Time waits for no one

After 25 years, one traffic jam, two flight delays, and a long crawl through a crowded city park, my brother and I didn’t want to be late. We had tickets to the Rolling Stones in Chicago, a concert that had become the opening of their current tour after the delay caused by Mick Jagger’s heart valve replacement. The showtime was 7:30 p.m., which we had no hope of making. At first I didn’t expect this to be a problem. There was an opening act, and the Stones have never been known for punctuality. But as the delays piled up I started to worry: What if they’d changed? What if they (and their audience) now needed a bit more promptness and an earlier conclusion? 

Finally we reached the gate, the flood of fans long having ebbed to a trickle. We made our way to our expensive but still quite distant seats, which were already occupied. We sorted that out and turned to face the stage just as the first thunderous chords of “Street Fighting Man” began and the four towering screens lit up with a stylized shot of the bridge of Keith Richards’s Fender Telecaster. We were an hour and fifteen minutes late, but we ended up right on time. 

The improbable, then slightly comical, and now just stupefying endurance of the Rolling Stones is built on four albums and a handful of singles released from 1968 to 1972. They made some great music and had some big hits after and especially before those years. But it’s that period that distinguishes the Stones from the nostalgia acts confined to airways, playlists, and state fairs.