The Rolling Stones made some of the greatest records of the
Rock & Roll era, but for a lot of fans, the band was at their greatest on
stage. Sitting in your living room listening to Aftermath you couldn’t see Jagger shimmying his skinny hips and
flapping his pillow lips. You couldn’t watch Keef swaying over his guitar like
a marionette operated by a drunken puppeteer. You couldn’t see Wyman…errr…standing.
While the Stones’ recordings have been well documented in
books such as Martin Elliott’s Complete
Recording Sessions, their live performances have not been as thoroughly
covered. In his introduction to The
Rolling Stones in Concert, 1962-1982: A Show-by-Show History, author Ian M.
Rusten is up front about attempting to create a stage equivalent to Elliott’s studio-centric
one. Like Elliott, Rusten has created a very well organized chronicle of The
Rolling Stones at work with separate entries for each item. Of course,
recordings are more available to review than ephemeral performances are, so
Rusten relies less on his personal opinion in evaluating his topic than Elliott
did. This means a hell of a lot more research was involved as Rusten had to
seek out period reviews for nearly every concert he discusses in The Rolling Stones in Concert. No wonder
he only had it in him to cover the Stones’ first two decades.
Even without considering the workload, 1982 is still a smart
year to cease the discussion because it both marks an end to the Stones’ road
work before they took an extended (and very acrimonious) break and also marks
the end of the Stones as a fairly uncalculating live act. To see them from
1989’s Steel Wheels tour and beyond is
not to see the real Rolling Stones. They became more like a Vegas act. Rusten
covers the Stones before they started putting on slick shows. In their earliest
days, it was more like they were putting on hurricanes. It’s stunning to see
how many of their mid-sixties shows ended in riots. In the context of the
Stones’ whole sixties stage career, Altamont looks more like a
business-as-usual show than a grotesque aberration.
It’s hard to convey the excitement of live music in prose,
especially when you weren’t present for the performance in question, so Rusten
mostly serves as relayer rather than reviewer. Along with period reviews and
less reliable fan relocations culled from contemporary message boards, Rusten
provides set lists when possible, and most interesting of all, chunks of quotes
from the Stones themselves. Mick and Keith’s hilariously nasty responses to
some daft reporters from Phoenix are worth the admission price alone.
