The Rolling Stones in Rio, 2006: High on Energy, Low on Emotion

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I ran a big pledge-break special on KPBS featuring the 2006 edition of the Rolling Stones: core members Mick Jagger (vocals, and guitar on one song), Keith Richards and Ron Wood (guitars) and Charlie Watts (driums) nad a bunch of hired hands,including a full horn section and three backup singers, one of whom, Lisa Fischer, gets to sing the second vocal part on the Stones’ cover of “Night Time Is the Right Time” and totally explodes Jagger’s pretensions of being a soul singer. (Ray Charles, who had the original hit on this song even though his wasn’t the first version – Roosevelt Sykes had recorded it as early as 1937 and there are also previous versions by Big Bill Broonzy and Nappy Brown – could have more than held his own against Fischer. Mich Jagger, not so much.) The concert was held outdoors at Copacabaña Beach ini Rio de Janeiro, Brazil as part of a 90-show tour the Rolling Stones did in 2006, and according to the show’s announcers (who could well be exaggerating) drew almost a million people. It was also a nice memorial to drummer Watts, who had been with the tones for their entire existence as a band (so the Stones didn't go through the struggles of finding the right drummer the Beatles did!)and who played his last show with them in 2019, two years before his death.

I must say that in recent years the Rolling Stones have pretty much faded from my cultural radar screen; I first discovered them when my mother passed down to me a copy of the original 45 rpm of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” saying that she hadn’t liked it. I immediately clasped it to my bosom (metaphorically) and embraced it because it finally enabled me to complete the rite of passage of adolescence: embracing a piece of music your parents can’t stand and blasting it out every chance I could get. (My mom actually liked the Beatles before I did, and she also turned me on to Bob Dylan.) Alas, the Rolling Stones did their best work in the 1960’s, and I suspect the reason the quality of their songs fell off after 1970 was that the Beatles broke up and therefore were no longer around to keep the Stones artistically honest. In fact, the Stones’ career still follows in the wake of the Beatles’ (or what’s left of them): in 2019 Paul McCartney did a huge worldwide concert tour and the following year the Stones planned a mega-tour of their own to compete – only the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic intervened and so Mick Jagger didn’t get to do his spit-in-the-face tour to put McCartney in his place.

It still rankles me when I hear the Rolling Stones described as “the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band of all time” – to me they don’t hold a candle to the Beatles as a creative recording act, even though the Beatles stopped touring in August 1966 (3 ½ years before they broke up, and one of the reasons for the breakup was that McCartney wanted to go back to performing “live” and the other three regarded that with all the appeal of a soldier already diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder being sent out on another tour of duty). My last encounter with the Stones’ music had been ordering two CD’s of the 1967 psychedelic album Their Satanic Majesties Request, one for a friend of ours who had bought the original LP (with the 3-D cover) in a thrift store but nad nothing to play it on, and one for me. It’s a bizarre and largely self-indulgent album, with two different versions of the song “Sing This All Together” (a normal version at the start of the album and a really long and rather pointless jam on the end of side one), though it has some lovely songs on it including “She’s a Rainbow” and “2000 Light Years from Home.” It was also, to put it politely, inspired by the Beatles’ masterpiece Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and in his 1970 Rolling Stone interview John Lennon expressed his irritation. Not only did it rankle him that the Beatles were portrayed as safe and cuddly, while the Stones were considered the bad boys of rock, he bluntly said, “Satanic Majesties is Sgt. Pepper and ‘We Love You’ (the non-LP single the Stones recorded at the same sessions) is ‘All You Need Is Love.’”

I’ve seen the Stones on stage three times – in 1969 (at the infamous Altamont show), 1972 and 1981 – and they are a spectacular live act even though I’ve seen better. I remember my mother and I watching a Stones appearance on the Dick Cavett Show in 1969 and she, who had apparently expected Jagger to be a sort of white James Brown, got incensed at how little he did on stage. “He doesn’t even dance! He just jumps!” my mom complained. Actually, I was impressed with how well Jagger jumped at this 2006 concert; despite all the years he’s lived (he was born July 26, 1943, which would have made him 63 when this concert took place) and all the physical abuse he’s put himself through, both natural and chemical, he came across as ini excellent shape. Certainly he looked better than his long-time collaborator Keith Richards, who looked like a stoned zombie – remember that he’s had his blood completely changed at least twice as a sort of high-expense instant cure for heroin addiction – and I had a hard time telling which guitarist was Richards and which was Ron Wood (another 1960’s veteran but one who was originally part of the Small Faces and didn’t become a Rolling Stone until 1975). I remember the last time I saw the Stones live Richards looked and sounded so “out of it” that it took him a minute or so to get into each song on which he had to play lead (whine on the newer songs Ron Wood was visibly playing lead); 25 years later he was in surprisingly good form.

The Stones raced through a set that in this TV version (once again, the PBS network persisted in this disgusting practice of abbreviating their music specials and then boasting during the pledge breaks that if you gave them a fair amount of money they would send you a set of two CD’s and a DVD containing the entire concert, not just the loss leader) consisted of 14 songs, mostly from their 1960’s heyday and their 1970’s not-quite-heyday-but-still-better-than-they’ve-been-since: “Jumping Jack Flash” (their obligatory opener), “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It),” “You Got Me Rockin’,” “Tumbling Dice,” “Wild Horses,” “Midnight Rambler,” “Night Time Is the Right Time” (the Stones’ only nod to their early years as a cover band for African-Amencan blues and R&B songs), “Miss You,” “Get Off of My Cloud,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Sympathy for the Devil” (my all-time favorite Rolling Stones song, though since they were in Brazil I wish they’d recruited a local group to reproduce the samba percussion on the original record, which they didn’t), “Start Me Up,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Satisfaction” (their obligatory closer).

From their set list you can see that the Stones were going all-out for energy and power, neglecting the quieter and more lyrical parts of their repertoire; even the beautiful ballad “Wild Horses” was taken way too fast, and in “Tumbling Dice” I could hear Jagger dodging high notes he no longer has. This business of the Stones speeding up when they perform live was noticeable even from their very first live album, Got Live If You Want It (a notorious album because at least one song, “Fortune Teller,” was an early Stones demo crudely faked to sound live when it wasn’t) – they zipped through the opening song, “Under My Thumb,” at warp speed compared to the studio version, and that pattern persisted throughout the recording. (Jagger also showed off his limitations as a soul singer with a cover of Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Much Too Long” that isn’t a patch on Otis’s own version from his Live in Europe LP.) It resulted in a show that was exciting and a lot of fun, but also just a bit wearing after a while, and one would expect “the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band” to show off their quieter as well as their louder side. Then again, the title of the special (and the tour it was drawn from) was A Bigger Bang, and that essentially warned us what they would do!