecting this for a while. It's a rule of popular fame that everything comes back into favour eventually.

Keep at it long enough and- no matter how humiliating the middle years- you will eventually be acclaimed as a veteran.

I was reading the other day about how hip Donovan is. Donovan? Yup, Donovan.

The Stones have been a joke for the last twenty, thirty years (not that it ever hit them in their fanbase or their pockets) but they have continued, they have persevered, they have stuck to their guns and finally it's paid off. Last year they were ridiculous old roues grooving to the rhythms of their youth and this year they are keepers of the flame and an example to us all.

Comments

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

I have never attended a Stones concert. I DID live down the street from the Carrier Dome so I certainly have HEARD one.

They never did anything for me. Mick is far too skinny, and too impressed with himself to really make me want to pay attention. I certainly danced to "Honky Tonk Women" more times than I can count...I can remember teaching a three year old baby sitting charge a little dance to show her parents to that particular song. I just can't stand to watch him. In fact...until there was a Restaurant chain called "Ruby Tuesdays", I used to used that as one of my 'secret' names.

But a work friend of mine went to see them in Boston, at Fenway. She came back to work today and she can't say enough about it. She's...four years younger than I am. It was good to see that she had such a good time, but...they are still ridiculous old roues to me.

I'll take The Boss, any time.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think the Stones were always a bit hit and miss.

I bought myself a compilation disc once and the percentage of embarassingly dire mistakes was surprisingly high. As songwriters they were never in the same class as the Beatles (or the Beach Boys or the Kinks.)

There was always something ever so slightly silly about Mick Jagger. Marianne Faithfull's Autobiography paints him as a nice, middle-class boy who- even at the height of the 60s- never quite got it.

[philtration.livejournal.com]

I like the very old stuff by the Stones but everything since the early 70s has been forgettable. I saw them live at Soldier field in Chicago in the late 70s because I worked there and got in for free. Being a Chicago Park District employee, I was able to go back stage after the show. I walked right past Mick and he looked like a drowned rat. Kind of like Barney Fife after being hit with a fire hose.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The Stones were really baaadass in the 60s. They signified the end of civilisation as we know it. But then they got stuck in that groove and it became kinda ridiculous to have these wrinkly muli-millionaires leaping around on stage singing about sex and drugs and fighting in the street.

Mick has always been a nice, middle-class boy underneath all the pouting and attitudinizing- but it really put the cap on it for me when he accepted a knighthood.