For a couple of magical hours Tuesday night, aging rock fans in “easy fit” (big-butt) bluejeans could put aside worries about their prostates, turn off their cell phones and let all the middle-age muck recede.
It used to be that going to a Rolling Stones concert was about anarchy, rebellion, our darker side, lit up by the sexy lyrics of some rocking bad boys from Britain.
Not anymore. Tens of thousands of Stones fans, many with their children in tow, arrived at Soldier Field for a show that is part nostalgia, part big business and corporate sponsorship–where the good seats were going for 65 bucks a pop.
For the older folks, the ones who switch to decaf at 8 p.m., the evening offered a few hours to relive their carefree glory days before the intrusions and responsibilities of growing up drowned out the music.
“I feel young again,” said longtime Chicago TV newsman Bill Kurtis, 57, who went to the concert with his life and business partner, Donna LaPietra, as guests of Sprint, the corporate sponsors of the Stones’ world tour that kicked off Tuesday in Chicago.
“The best part is the young people in my office look at me with a measure of envy–and a little respect,” Kurtis said. “Like, `Maybe this guy isn’t such a stodge after all.’ “
Arriving at the concert straight from work, in a business suit, Kurtis turned his pager from “beep” to “vibrate” and was ready to rock.
Said LaPietra, in her 40s and a Stones fan for more than half her life: “I don’t feel my age, and I’m sure the Stones don’t either. We’re still 20 years old.”
For people of a certain age, looking at the Stones is a way of looking at themselves. When they were young, listening to the Stones showed off a risky, outrageous side. Fistfights were commonplace, and a stabbing death at the 1969 Altamont concert just added to the legend.
Now the Rolling Stones are a mainstream entertainment enterprise, more Vegas than vicious, brought to you by the long-distance carrier that Candice Bergen made famous.
It’s a perfect fit for Baby Boomer fans who have gone from defying their parents to becoming parents themselves, with all the baggage that implies: jobs, car payments, bad knees, kids in college or drug rehab.
“It’s a day to get away from the monthly mortgage payment and enjoy life again for a few hours,” said Northbrook salesman Bruce Raming, 40, who brought his 15-year-old daughter, Stephanie.
“When Mick Jagger works out and drinks bottled water, what does that say about how lifestyles have changed?” Raming said.
Those aren’t crow’s feet and wrinkles on Jagger, 54, and Keith Richards, 53–or on their adoring fans–they’re character lines. (We should all look so good and be so bloody rich!)
As for making money, it was the Stones who showed how it’s done, pioneering corporate rock sponsorship by selling ad space on its tickets for $1 million to Jovan perfume back in 1981. Sprint paid an estimated $4 million to $6 million for the privilege of sponsorship 16 years later.
But not to put too fine an analytical point on the psycho-socio magnitude of the event, Tuesday’s concert was also about listening to what a lot of the crowd thought was simply the best rock ‘n’ roll band in the history of the universe.
“They’re an institution. They’re like church,” said Raming, in a fuzzy red Eddie Bauer jacket.
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Norm Winer saw his first Stones concert in Boston in 1969 at age 21. His daughter was born the following month. On Tuesday, Winer and that daughter had tickets for the Stones concert. What had been cutting-edge, “staggering . . . mind-blowing . . . incredible” in the ’60s has evolved into family entertainment almost three decades later.
“I never could have imagined it,” said Winer, program director of WXRT-FM.
Back then, rock ‘n’ roll was music by and for the young; it was songs and singers obsessed by drugs and sex.
Three decades later, “compared to what’s on the radio today, this stuff is not wild or risque at all,” said Bill Donahue, 37, of River Forest, who brought his 5th grader, Billy, 11, to Soldier Field.
“If it’s between a song that says, `Let’s kill the police’ or `Let’s spend the night together,’ I know what I would choose for my kids to listen to,” Donahue said.
Thirty-four years after the Stones released their first single (a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Come On”), their music is a generational bond.
“If it comes on the radio, one of us will turn it up and will smile because it’s something we can both listen to,” said concertgoer Paul Hnatiw, 21, who drove in from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., to see and hear the legendary band. He said his mom was out there, somewhere, in the Soldier Field crowd.
“This is more like a mellow band,” said another Purdue student, Anne Bosse, 18. “Something you would listen to while doing your homework.” In fact, the band that shocked their parents’ parents is now music to do step aerobics to.
Chris Vignali, 35, of Seneca, Ill., a two-hour drive from Chicago, brought her two 11-year-old sons, B.J. and Drake, to listen to the band she has loved since she was a teenager.
“I’m a parent and I want to connect with my children in some way, and it’s hard these days. I wanted to connect with them through music. This is middle-ground music,” she said.
B.J., who prefers Metallica, Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana, was underwhelmed. “This is soft music compared to what we listen to,” he said.
“The old fans have grown up to be bankers and senators, and the Stones music has mellowed. But it’s still great. `Satisfaction’ works just as good as it did then,” said Bill Carter of Nashville, the attorney who represented the Stones’ Richards on drug charges before he got clean.
“I watched the evolution of America by going to Stones concerts through the years,” said Carter, 61. “I saw the crowd go from drugs to naked women in the audience to much more subdued. Less drugs. Very little drugs at all to a well-dressed kind of, yuppie kind of audience. It’s the evolution of society.”
Indeed, there in the parking lot before the show were Penny Jacobsen, 47, a graphic designer, and her husband, Larry, 50, a computer consultant with his own business, both hard-core Stones fans. They drove in from Cleveland for the event and a tailgate party beforehand.
Larry grilled chicken breasts on the hibachi. Penny tossed the spinach salad as they both sipped zinfandel by a little table they had brought along and covered with a green cloth.
A few cars down, a carload from the North Shore laughed as they puffed on their big, $8 cigars.
“It’s not exactly reliving your youth,” said Larry Jacobsen. “But our kids are out of college so we have more money. We wanted to spend it on the best rock ‘n’ roll band of the century.”