Lots to love, hate about the Rolling Stones, playing MGM Grand

Stick around for 50 years and you make a lot of friends and a few enemies. So we came up with 50 reasons to love/hate the Rolling Stones. As you might guess, the love outweighs the hate.

1. Hate: They’re old.

Let’s go straight to the elephant in the room. My 13-year-old thinks they look ridiculous. So do a lot of people at this point.

2. Love: They’re old.

“Bands have never toured at our age before because rock ’n’ roll isn’t old enough to have elder statesmen in it, like you have in jazz and country music,” Bill Wyman (yes, the one who retired before he could be an elder statesman) once noted in an interview.

“If we can’t take it a bit further down the road we’d be chicken. Let’s find out. Nobody’s taken it this far,” Keith Richards agreed in the same interview. And that interview? It was in 1989!

3. Hate: The ticket prices.

It’s always been the ticket prices, hasn’t it? Even when they first played the MGM in 1994, tickets were $100, $200 and $300, compared with $30 to $55 in other cities.

4. Hate: They actually seem proud of those ticket prices. “It’s America. We’re not living in a socialist society where we’re all paid so low and no one can afford it,” Mick Jagger told Forbes in 2002.

5. Love: At least they deliver.

“They’re paying good money to come and see you, I don’t see why you should disappoint them just being difficult and say ‘I don’t want to play ‘Brown Sugar,’ ’’ Jagger once noted. “There’s about 10 of those (songs).”

6. Love: They don’t worry about packing in every hit, and as a result their shows still seem fresh and surprising.

In 1999, for example, the “Some Girls” cuts “Respectable” and “Before They Make Me Run” made it instead of “Miss You” or “Beast of Burden.”

7. Love: The tongue logo.

8. Love: Making people pay attention to old American bluesmen.

9. Love: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” “He’s tellin’ me more and more about some useless information.” The simple distorted guitar riff and disgruntled lyrics still ring true after 47 years.

10. Hate: Why don’t they just freakin’ play a Sam Boyd Stadium show already, so everyone can go?

11. Hate: Their aging fans. They only go to concerts once every few years — usually, when the Stones tour — squeeze into embarrassing leopard-skin tights (see: Cover of “No Security”) and ignore fine opening acts such as Queens of the Stone Age.

12. Hate: Making us sit through opening acts. Really, Sugar Ray? (In 1999 at the MGM.)

13. Love: The way they start off a song with a bang. “Start Me Up” would be the obvious example, but even a later rocker such as “Mixed Emotions” knows how to hit the ground running.

14. Love: How many times did critics say they’d already made their last great album? Hmm. There was “Some Girls” in ’78, “Tattoo You” in ’81 and, after 31 years and 20 albums, “Voodoo Lounge” in ’94, which reinvigorated them and made them a working band once again.

15. Hate: They’ve been around so long that “A Bigger Bang” would have been a good album if they hadn’t made so many great ones already.

16. Hate: Taking that “Beatles are the good boys, Stones are the bad boys” thing too far by trying to answer the “Sgt. Pepper” album with “Their Satanic Majesties Request.”

17. Love: Sing along now: “I was born in a cross-fire hurricane ...”

18. Hate: Because someone actually went and made “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” into a Whoopi Goldberg movie.

19. Love: “Ah think I’ve busted a button on my trousers, I hope they don’t fall down. ... You don’t want my trousers to fall down, now do ya?”

20. Love: The guys who recorded “Exile on Main St.” are still alive.

21. Hate: Because everyone scratched and scraped to get into a “Bridges to Babylon” concert, while those who actually bothered to buy the “Bridges to Babylon” album have long since buried it somewhere (“Saint of Me” is still worth a download though).

22. Love: Because Charlie Watts never needed the giant rock star kit with the two bass drums and all that.

23. Hate: “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow.” That whole weird thing with Bill Wyman and his son marrying the daughter and the mother.

24. Love: Because “Miss You” was the only disco song that, in the parlance of the day, did not suck.

25. Love: The sidemen. Darryl Jones playing bass since Bill Wyman retired in 1993, so he’s only been a temp for 20 years now. Man, can he lay down a groove. Then there’s ...

26. Love: Bobby Keys. The sax on “Live With Me,” “Brown Sugar,” etc.

27. Love: Chuck Leavell. The Stones never had an official keyboard player. Unofficially? It’s been this guy, since the early ’80s.

28. Hate: Altamont. Smooth move, asking the Hells Angels to provide security at your free festival. Dec. 6, 1969, marked the end of the age of innocence and of high hopes for the Woodstock generation.

29. Love: “Gimme Shelter.” Now synonymous with Altamont, and any Big Moment in a movie or TV show about the ’60s. How would Martin Scorsese have scored his films without it?

30. Hate: Jagger in the movies. “Ned Kelly,” ’nuff said.

31. Love: Richards in the movies. Especially alongside Johnny Depp playing him.

32. Love: Brian Jones playing marimba on “Under My Thumb.” Heck, Jones playing slide or dulcimer or mellotron or recorder or any of those other instruments that sweetened the sound of those early Stones records.

33. Hate: Brian Jones drowning in 1969. (Technically, we don’t hate the rest of the Stones for this. We just hate that it happened.)

34. Hate: That “Goat’s Head Soup” inner sleeve photo was, and is, really disgusting.

35. Love: Mick Taylor. John Mayall suggested Bluesbreakers guitarist Taylor to replace Jones. He played on the dirty-drug era of “Let It Bleed,” “Sticky Fingers,” “Exile on Main Street” and, of course, “Get Your Ya-Yas Out.” He’s supposed to be joining the Stones for some songs on this tour. Let’s hope one of them is “Sway.”

36. Hate: Ronnie Wood replacing Mick Taylor. We respect his longevity and think it’s cool that he paints. But for guitar fans? Wood is good, but Taylor was great.

37. Love: Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards together. Now we’re talkin’. They effortlessly trade lead and rhythm duties, fit together on a stage as though choreographed and, as the years roll on, they are beginning to look more and more like each other — and like old saddles.

38. Love: Charlie Watts’ dapper cool dress code, and even if no one really asked him to, and that he formed a big band to play standards.

39. Hate: Charlie Watts looking bored and thinking about his next jazz project during a big stadium show.

40. Love: Some girls who turned up just at the right moment on an album or show over the years: Merry Clayton, Marianne Faithfull, Tina Turner, Sheryl Crow, Lisa Fischer and, most recently, Florence Welch on “Gimme Shelter” at the big 50th concert in London.

41. Love/Hate: Richards’ singing voice.

42. Love: “Salt of the Earth.” Let’s drink to the hard-working people. The Stones never have to play anything but their hits, and they can’t get through all of those in any given night. But they wrote some great songs that people simply forget about. Like this one.

43. Love: Without Richards to keep him honest, Jagger would likely have gone off the deep end in the early MTV era, with more albums like “Primitive Cool” or the “Dancin’ in the Streets” thing.

44. Love/Hate: After all that heroin, all those cigarettes, Richards almost kills himself by falling out of a tree?

45. Love: “You can bruise it but you can’t break it,” Richards told an MGM audience in 2006, having a laugh about the tree thing.

46. Love: The country songs.

47. Hate: Covers of the country songs by country singers; i.e., Travis Tritt “Honky Tonk Women.”

48. Love: Truth in labeling (we hope). Their first album in the States was subtitled, “England’s Newest Hit Makers.” The new tour is called “50 & Counting.”

49. Love: Richards’ biography, “Life.” It’s 547 pages.

50. Love: “Time is on my side, yes it is.”

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at
mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.