Sixty years after their first American tour, the Rolling Stones are on the road again. This time around, they’ve got a new drummer.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards both turned 80 last year. Their first performance together was in the summer of 1962, or well over a year before the Kennedy assassination. On the microphone at Lincoln Financial Field in South Philadelphia, where I joined 60,000 other people still eager to see the Rolling Stones in 2024, Jagger told us he could remember an early Stones gig in Philly in 1965.

Some people grumble that these old men shouldn’t still be getting up there and peacocking like vain and troubled teenagers. It’s a fair point. Jagger and Richards are the only original members of the band, and over the years they’ve become more or less synonymous with the whole outfit. Any ensemble still in operation for six decades is bound to have some casualties, the first in this case being founding guitarist Brian Jones, a hard partyer who drowned in his swimming pool in 1969, and the latest being drummer Charlie Watts, who died at the age of 80 in 2021. A lot happened in between.

From my corner of the bleachers at Lincoln Field, some 180 yards away from the stage, the band seemed to be made up of tiny figures, and were more discernible on the massive high-definition screen. Aside from a few songs from their latest album, Hackney Diamonds, the band mostly delivered the hits, nine of them collected on the definitive anthology Hot Rocks 1964–1971. Jagger and Richards cowrote most of this classic material, though bandmates like Jones and bass player Bill Wyman contributed melodies and harmonies. These hits are familiar to multiple generations, and may well be part of the very texture of human existence.

I’d traveled to the concert with two of my best friends from high school, Wilson and Tim. We’re all in our early 50s, and it seemed like a good time for a bonding ritual that guys our age have been undertaking for decades. Much of the audience shared our demographic, and all of us seemed to be transported. Certain moments of the show exhibited sheer pageantry, as in the evening’s rendition of “Sympathy for the Devil.” The idea that rock and roll is aligned with sin, Satan, and bad-boy behavior is banal. Yet it is also the truth. When Jagger thundered out, “Please allow me to introduce myself,” the lights turned a burning red and the whole stadium sang along.

Like most other significant recording artists, the Stones invested a lot of time and energy in studio magic when crafting their hits. But the live gig has always been the live gig. They set up and they play: No synthesizers glamming up their sound, no click track in earpieces keeping their beat in line. The front line is the grizzled veterans: Jagger in the spotlight, Richards with his idiosyncratic tunings, and second guitarist Ronnie Wood as bluesy foil. However, much of the heavy lifting is done by pianist and longtime music director Chuck Leavell; bassist Darryl Jones, a Miles Davis alumnus who joined the band’s first tour after Wyman’s retirement in 1993; and the newest member, Steve Jordan, who replaced Charlie Watts.

The first requisite of a great band is a great drummer, and the Stones were lucky to land Jordan, whose numerous past credits include not only rock icons Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Neil Young but major figures in jazz (Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, Don Pullen) and R&B (Stevie Wonder, Alicia Keys, Beyoncé). His association with the Stones dates back to the 1980s, when, after a couple of one-off collaborations, he became the drummer and principal cowriter on Keith Richards’s solo albums. As Richards recounts in his memoir, Life, Watts himself noticed Jordan as far back as 1978, when the young drummer was part of the Saturday Night Live band and the Stones appeared as musical guests. Years later, Jordan was jointly chosen by Richards and Chuck Berry for the backing band in the documentary and concert film Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll. There could be no higher credentials for the seat he now holds.

Rock and roll has a basic orientation, a North Star, its first breath, the om. It is the backbeat, the “crack” played on the snare drum on beats two and four. At Lincoln Field, the great unifier was not Mick Jagger’s menacing vaudeville or Keith Richards’s ragged strum. It was Steve Jordan’s backbeat, a driving pulsation roaring out from the back of the stage.