![]() Few spectacles in modern life are more sublimely ridiculous than the geriatric members of the Stones playing the opening strains of “Street Fighting Man.” The arena is typically jammed with middle-aged fans, who have donned après-office relaxed-sized jeans, paid the sitter, parked the minivan in the lot, and, for a few hundred dollars a seat, shimmy along with Mick Jagger, who, having trained for the tours as if for a championship bout, prances inexhaustibly through a two-hour set, at his best evoking the spawn of James Brown and Gumby, at his worst coming off like someone’s liquored-up Aunt Gert, determined to trash her prettier sister’s wedding with a gruesome performance on the dance floor. On Copacabana Beach, in Rio de Janeiro, they played to more than a million people. The last time the Stones were out on the road, between 20, they took in more than half a billion dollars-the highest-grossing tour of all time. We put thirty percent in holding until we sort it out.” Keith may fancy himself a symbol of ’68, but he channels the fiscal policy of Grover Norquist. I don’t want to screw anybody out of anything, least of all the governments that I work with. We left England because we’d be paying ninety-eight cents on the dollar. A lot of our astute moves have been basically keeping up with tax laws, where to go, where not to put it. “It’s why we rehearse in Canada and not in the U.S. “The whole business thing is predicated a lot on the tax laws,” Keith Richards told Fortune. The Stones logo-a fat, lascivious tongue thrust through smiling, open lips––is as recognizable on the corporate landscape as the Golden Arches. According to Fortune, the Stones are behind the merchandising of some fifty products, including underwear sold by Agent Provocateur. They licensed “Start Me Up” to Microsoft when the company rolled out Windows 95, and “She’s a Rainbow” to Apple when a line of iMacs was in need of promotion. Even in years without tours or albums, the Stones find a way. Promotour, Promopub, Promotone, and Musidor, firms based in Holland, for tax reasons, handle the various ends of the Stones’ business concerns, and everything is watched over by teams of accountants, immigration lawyers, security experts, and, until very recently, an aristocratic business adviser named Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg. Since 1989, the Stones have earned more than two billion dollars in gross revenues, helped along by sponsorship deals with Microsoft, Anheuser-Busch, and E*Trade. And, even as their originality has waned, their performing unit and corporate machine has been honed to perfection. The Stones have not written a song of consequence in thirty years, but they have survived four decades longer than their great contemporaries the Beatles. ![]() 1 on its deathwatch for ten years, finally gave up and conceded his immortality. New Musical Express, having kept Keith at No. And, through it all, the Grim Reaper was denied a backstage pass. There were far better technicians than Richards, far better soloists, but his sense of rhythm and riff and taste, his signature sustained chords and open spaces, gave the band its sound. They went on to perform those songs as long as Sinatra performed “Love and Marriage.” The distinctiveness of the Stones was due less to Jagger’s vocals than to Richards’s capacity to ingest the blues-guitar styles of Chuck Berry and Jimmy Reed and create something new. ![]() Between 19, the Stones recorded “Beggars Banquet,” “Let It Bleed,” “Sticky Fingers,” and “Exile on Main St.,” the core of their repertoire. In fact, Richards went on and on, stumbling through concerts in a narcotic haze, sleeping through rehearsals, always on the edge of oblivion, and yet, together with Mick Jagger, producing some of the most memorable pop music of the time. ![]() You looked at those pictures of Richards, slumped, stoned, and stupid, and you figured it was only a matter of days before the wires would announce that he’d choked to death on his own vomit. He memorialized his near-constant insensibility by giving open access to Robert Frank, Annie Leibovitz, and other image-makers, who captured him, backstage or in hotel rooms, half dressed and thoroughly zonked. Richards did not so much guard his mortality as flaunt it. In 1969, Richards and his fellow-Stones had lost Brian Jones, who drowned in a pool just a few weeks after the band fired him. Rock’s casualty list was already ominously long Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin merely headlined the necrology. Even by rock standards, Richards was a heroic consumer of heroin, cocaine, mescaline, LSD, peyote, Mandrax, Tuinal, marijuana, bourbon, and other refreshments, and it seemed to all observers that he was living on borrowed time. In 1973, the editors of New Musical Express put Keith Richards, the principal guitarist and the musical soul of the Rolling Stones, at the top of their annual list of “rock stars most likely to die” within the year.
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