“Yes I’ll have a pint of Guinness and a dinner portion of the cute little rooster man over there with the shag haircut.”
 
The Rolling Stones, the longest running oldies show on the planet, performed last night in London and, according to reports, it was a moderately hard-rocking 2 1/2 hour set. The concert celebrated the band’s 50th anniversary of making music together and not dying.

From the videos I’ve seen, the show seemed rather lackluster and tired. A visibly bored Bill Wyman, re-united with his old band for “Honky Tonky Women,” plucked his bass guitar with all the fervor of a man trying to dislodge dried snot from the front of his pants. While Wyman was never what you’d call a great showman he really gives new meaning to the term “going thru the motions.” In contrast, Mick Taylor joined the group for “Midnight Rambler” and the word is he tore the joint up with a blazing guitar solo that was met with delirium from the delighted middle-aged and older audience. The once beautiful Taylor has blown-up to Falstaffian proportions - which may explain why Jagger kept at a considerable distance from his former bandmate: a fear perhaps of being crushed to death or, god forbid, eaten. But that sense of distance and disengagement seems to define the band these days. The whole group seem to be acting the role of being The Rolling Stones, reminding us all that sometimes you really can’t go home again.

The Stones are playing to audiences trying to relive the epiphanies of their youth, looking backward while dancing to music that once enthralled us with its threatening newness. What was once dangerous is now a collective memory swoon for a generation of adults who cling to their adolescence like Priests clutching rosary beads or a drunk holding tight to a photo of a lost lover. There is an element of religiosity in this adoration of The Stones and all of the touchstones their music represents. But instead of being the sexy dark mass of the past, it’s become a church picnic. Our totems and costumes have changed from dope, longhair, beads and leather-fringed jackets to a pair of bermuda shorts, flip-flops, Ray-Bans and over-priced stadium beer. We’re not fucking in the mud anymore. We’re head-bobbing on astro-turf.

The most ferocious and feral rock band in the world has turned kind of silly, sad, and irrelevant, yet they continue to tour and we continue to argue about them and many of us pay to see them. Maybe it’s The Stones longevity, not their music, that keeps us interested. We all want to live forever and so far that’s exactly what the Rolling Stones are doing. For many of us, they represent the thing we thought we’d never see: old age. Theirs and our own.