The Inflection Point

The Rolling Stones – the world’s premier rock band, are back with their first original album in almost 18 years. Shit doesn’t make sense to me to be honest. It would be different if this felt like a money grab, or some classless B side throwaways from the drugged out 80’s and 90’s, but the Stones feel and sound here like they’ve got a little more to say before the light dims.

It should be noted that this is most definitely a modern day Stones album – the first of it’s kind. The kind of maximalist, heavy handed production is here that pertains to most modern rock music these days. Long gone is the uncut, deviously unfiltered, off the cuff riffs on blues and disco that Exile on Main Street and Some Girls left the globe with some 40 years ago. It’s perhaps overproduced in some ways, but if Mick Jagger can still give it this at age eighty (80!), well damn it, I’m content to hear him out.

No joking aside, Jagger has some serious vocal performances here. Is he backed up by enhanced producer engineers and technology unlike ever before? I’m sure of it. But still, my man has never sounded better through the first 3 songs. He hits a lull when going for those iconic, southern twang ballads the Stones were known for (see Sweet Virginia or Far Away Eyes from years past), content to playing the version of himself imitating the most famous front-man of the mid to late twentieth century, but he’s more or less holding his own throughout the track list.

After drummer and original band member Charlie Watts died in 2021, it would be remiss to think the boys wouldn’t be long behind him. It is a safe assumption to say that at this point – I’m not sure anybody has ever lived life to it’s fullest more than Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Richards, who has survived against all odds, may never see his day without the sun. It’s perhaps time for us, the younger generation, to consider what kind of planet we want to leave for the behind-the-scenes mastermind of the Stones. I’m starting to really believe he may just outlive us all.

So what does it mean to be an aging rock band? When you think about it, there really is no blueprint. The Rolling Stones were somehow, one of the first rock bands around the time of “modern music” kicking off, a genesis of groundbreaking performances and bands that they help usher in during the early 1960’s that laid the work for a decade of musical ingeniousness and the trickle down effect it’s had ever since. The Stones were there in 1964, a debut album when rock was in it’s pre-formative years, still drifting away from Buddy Holly and content on stealing the blues from the African Americans that the origins of rock music so clearly belonged to. Here they are, at the end of 2023, some 60 odd years later, having gone around the sun, toward the sun, bright as the sun, and hot as the sun as a band can go. Their light still may never dim.

The four album climax, within a four year period, starting when they released Beggars Banquet in 1968 to the release of Exile on Main Street in 1972, saw the band hit a tremendous peak that almost no other at the time, and no other since has done. They have forever been labeled the “greatest rock and roll band of all-time”, but if that title ever applied correctly to the Stones, it was here. Sticky Fingers in 1971 with the Andy Warhol cover art provided the type of crossover, pop culture canonization that no band previously had ever had. They were no longer drug induced musicians; from then on, they were artists of the highest order. Jagger in turn, was not the front man of a band from the UK, but instead the face of music during the societal upheavals of the 1960’s and 1970’s. A personal favorite Some Girls in 1978 saw the band return to form, a mere 14 years after their debut album – a millennium in rock-band hazy years, refusing to go away gently and age like any of their contemporaries. By 1981’s Tattoo You, they had made it clear even their B sides and outtakes could lap the modern rock scene.

It’s incredible to think, that even through all of this, just how small and tiny the window of modern music has been. One could argue, music’s course was set on this course by Chuck Berry and the post World War boom and globalization of the 1950’s. If true, that would define roughly 75 years of modern music. The Stones have been around for 60 of those. To feel even smaller, an estimate, as scientists believe, that modern humanity as we know it only started around 3500 BC (the first sources of original handwriting and hieroglyphics). That gives us modern humans around 6000 years of existence. The World has been around since the Big Bang, roughly 13.8 billion years ago.

That gives us humans around 1/100 millionth of an existence. A flash in the pan. Not even a blink of an eye. The Mesozoic era of dinosaurs wouldn’t even recognize us modern day homo-sapiens as an age. Contemporary music, less than even that. Look how far we’ve come. Look at the ways the sounds have progressed. I’m excited to hear how music will continue to change in my lifetime alone – we are, again, just in the infant stage of it all. In that 1964 debut album of the same eponymous name, Jagger and Co. had the following to say 4 years later after it’s release across the pond into the States “Suppose we failed. Suppose we went on not doing much, just soaking up music, for a whole year. That would be about the limit, we reckoned. We flopped – would it matter? At least we’d have tried. We’d have tried to the best of our ability and we would have had nothing to regret in later life – when possibly we’d all be working in offices and married and settled in some suburban house. But if we didn’t give it a proper fling, we would probably end up kicking ourselves – like never knowing how good we could have been. And we figured that a lifetime of regret, of thinking back, just wouldn’t work out.” As Jagger would go on to say 60 years later in the swaggering Close to You from the new album, “Now I’m too young for dying, and too old to lose“. Wherever the new sound moves to, it’ll have been the reaction and causation of their influence.

So stick around for the next 60 years, and you may be surprised about what the Stones will continue to say. The sun hasn’t set thus far. In a real sense, it probably hasn’t even risen yet.

The Rolling Stones, 2021. Drummer and Original Member Charlie Watts (far right) would die a few weeks later.