Ghastly Bloated Spectacle

Author Laments Audacity of Rock Icons Whistling Past Their Own Graveyards

When viewing such scenes as this ghastly phantasmagoric nightmare of seemingly animated corpses slopping through a 50+ year-old catalog beneath effigies of their recently dead drummer, the best musician in the band, I feel an unease leaning toward revulsion.

If anyone’s got a dead pool going on who’s next to drop, I will go ahead and put a buck on the square with Ronnie Wood, who, bless his heart, looks absolutely skeletal and weak under his black-dyed hair and pancake makeup. But really, it’s already RIP Rolling Stones. Whatever lumbers onstage now looks more like the next version of Dawn of the Dead than ‘the greatest rock band in the world.’

Speaking of the Dead and how all this applies to my feelings about my beloved longtime favorite band, I will just say that the act has been in the drawer for twenty-six years now, and while their own lily-gilding retirement fund campaigns have taken turns for better or worse, they have been conducted while pretending to be ‘themselves’ as they were before with Jerry Garcia (although in full disclosure, the decision to retire ‘Grateful Dead’ had more to do with not wishing to share future profits with the Black Widow of Marin County, but, I digress). Dead & Company offers a slightly better attempt at the typical boomer rock & roll endless tour than the norm, but the main thing the group has in its favor is that it does not have the unmitigated audacity to call itself the Grateful Dead.

In this same vein, the Stones without Charlie Watts is a cover band not unlike the various attempts to keep the Dead lamp lit through the decades. Sorry, but as Roger & Pete alone can never be The Who, the Stones without Watts is a limp and ersatz lump of pyrite indeed. Sorry-not-sorry.