photo: Mike Brody

The following is an excerpt of the original review:

Peter Tosh was better than the treatment the crowd was giving him. I had never heard reggae live and Tosh was the real ting.  The Philly crowd was not as interested. Tosh left the stage to a roar of STONES! In the lull between set ups I went looking for a place to do a little crank. I had lost my friends and was now on my own adventure.  I found myself walking in between the trucks parked on the side of the stage. These were Rolling Stones trucks, decals of the red lips logo, ‘Reefer Rollers’ bumper stickers, and the whole nuts and bolts of the rock and roll circus.  A rough looking driver was staring me down, I asked him if he could use a little pick me up and he said “Step right up in the cab my young friend!” After a couple blasts the driver introduced himself.

“I’m Fred but my friends call me Ferd!” He talked about some of the wild orgies he’d been too and then he said the Stones would be out in a couple minutes, he took a couple twenty bags and I said thanks and he said “No, thank you!” Ferd gave me a personal escorted walk to a  roped off area full of amazing looking happy people.

I was standing directly in front of the stage when the band came walking on and picked up their instruments.  Even at 17 I usually didn’t like music that a lot of people liked, but the Rolling Stones represented the beginning of English blues rock and I liked them in spite of their style changes and fame. Their last great album had been Exile on Main Street. I knew what depths they were capable of.

The first song was Chuck Berry’s Let it Rock, a chunky mid tempo stomp which segued into Exile’s All Down the Line.

Whatever style this was just sounded great for the frequency I was on. There was nuance in the music that was very much theirs. Simple tricks, a thick bar chord suddenly finger picked into a vulnerable blues chord and then the slide guitar connecting them back together. Not a bad tone on the stage either. The Stones sounded like musical dirt, brown, wet dirt. While the over all demeanor was hard and dangerous there was an odd sense of humor about the whole mess. At some point early on they played a very pained Love In Vain. This was guitar laden emotional blues and it sounded right out of the legendary 1969 tour.

I knew this world was fleeting. Even at that moment in my life at that concert I knew it would somehow go bad and curdle or even worse, become a gentrified thing of some kind. I remember fighting back tears for a special time in peril. This is what the music was saying at that moment, all your loves in vain. Who would even care about this song in a few years? In to this mix came the new stuff which fit in pretty well with the old stuff, “when the whip comes down, da da”, this song recalled the old mid 60’s chainsaw sound captured on ‘Got Live if you Want It’. ‘Beast of burden’ came on like an old soul song but just a little sonically darker. Old greats followed, reworked slightly and played with an urge and feeling that bordered on the edge of control. Joints were passing freely through the crowd and the whole concert started to feel like a party when people are starting to get too wild and intoxicated.

After the light and bouncy soul classic ‘Just my Imagination’ a very new song started. A phase shifted two chord rock riff with a tense rhythm. “Shattered – shattered”. The stones weren’t as much playing now as burning the song. This smelled like the new music. I took a look around and the 1970s Philly crowd was perfectly morphing to this rhythm. This was a hard edge song for some hard edge people. “To live in this town, you must be tough, tough, tough, tough, tough, tough, tough…” The Stones were grinding out punk, but as innovators. Stripped down and animalistic, but of course with this waning generations hippy blues sensibility which would be, in a couple years, on the run. Shadobee.

Chants of “More” were my cue to start trying to navigate back to the street and find the van. I was completely satisfied and ready to be out of this hot throng of humanity. While I was heading for the exits I noticed that the band had not come back on and then I was startled by a sudden barrage of explosions.

the author, back in the day

photo courtesy of Mike Brody

Turning around revealed a riot going on. The stage was being blown up by M-80s and wasted wild men tearing down drums and amps and equipment. Security must have been taken by surprise because the three or four guards swinging mic stands and two by fours were not stopping the mayhem. I didn’t stick around to see the ensuing battle but I felt like those people could not have truly been disappointed by this music. I asked some one why everyone was pissed and he said he felt ripped off by the lack of an encore and no stage show. I can understand the encore issue being an insult to someone who had made this their whole weekend, but why would he need a stage show? Isn’t a guided tour through the history of heartfelt blues and traditional rock and roll music enough to handle without some blowup penises to go along with it?

Mike Brody is a musician, songwriter, video and recording producer, and writer. He lives in New Jersey. His band Brody’s Monster will be at the Light Of Day Festival at The Saint in Asbury Park Sunday January 19th at 8:00 pm. He is currently working on a book with the working title “Real Strange Things That Really Happened To Me”