Somehow, though, they keep managing to surprise us -- not just with their improbable endurance and Jagger's staggering ability to defy the aging process, but by the band's stubborn determination to meet its own outsize expectations. Last night, launching the fall North American leg of the band's ``A Bigger Bang" tour, the Stones opened the two-plus hour show with the Eastern-tinged ``Paint It, Black" for the first time in its 44-year history.
The band received an affectionate welcome from the 44,000-strong crowd (Richards and Wood especially) and was in feisty, crash-bam-boom form, blaring gleefully and biting down hard on a chewy ``Live With Me" and ``Monkey Man," and an arch, but guitar-bleary ``Sway." The latter was stripped of the original's despondent poignancy perhaps, but it nevertheless boded well for a show that yielded the old Glimmer Twin gold of a classic Stones spectacle. And not just the crowd-pleasing entertainment juggernaut the band's long since become, but what they once, were too.
Now more than ever perhaps, the epic hoodoo nightmare ``Midnight Rambler" has become the Stones's showpiece and a window into the pre- stadium days, when they seemed a five-headed hydra of blues, lust , and theater: There was Mick as tomcat, the years dripping off him with every shake and snake of his hips, blowing dirty harmonica as Keith's and Ronnie's guitars circled him, wailing and rumbling with timeless dread and malevolence. Richards beamed and delivered a sweet-tempered ``You Got The Silver" before springing forward a decade with the raunchy ``Little T & A." ``Sweet Virginia," with Jagger on acoustic and harp and the band working out its lifelong country-blues jones, was a treat. It was moments like these that reminded you that no matter how much they change, or earn, or stumble, some things never change with the Stones, thank goodness.
