Mick jagger

Most of us have at one time played the you-couldn’t-make-it-up game. What were the odds back in, say, 1973, that millions of us would casually engage in Jetsons-style video chats, conduct business at the swipe of a thumb, or consider the prospect of a space-tourism flight courtesy of Virgin Galactic? Or for that matter, rue the fact that the all-conquering Oakland Athletics might fall so low as to become the worst team in baseball last season, with a dismal 50-112 record? Perhaps the biggest shock to someone contemplating the future in 1973 might have been the knowledge that Keith Richards, the guitarist and primary creative force of the Rolling Stones, would still be alive and well at the time of his eightieth birthday on December 18, 2023. Wrecked. Sick. Zombielike. Undead.

Among the other jewels in the crown of Sir Mick Jagger’s songwriting career is a number he and his longtime creative partner Keith Richards knocked off in December 1963 to promote the Kellogg’s company products. Don’t laugh — it’s an infectious little tune in its way, even if the key lyrical message — “Wake up in the morning/ There’s a pop that really says/ Rice Krispies for you and you and you!”) falls some way short of the same duo’s “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which followed barely twelve months later. But then Jagger, who turns eighty on July 26, was always a quick study. Last year’s four-part EPIX documentary series My Life as a Rolling Stone may be numbingly banal (“They set the bar for what a rock ’n’ roll band should sound like, look like..

First, the good news. Despite the recent death of drummer Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones are back among us, playing a series of sold-out US stadium shows between now and Thanksgiving. It’s not just that the three surviving band members, now all in their seventies, refuse to grow up. They seem actually to live in a time warp: in an era when most rock stars dress like they work at UPS and offer a relentless diet of screwed-up nihilism and phony salves, the Stones are still out there in their skimpy, Day-Glo T-shirts and leather pants, serving up great meat-and-potato rock songs garnished with lyrics about sex and drugs, and generally carrying on like it’s 1967 all over again. Now the bad news.