Good News: Rolling Stone are set to bring him back…

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.