Jagger and Richards have been rock’s most challenging and elemental songwriting team for years, Mick’s a master of stagecraft, and so on. Ron Wood can be a ferocious rhythm player too, and let’s not leave out Mick Jagger, whose sure sense of time enables him to punch out phrases and repeat little vocal riffs like an instrumentalist. Wyman meshes so tightly into the grooves that much of the time you don’t even hear him if he dropped out, however, you’d notice right away. Watts brings his ear for jazz to the Stones like a first-class jazz drummer, he provides lift without ever overplaying. Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts catch Keith’s momentum and swing with it. Everything Keith Richards plays, from the simplest handful of notes to the most monolithic riff, pushes the music forward. To play rock & roll, you need a rhythm section, and the Stones are the great rock & roll rhythm section of our time. And if it doesn’t happen at least once or twice, you aren’t at a rock & roll concert. When was the last time you saw a guitar player yell, “I’ve got it” and plunge into a solo, only to realize that the other guitar player was soloing, too? It could only happen in your neighborhood bar or at a Rolling Stones concert. In fact, the Stones may be the only band on the stadium circuit that’s loose enough to make mistakes, the only band that isn’t afraid to start a number without having the vaguest idea who’s going to take a solo. Scores of bands can knock off the same letter-perfect set night after night, every note and nuance frozen firmly in place, right down to the guitar player’s grimaces. Okay, what makes them the greatest? It isn’t consistency. And on October 26th, at the 3,933-seat Fox Theatre in Atlanta, there was no question about it: The World’s Greatest Rock & Roll Band was the Rolling Stones. Keith Richards laughed it off in his recent Rolling Stone interview, suggesting that “on any given night, it’s a different band that’s the greatest rock & roll band in the world.” That makes sense. But the phrase still seemed overblown, inappropriate. At JFK Stadium this past September, for the first show of their current tour, the Stones were sloppy and spirited, and that made a difference.
Reviewers wield it like a rusty razor when the Stones are sloppy and dispirited, as they were at John F. That phrase keeps coming back to haunt the Rolling Stones.
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