Still rockin’ hard after all these years

I wonder if Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards and the other stones Ron Wood and Charlie Watts ever imagined they would still be rocking by the time they got to their 60s. But they are. And truth to tell, they do not only sound good, they also cut trim figures in their photos despite their boozing, drug-pocked lifestyles of long ago. Now if they had chosen to be businessmen, they would be retired in their country estates by now and answering to the term granddaddy.

But they became the Rolling Stones, rock stars, pop idols. So they make rock music and are here today as artists of the first order, the guys who gave us the hard-living, uncompromising face of rock and roll, still doing what they do best. And given how their new album, A Bigger Bang, turned out, I can predict they will probably still be doing what they do best well into their 80s. One cannot really tell but they might even turn out the best works of their careers in the next two decades.

Don’t laugh. That age is young by artist standards. Matisse and Picasso were still painting when they were well passed their 80s. Julia Child was concocting recipes and writing about them when she was over 90. And not to forget, great composers like Verdi, Bach, Liszt, Strauss created some of their masterpieces while already in their 80s. Compared to them, The Stones are young blokes but that did not stop the creative juices from flowing out in strong doses for A Bigger Bang. So I do not see any reason for this not to happen again in future albums.

A Bigger Bang is made up of all new materials written by the now legendary tandem of Mick and Keith. It is the group’s first studio album since Bridges to Babylon five years ago. It is an energetic, tight, fully realized, rocking, bluesy album made up of a whopping 16 cuts. That is long for a foreign album that is not a greatest hits collection. It is also so superbly put together and might serve as a handbook for recording engineers. You can really see that these guys buckled down to serious hard work for this one.

The title refers to that big bang that scientists believe marked the beginning of the universe, but while I am certainly agog about what they have created I couldn’t care less about their "fascination with the universe." Somehow I do not see The Rolling Stones and Physics as going well together. They must have felt likewise for not a single cut in the album takes the trouble to explore the title. They do get political in one cut though, Sweet Neo Con, where Mick takes shots, big ones, in fact, that make a lot of sense, at the Bush administration. I have also never thought of The Stones as political so although Sweet Neo Con has become the most talked about track from the album, I’ll just dismiss it as a filler.

I will go for Rough Justice, because it hews close to the fiery rock openers in the Stones’ early albums. It effectively sets the stage for the rest of the cuts. You will like the delightfully rhythmic Let Me Down Slow, that moves on smoothly to the infectiously grooved Rain Fall Down, the extraordinary guitar interchange in Back of My Hand, She Saw Me Coming, Oh No Not You Again and Driving Too Fast and down to the fun and lilting Look What the Cat Dragged In.

Lost amidst these are Streets of Love and Biggest Mistake but they still emerge as passable because these tracks are also well-produced. As for the big winners, my picks are Laugh I Nearly Died, because I really like it when Mick does slow tunes and Dangerous Beauty, a simple rock tune that grows in you in an uncanny way. Might just be the future classic out of this album. Then, there are This Place is Empty and Infamy, both of which has Keith singing the lead vocals. Here is a crooner who has seen it all and sounds like it. But as for losing it, that will take more than being a 61-year-old Rolling Stone.