The Rolling Stones Revue Review
Age Ain't No Thang When You Rock and Roll
On a night where the Boomers were on TV (the men's Olympic basketball version) I found myself out with ‘the boomers’ (the generational version) listening to music released before I was born.
Off to the Fortitude Music Hall to see a star studded line up of Aussie rock legends performing The Rolling Stones greatest album (Sticky Fingers) plus a roster of their greatest hits, I stepped tentatively into the psychedelic swirl of The Rolling Stones Revue.
Unsurprisingly, I was the youngest person in the room.
And that included the people on stage.
Strolling in at 830 pm thinking I'd have plenty of time before the tunes rang out, I quickly realised I had missed the first 30 minutes. The performers know their crowd - most attendee’s dentures would be cleaning on their bedside table come 11pm.
There was one empty seat, so I slipped into it. Yes, it was seated! Which, age be damned, was fucking awesome.
Let’s face it - we're all getting older, and at exactly the same speed. Some just started earlier than others.
Mick Jagger certainly started 'earlier'. Born in 1943, this is man who still tours and records constantly at age 81. Despite barely slowing over his 8 decades, this rolling stone has still gathered plenty of moss in the form of 8 children to 5 different women.
But, I'm not ageist. Biden was 81 when he stepped down as the President of The United States, and he was doing completely fine and was really good at debating. Trump is the oldest person ever to run for the presidency and there’s no problem with his cognition at all and the connection between his healthy mind, the truth, and the words that he says remain strong.
There’s nothing wrong with getting older! We’re all doing it!
Back to the music. The original members of The Rolling Stones weren’t concerned about the cuban missile crisis back in 1962 - they were too busy forming an iconic British rock band that would reshape the history of Rock and Roll. Their music has had a lasting cultural impact spanning decades, and, as we will see, still goes hard.
Especially when performed by Aussie rock royalty.
Tim Rogers (from You Am I, aged 54), Phil Jameson (from Grinspoon, aged 49), Adalita (from Magic Dirt, aged 53) and Tex Perkins (from, well Tex Perkins, and everything he has done, aged 59) each took turns to front an impeccable backing band to sing through the entire Sticky Fingers album, my all the fav by the Stones.
Having missed the first part of the album and cursing I didn’t get to hear Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’ – which, if I had to choose, would be my all-time fav track - I settled into the slower and more moody 2nd half of this 1971 masterpiece. Tex’s Sister Morphine was sublime, but it was topped by a duet with Tex and Adalita on the final track, Moonlight Mile, the quintessential travelling musician song.
Just another mad, mad day on the road.
It was a tad odd to be in a venue where I’ve witnessed many a magic musical moment often in a peak of wailing guitars, sweaty head-banging and screams of encore, but to have calm voiceovers for the intermission (handy for those with incontinence), often feeling out of place when I clapped too loudly, and call-outs to 'please return to your seats' like we were at the theatre.
On with the show:
The slightly muted 2nd half of the Sticky Fingers album was no harbinger for the 2nd set post intermission - a 15 + track run through of the Stone’s greatest hits.
A few tracks in, the crowd was warming. Beginning to bob heads and tap legs up and down. The glasses of chardonnay were peaking, groups of 70 year olds gathered around the bar, but were unable to take their eyes from the stage.
Then, Tim Rogers come out to performed Midnight Rambler, and absolutely tore the fucking house down.
He slinked and strutted, humped a speaker on stage, and threw himself around like he was 20 years old. Later in the set he would exclaim that ‘up close I’m really bloody ugly’ as a hedge against his desirability, but in this moment he was the sexiest man alive. Besides, we could only make out a semblance of a silhouette of the lithe, slinking rock god swaying before us because no one in the crowd was wearing their glasses.
That silhouette was all we needed - agelessness confirmed.
Start me up, baby!
Last year when I saw The Cruel Sea perform at the same venue, I immediately thought Tex Perkins looked exactly like a mid-twenties Mick Jagger. He pours himself into his tight jeans, swaggers everywhere and makes love to his mic stand like an Englishman in heat.
So by the time Tex blasted out Paint It Black, and then Sympathy For The Devil, two Stones tracks with the most infectious beats for moving your bod, the whole place threw off their concerns and their age, and, fuelled by white wine spritzers and statin meds, sprung from their seats and danced.
One lady in her 70s didn’t stop for a 7 or 8 song run – twirling and shimmying for over an hour.
Caution was being forcefully thrown to the musical winds. Abandon was recklessly embraced.
These old dogs were suddenly remembering their old tricks.
Every track Adalita sang she completely nailed - an absolute force of a voice and performer - with her duets with Tex and Tim stitching the harder edged rock songs together seamlessly. It’s Only Rock and Roll (But I Like it) was her killer track, Adalita’s charisma and stage presence far exceeding any reasonable expectations of rock goddess awesomeness.
Another thing landed hard for me.
Live, louder and more chunky versions of many of these Stones songs are far superior to their recorded counterparts, which often come off as more twangy country rock and roll pieces. I’m not saying the album versions of Start Me Up and Jumping Jack Flash are ‘small’, but in the hands of seasoned rock royalty in a perfectly sized venue with impeccable sound engineering they become mighty - transcending generational ideas of rock heft. They become solid, they hit your chest, they punch your ‘drums. Especially the chest and ‘drums of this millennial raised on 90s hard rock who sometimes laments the softer nature of 70s rock’n’roll.
I should have never doubted, Underneath the semi-quiet exterior of many of these studio recorded anthems are the impenetrable bones of much hardier rock masterpieces that need to be experienced live at ear shattering volumes to be fully appreciated.
This is true of all live music of course; in the moment, shared with strangers, the bright lasers flashing, the psychedelic backgrounds swirling, the airwaves pulsating with drum beats and screaming guitars - the music becomes more than the sum of its parts.
We can lose ourselves, together.
Transcend ourselves even?
Just for a little bit.
Some gigs it’s only for a few fleeting moments, in one song, that everyone feels this, arms raised in synchronicity. Seasoned veterans like the crew from the Rolling Stone Revue know how to extend that moment across multiple songs, linking the peaks, keeping the energy and maintaining the ‘high’. (The LSD soaked visuals and the kaleidoscopic lighting all playing their part.)
No music does this quite like rock music.
And live will always be better than studio. Fight me.
Other than taking drugs, or playing with children, live music must surely be the greatest leveller, the age-defying boundary-dissolving flow-state enabler that suppresses how old we are (or feel), and simply reminds us none of that matters because we are alive goddamit.
On the drugs thing, it’s worth noting that all of these musicians have battled addiction. Phil Jameson used to be a junkie (his words) and battled an addiction to ice/meth. I first saw him at ‘99s Livid festival and he was a frenetic, drunken force on stage. Tim Rogers is an alcoholic (it’s not clear if he’s on the wagon currently or off) and Tex is recently sober, lamenting that it might be a long time between drinks for fans of his performances as Johny Cash (which assumedly he needed to do whilst inebriated to match the style of the famously addicted Man in Black).
Like athletes Kelly Slater and Lauren Jackson, these 4 rock legends proved that age is just a concept. I’m grateful that the battles they had to surmount to step up there and, in combination with ageless 70s rock and roll show us again that we are alive and still kicking, were battles won this night. And the battles the crowd had to work through to feel free to erupt from their seats and roam the aisles in blissful dance, high blood pressure be damned, losing themselves to riffs of yore, were won by the agelessness of this music and the permission given by the people who performed it with such youthful gusto.
Even if there were sore knees and tight hips the following morning.
Worth it.
SetList
1st Set - Sticky Fingers Album
Brown Sugar
Sway
Wild Horses
Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’
You Gotta Move
Bitch
I Got the Blues - Phil Jamieson
Sister Morphine - Tex Perkins
Dead Flowers - Adalita
Moonlight Mile - Tex and Adalita duet
2nd Set - Greatest Hits
Start Me Up - Phil Jamieson
Honkytonk Woman - Tex
Track by Tex and Tim
Waiting On a friend - Tex Perkins
Get off of my Cloud - Adalita
Paint It Black - Tex Perkins
Midnight Rambler - Tim Rogers
Tumbling Dice - Adalita
Beats of Burden - Phil and Adalita duet
Track by Phil Jamieson
It's Only Rock and Roll (but I like it) - Adalita
Sympathy For The Devil - Tex Perkins with backing ‘woo wooos’ by everyone
Can't Always Get What You Want - Adalita and Tim
Jumping Jack Flash - Tim Rogers
Gimme Shelter - Everyone