Rolling Stones review, Providence Journal, June 13, 2013

At 50, Rolling Stones still have the power to start us up 

Kris Craig/The Providence Journal

Charlie Watts, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, and Mick Jagger perform at TD Garden Wednesday as their tour celebrating 50 years as a band hits Boston. They perform Friday also. 

By Scott McLennan
Special to the Journal

 

BOSTON — Forget the band members’ ages. Forget the ticket prices. Forget the number of times that the band has played “Honky Tonk Women.” The only question that mattered at the Rolling Stones concert Wednesday at the TD Garden was this one: Did the Stones own the building?

Yup.

The Rolling Stones “50 and Counting Tour,” which returns to the Garden Friday, is a scaled-down affair by Stones standards, and in spots during the show it was apparent that the energy and fire of yore are somewhat diminished.

But there were plenty of transcendent moments — 1970s-era guitarist Mick Taylor rejoining the band for “Sway” and “Midnight Rambler,” a deliciously sleazy “Emotional Rescue” — and no outright fumbles. Even the inclusion of two new, non-hits seemed an act of defiance worth cheering.

After an aggrandizing intro film loaded with celebrity hosannas, the band hit the stage with “Get Off of My Cloud.” The tempos through that and “It’s Only Rock ’n Roll” were noticeably taken down a notch, and lithe and limber singer Mick Jagger had a few moments of slipping out of the groove.
But an early turn into “Gimme Shelter” seemed to right the ship, with Jagger and back-up singer Lisa Fischer generating sparks as guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood constructed the song’s ominous atmosphere.

The tour has featured special guests most nights, and in Boston guitarist and singer Gary Clark Jr. joined the band for a romp through Freddie King’s “Goin’ Down.”

It was as freewheeling trip back to the blues as you could hope from the Stones at this point, with Jagger stepping back to let Richards, Wood, and Clark revel in solos.

The top half of the show is where the Stones were less scripted. A boozy “Beast of Burden” benefited from the band’s more wily than wicked stage attack. And the first appearance of Taylor on “Sway” tapped deeply into the catalog in a way diehards wished the Stones would do more of. For his customary bit as lead singer, Richards even went not with the obvious “Happy” but instead played the acoustic “You Got the Silver” and “Before They Make Me Run.”

The band trod down the path of well-known hits for the concert's second hour, though Taylor returned to spice up “Midnight Rambler.”

But the deliveries on “Miss You,” “Tumbling Dice,” and “Start Me Up” were not perfunctory, and led up to an incendiary “Sympathy for the Devil.”

For all the temptation to bash the Stones for having the audacity to keep doing what they do, shows like the one the band played Wednesday remind that this is a game —
spectacle matched with commercial clout matched with musical ingenuity — that the Stones pretty much invented.

And own.