We’ll, Mick and his mates pulled it off. The inclusion of Tumbling Dice in the set list at the Stones 2023 Club Gig in NYC last night seemed appropriate, and instead of crapping out, the band Rolled some Bones and came up with sixes, sevens and nines.
Great new album, which Mick clearly drove the direction of. His bringing in Andrew Watt gives The Stones and Watt a shot at some hardware when awards season rolls around. If the fans are lucky, we will get a Some Girls tour ratio of Hackney Diamonds songs included in the set lists on next summers tour. I need a few more listens to fully evaluate it, but it jumps off the vinyl as much as any first play by the Stones I’ve heard in decades. While Mick drove the bus, without the riff master, several of these songs are just solo Mick throwaway’s, IMO. It’s clear Keith is still the heart and soul of this band, but Mick is step for step with him in many ways, and he’s not just the front man on stage, he clearly drives the direction of this band and he’s very good at that.
The marketing blitz was equally brilliant. Fallon in London and NY worked, as did the mainstream TV interviews, especially Howard Stern’s chat with Keith. Too bad SNL couldn’t be worked around the writers strike, but maybe he wanted to save that for the new album next fall?
As for merch, he doubled down with flagship pop ups in strategic cities around the world as no one knows better than Mick that after the Adidas, Columbia, and Nike logos people like to wear, they also like tongues on their clothes.
The final piece in this years marketing “blitzkrieg” is the peddling of a TV documentary he’s been behind for this whole process, and I’m sure the film crew worked all night to include last nights key moments as the grand finally to a show that’s being bid up at Cannes by Netflix, Amazon, Paramount, Apple, MGM etc.
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www.mercurystudios.co]
For Mick to take a chance on playing new material in public with limited rehearsal time, it needed to have a risk vs reward opportunity, a roll of the dice so to speak. Getting Stephani to show up was the icing on the cake, although it looked like Darryl took Macca’s bass line up a notch too.
They keep raising a bar in Rock and Roll that will be nearly impossible to match. We are all very lucky.
CHELSKEITH
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2023-10-21 01:24 by MizzAmandaJonez.