The Lefsetz Letter: The Stones At SoFi

They are no longer selling danger.

They’re selling rock and roll. A lost art. If you want to experience it in its original form, go to see the Stones.

What I’m saying is the emphasis is misplaced. It’s on Mick Jagger’s dancing, his onstage antics. The bottom line is this is necessary when you play in the vast stadiums the Stones appear in.

Have you ever been to SoFi? One of the most bizarre experiences in the sports stadium stratosphere.

Actually, my favorite moment came after the show. When I walked into an elevator and was promptly escorted out, as I was told THIS IS RESERVED FOR MR. KROENKE! It only went from field level up one flight. I’d actually ridden it earlier in the evening. The show had finished about fifteen minutes before, but it was a no-go.

Now logic defies SoFi. If I wasn’t escorted to field level, I never would have made it, it was a labyrinth of escalators and corridors and stairs…

Even better was when I tried to get to Level 4 from the bowels of the stadium.

You can’t get there from here. Literally. you ride the escalator and it goes from Level 3 to Level 5. Turns out you’ve go to take an elevator to get to Level 4, but after waiting interminably, I got escorted again, otherwise I never would have made it.

But this has nothing to do with the show. Other than to say that SoFi is vast. Sans frontman antics it would be hard to get the audience involved. But Mick did. And the band did.

I don’t want to take sides, but the heart of the band is Keith Richards. Strumming his guitar, mostly in the background.

Actually, that was the highlight of the evening. Before the Linda Lindas took the stage, Keith’s guitar tech Pierre gave me a tour of his guitars. There’s one locked case after another. Because the band has rehearsed seventy songs, and you never quite know what they’ll play. The Gibsons all have six strings, the rest mostly have five. And we were looking at each one in its slot in the case and then Pierre extracted…

The axe from “Honky Tonk Woman.” The exact one from the track. I tingled then and I’m tingling now. This is rock and roll history. A direct connection from what once was to what now still is.

And then Andrew Watt came along and we joshed and jousted, he gave me sh*t for dissing him, being friendly all the while, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember exactly what I’d said. When I take a big swing at someone I usually do. But one thing was for sure, Andrew was reading. And Pierre told me at the first session for “Hackney Diamonds” Watt insisted on playing the bass… A bridge from then to now.

And speaking of “Hackney Diamonds,” “Angry” was far superior live. It breathed, there was more space, something that is hard to achieve in a recording. Sure, Jagger was still out front, but there was air between him and the rest of the instruments Saturday night, and it made “Angry” a classic, which was surprising.

What was also surprising was the band hit the ground running.

Now if you’ve ever seen the Stones, you know they start out rough, it takes them a while to find their groove. I was shocked that they were together from note one. Very professional.

But the reason this is hard is the Stones are a blast from the past. They’re doing it the way they’ve always done. Naturally. Sans the hard drives and offstage players trying to imitate the records, delivering a professional appearance and sound that not only all their contemporaries employ, but especially the young ‘uns. What you’ve got here is 1965. You remember buying a guitar in the wake of the Beatles breaking. You played in the basement with your buddies. And that’s what the Stones do, only on a much higher level.

Sure, it’s not the Marquee, but it’s not that far removed. Jagger’s movements are expanded, as is the band, with two backup singers and two horn players, along with two keyboard players. But if you close your eyes it could be…1965!

But the difference between the Stones and their British Invasion contemporaries is not only did they soldier on, they continued to have hits, in the seventies and eighties, and their tracks still had an impact thereafter. Actually, I sing 1989’s “Mixed Emotions” in my head more than I do the earlier stuff… You’re not the only one, with mixed emotions. Sure, we broke up. Maybe you pulled the trigger, but I was unsure too and…

They didn’t play “Mixed Emotions” Saturday night.

They started with… “Start Me Up.” Firing on all cylinders, as stated above.

Then back to the sixties with “Get Off of My Cloud.”

But then came “Tumbling Dice.” The single from “Exile on Main Street” that did not go to number one, that was the lead-in for the ’72 tour. The first in America after “Sticky Fingers” allowed the Stones to declare themselves “The World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band.” Not only was “Sticky Fingers” fantastic, all their contemporaries had given up, or fallen by the wayside, and here were the Stones delivering what we wanted and didn’t know we needed.

Not that the band played “Brown Sugar,” supposedly that’s been banished. And that line about the Puerto Rican girls dyin’ to meet you…that was not heard in “Miss You,” but…

Prior to the recent tours, the best, was ’75, the one where the band was revealed after the petals of the silver flower unfolded. When I saw the show at the Forum that tune was when the band finally locked in, when they were finally together, in the groove, I was closed on “Tumbling Dice” that night, and thereafter have loved it. And the band performed it just as well on Saturday.

Then came the surprise of “Angry.”

And I knew they were going to play “Heartbreaker,” the fan’s choice from “Goat’s Head Soup,” my favorite on the album. How were they going to get the intro right? Well, they didn’t. They didn’t even try. It was an approximation. Rather than use a tape, they approximated it with keyboard and then guitar and it made the song more special.

But then came “Fool to Cry.” Which was not my favorite song from “Black and Blue,” recorded with different guitarists after Mick Taylor left the band. There are two great tracks on that uneven album. One no one ever talks about, “Hand of Fate,” the other “Memory Motel,” a classic that only gained popular traction with the duet with Dave Matthews on a live album years later. But “Fool to Cry,” the album’s single? I never got that. And it was a big risk to slow the show down and do this number with falsetto. But the Stones are always about big risks. And Jagger pulled it off. Which is hard in a room this big.

“Monkey Man” didn’t have Nicky Hopkins’s piano, but it had energy nonetheless.

But the surprise I was warned about by Pierre. You see Keith gave up smoking two years ago and his voice has improved, he told me I’d hear it in the performance. I was positively stunned. The frog of yesteryear was replaced with a smooth voice with range. “You Got the Silver,” played acoustically with Ronnie Wood, was a revelation, in that Keith sang it effortlessly, as he did thereafter with “Little T & A” and “Before They Make Me Run.”

Oh, before that they did “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” in a slowed-down manner. Which emphasized the lyrics, Jagger was fantastic singing about the Chelsea Drugstore, the words were clear and meaningful, but the budding freight train of the recording was nowhere to be found.

Then again, Pierre told me Keith had to keep it interesting for himself. To especially notice Keith’s guitar work on “Satisfaction,” he played it a bit different from the record, he had to keep himself inspired.

And that was another interesting thing. Although there’s a ton of money involved, the show didn’t have the feel of a dash for cash. It was like there was nowhere these cats would rather be, this is what they do, it wasn’t about brand extensions, but the music, the camaraderie, the power of a band.

In truth, the show wasn’t as together in the late middle, but then the powerhouse closers built to the point where there was no doubt that this was the Rolling Stones. Especially “Gimmie Shelter,” whose gravitas and danger is hard to replicate live. But Chanel Haynes channeled her inner Tina to deliver a knife to the heart that was different from Merry Clayton’s, but powerful, and extended. When she and Mick duetted…you realized no one else could pull this off.

But generally speaking there was no danger. That’s gone. The bad boys of yore…are bad no longer.

I didn’t see a tattoo in evidence. The Stones were comfortable in their own bodies. They weren’t competing with anybody else. In fact, music has moved on, but they have stayed the same, which makes the experience more meaningful, and more powerful.

Not that there was not humor. Mick didn’t speak much, but when he talked about getting to the venue…how he was going to take the 405, but ended up going the 101 to the 5 to the 10 and it took him two and a half hours…everybody in attendance knew exactly what he was talking about.

Now your mother was warned not to let you date a Rolling Stone. Then they were doing drugs in a basement in France. The band was dark. And dirty. And led a jet set lifestyle when many Americans hadn’t even flown.

But everybody flies today. Look at the shorts and flip-flops on the plane.

And you’ve got billionaires flaunting their wealth. If you don’t have a private plane, you’re nearly laughable, certainly not a member of the club.

And all the musicians are sucking up to those with money, trying to revel in the largesse.

And there are these acts that play stadiums, but their reach is nothing compared to the Stones. How many shows can you go to and know every song (other than maybe from the new album, but that’s just the point, nothing today has the ubiquity of yore).

Rap recovered the danger of rock, but ultimately that became a cartoon. And how many people want to get shot and go to jail anyway? It’s one thing to do drugs, it’s quite another to fear for your life.

But in truth, no one can be dangerous anymore because the wall between the public and the performer has been torn down. We know everything about you, mystery is history. That paradigm is kaput. Which is why someone like Noah Kahan can triumph, revealing and owning his inner failings…Noah ends up relatable, whereas Mick and Keith never were.

And how much longer are Mick and Keith going to do this?

Until they can’t anymore.

When is the last tour? It’ll be like Rod Argent of the Zombies, who just had a stroke and retired from the road, we won’t foresee it. The Stones are the bridge between the Delta Blues and today, and those bluesmen kept on picking until they passed.

But not to audiences as big as the Stones.

All these years later, the recordings are just a framework. It’s all about the show. And I could tell you there’s nothing to see here, that it’s all been done before, that if you went to a Stones show in the past you don’t have to go again, but I’d be lying.

There was not a single person in SoFi who could complain they didn’t get their money’s worth. They came to see the Stones and they got more.

Sure, there were hi-def screens, but one could argue the production hasn’t meant less in decades. It was really about the band. The Stones were not winning you over with dance routines and pyrotechnics, but solely the music. They were playing. Sure, they might have been in a football stadium, but the roots were in the club. Where it’s more about energy than sound. Where you feel a part of the performance.

What the Stones are delivering you can’t get anywhere else. No one else is flying without a net. No one else is doing what they’ve always did. Jagger still has his voice, astoundingly. Ronnie does not replicate the solos from the albums. And Keith…well, he’s Keith, the smiling pirate who faced down the devil and won.

This is rock and roll.

Try sometime, you just mind find…

You get what you need.

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