Rolling Stones Rock Detroit

ROLLING STONES ROCK DETROIT

The Rolling Stones have been touring the USA again for the past couple months, their first American tour since the infamous 1969 trip which ended with Merideth Hunter's murder at Altamont during the Stones' set. The Stones' private jet emblazoned with the Sticky Fingers mouth-tongue brought them into Detroit for two Cobo Hall qet-downs last week, providing the Detroit scene with its biggest social (if not always musical) event of the season. The Rolling Stones, the last of the super-super groups still together, still holding together the myth as long as they can, sweet Virginia yeah.

The Stones are so BIG by now and their audience so incredibly vast that m Detroit approximately 240,000 ticket requests came in in the first two days tickets were on sale for two shows that could seat only 24,000 people (no standing or dancing allowed). A million starved rock and roll addicts wrote in for 80 000 tickets in New York City! ONE MILLION REQUESTS FOR TICKETS!! Bigger than Woodstock, bigger than anything involving rock and roll has ever been, the Rolling Stones' tour has brought millions of us all over the country to a new understanding of just how many of us there are and hopefully, of just how great our power would be if we could all get ourselves together and take control over our lives. It's 1972 and there's millions of freeks ALL OVER THE PLACE, in ever-increasinq numbers, and it takes events like this 1972 Stones' tour to make it apparent to us.

The Rolling Stones concert Friday night was bomb. The first half of their show was predictable and fairly tame as Jagger strutted his stuff in a kind of ersatz hysteria and the band behind him for the most part kept their cools well under control, but starting with the first few bars of "Midnight Rambler" it got higher and higher all the way to the end when the crowd jumped and screamed yelling for more. Mick and the boys and Wonderlove (Stevie Wonder's band which opened the show with a dynamite performance) came back up on stage for an unprecedented Jagger-Stevie Wonder jam as their special encore for the Detroit energy addicts.

They wailed into Stevie's masterpiece "Up Tight" and then smoked straight through into the only possible closing tune for he night - "Satisfaction" - with Mick and Stevie gyrating and jumping into the air while thousands of rock and roll crazed sisters and brothers went nuts trying to get off finally in the oppressive atmosphere of Cobo Hall. As the house lights carne on you could see a whole sea of people up on their chairs boogyin' and tokin' down, righteously rockin' together with the music that's shaped all of our lives.

But it's a long way from "Satisfaction" to being self-exiled on Main Street in the French Riviera. (The tunes from the latest album were the low-points of the night.) They seem to have even less of any kind of positive charge than ever before, with their cynicism and their distance from their audience growing greater and more frightening all the time. One million people begging for tickets, the millions of people who buy their records because they have to have the music, it all brings a lot of dollars and power to people who don't really have anything more to do with us and our lives and problems than coming in every three years or so and "entertaining" us.

The Rolling Stones made it clearer than ever with their latest extravaganza that they just don't care about much more than getting the people's money and using it only to pursue their own decadence. Their stage show is in reality so hoked up and contrived when seen stripped of all the music business glamor which so surrounds this tour, that they would have even now a hard time playing tor the same people three or four times in rapid succession, and that ain't what keeps you known as "the greatest rock and roll band in the world" by any means. Especially in a time like this when the people are so much farther out than the musicians at almost any given rock and roll concert, at least the large-scale ones.

Thursday and Friday night Cobo Hall, the Ponchartrain, and the whole honkoid area downtown was occupied by riot-equipped police from the infamous John Nichols' Detroit Police Department. It was like the traditional colonial scene, with the mothercountry troops out in full force to guard the buildings and institutions of the mothercountry exploiters from the rampaging natives on their way home from some kind of spaced-out religious ritual. Lines of police with helmets and clubs and thousands of people milling about looking for the scalpers selling tickets for as much as $100.00 apiece. Inside, the ushers and guards pushed and herded people around who couldn't stand to sit down any more while the music was going on.

At one point Jagger told the people (quite irresponsibly really, since he was ultimately the employer of the guards and ushers for the night) that they should be able to get up and dance if they wanted to. But if he was really into that he would've arranged for dances instead of concerts. or took some of the Stones' big money and put it into the kind of dance/concert joint people are dying for but which won't exist until the bands themselves start doing something to create it. Jagger got the people fired up but then to be the game he plays with his audiences in order to get them excited like he wants them. It was great to see a huge wave of people leap from their seats and charge for the open area in front of the stage just as Jagger slid into "You Can't Always Get What You Want," but he really wasn't telling them anything they didn't already know. for real.

We can't always get what we want right away, we all know that, but with the Stones -after 10 years as a wealthy entertainment we expect to get more than some simple tunes and a patently contrived stage act from the aging Jagger. We expect them - and it was never so apparent as on Friday night at Cobo -- to become a part of us, in every way, and nothing short of that will ultimately get people off anymore. Right now the Stones bring us together to rock and roll and be with each other out in the open for a while, but at the time they are engaged in perpetrating the whole music industry fraud on the people who love them more than they deserve, and they have to answer for that too as long as they presume to take as much of our people's money as they do.

Right now the Stones, or any popular group, is more than welcome wherever the people happen to be, no matter how much the economic aspect of the whole scene turns people off, because the people have to have the music and they'll go through almost anything to get it. But if these same groups that have all the money started relating to the people as more than just a bunch of suckers who'll play incredible prices to experience a little rock and roll music, if they would start bringing not only their music but its economic power back home to the rest of us, then we could really start to have a good time!

ROCK & ROLL IS HERE TO STAY! IT BROUGHT US TOGETHER, LETS KEEP IT THAT WAY!!

David Fenton, RPP

(caption images)

Stevie Wonder and Mick Jagger-Can't get no satisfaction

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards-in case you didn't know.