. . . or you can’t always get what you want
April 20, 2003 | 12:00am
I have a case of SARS.
Not Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
(Knock on wood.) But Severe Anxiety over the Rolling Stones. You can replace anxiety with annoyance, agitation, amazement, ambivalence, amusement – all the applicable A-words you could think of.
Flashback to two weeks ago: I got an assignment to cover the Rolling Stones concert in Bangkok, Thailand slated on April 10. I felt just like that Pablo Neruda figure suddenly watching the heavens unfasten, plantations palpitate and shadows riddled with arrows, fire and flowers. I heard hallelujahs, man. I heard cherubs and seraphs buzzing in my ears. It was supposed to be a dream made flesh. I know it’s only rock n’ roll but I like it, like it, yes I do.
As a kid, I stole a cassette tape from our neighbor (a guy who worked in Saudi Arabia with tons of tacky gold chains and pirated tapes of rock bands). It was called "Stones Slow," which gathered dust and years in the guy’s bookcase along with "Beatles Ballads," "The Best of Fleetwood Mac" and "Slow Rock Memory Vol. 1 and 2." My angelheaded hipster uncle – who had a Ginsberg-tinted, Seventies mind – used to tell me the Beatles were great but the Stones were grittier. It was "The-Beatles-want-to-hold-your-hand-while-the-Stones-want-to-pillage-your-town" thing. He had evidence: pictures of John, Paul, George and Ringo wearing neatly ironed suits and dorky moptops; while Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, the late Brian Jones, Bill Wyman (who resigned from the group not so long ago) and Charlie Watts posed like edgy Alex and the rest of the droogs in A Clockwork Orange, shouting, screaming, killing the king, railing at all his servants on a sleepy London town like street-fighting men. They were the kind of blokes who’d snap, "Said my name is called Disturbance."
I just fell in love with Angie, Wild Horses, Fool to Cry, Heart of Stone, Lady Jane and the other more introspective Stones numbers in that cassette tape. (I still have it, by the way.) Since then, I got hooked on the Rolling Stones – eventually growing tired of aural clichés like As Tears Go By and (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (Britney Spears covered it for crying out loud), hardheadedly sticking to old favorites like Beast of Burden and You Can’t Always Get What You Want, and helplessly falling in love with obscure numbers like Torn and Frayed, Tumbling Dice, Salt of the Earth, Sister Morphine and Moonlight Mile (currently the soundtrack to my stupid, beautiful life).
Sound of strangers sending nothing to my mind/Just another mad, mad day on the road/I am just living to be lying by your side/But I’m just another moonlight mile, on down the road.
So, when Twinky Lagdameo, EMI Philippines’ marketing director, showed me our tickets to the Stones gig I said to myself this is that one apex, that one zenith in my linear, humdrum existence. This was my Almost Famous to a lifetime’s worth of Jackass or Gulong ng Palad. What a thrill it would be to see Keith (whom Dave Barry once called an iguana with a Telecaster) purvey those raw and raunchy five-string licks, to see Mick don his "Satanic Majesties" cape for the samba from hell called Sympathy for the Devil, to see Charlie Watts be the epitome of cool, to see Ron Wood fill Brian Jones’ and Mick Taylor’s shoes with aplomb. To see the "World’s Greatest Rock N’ Roll Band."
And this was part of their Forty Licks World Tour, so all the old stuff from "Exile on Main St." and "Let it Bleed" are dragged from the closet, dusted off, raved up to give the fans a dose of those hallucinogenic riffs and lyrics.
I imagine myself at the venue with Mick Jagger singing "War, children, it’s just a shot away, it’s just a shot away" or "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name!" Or Keith Richards doing the E-B-C#m-A intro of Beast of Burden.
Nothing could stop me from seeing the Stones live – except the possibility of a dead me.
The specter of SARS was (and still is) sweeping our part of the world. The Rolling Stones had to cancel gigs in Hong Kong, as well as in Shanghai and Beijing, China because of the outbreak of the mystery flu. And the disease is very real; those cancellations were called for. (Hey, aren’t you a bit baffled it’s taking so long for scientists, who can play God and clone f*cking sheep, to come up with a cure for SARS? Hmm…) The band very much wanted to play in China (it would’ve been the Rolling Stones’ first gig in Mao country), even going so far as to omit a couple of "censored" songs from the set list such as Let’s Spend the Night Together and Honky Tonk Women. But I guess there is an evil presence tangling with the fates of the Stones. Remember Altamont? Remember the drug bust with Marianne Faithful (Mick’s girlfriend at that time) wearing nothing but a rug? Remember the tragedies, the travesties, the tabloid fodder, the rock n’ roll circus of it all?
My girlfriend Cathy tried to discourage me from going. There are more important things in life than a rock n’ roll band, she said. My editor, Ma’am Millet Mananquil, sweetly told me that if I were her son she wouldn’t let me go to Bangkok for the concert (and I appreciate her more for that). One of my friends texted me, "F*ck the Stones, pare, the Replacements pa rin!" Man, that’s like comparing Yul Brynner and Telly Savalas – absolutely not in the same universe. So, I just trashed his message.
My friend Ayvi said it illuminatingly: If you waste this opportunity to watch the Rolling Stones because of fear of the mystery flu, that’s like being infected with SARS of the soul.
So I went.
At the airport on Wednesday morning (a day before the gig at the Impact Arena in Muang Thong Thani), Twinky and I met the other lucky individuals bound for the Stones Bangkok concert: Nigel Gamalong, program director of 103.5K-Lite, as well as couple Alejandro and Christine Yu. Ali won the Rolling Stones trivia contest by answering, "Who is the sixth member of the Rolling Stones?" Answer: pianist Ian Stewart.
I tell you, if you’re going to a Stones concert (even if it gets cancelled and everything) these are the best people to go with, since they’re very friendly, generous and hip to music. And like me, they all are Rolling Stones junkies. Each of us acknowledges the fact that there’s something redemptive about the band’s music despite the decadence of its members. (Hey, Picasso and Miles Davis were monsters, but that doesn’t tarnish the greatness of their art.)
We talked incessantly about Rolling Stones songs. Twinky, who knows infinitely more about music than some of the music writers I know, adores Let it Loose from the excellent "Exile on Main St." Ali, Christine, Nigel and I even betted on what the opening number would be. My bet was Brown Sugar, the first song in the Stones’ Bombay show. The others thought it would be Start Me Up. (Of course, the gig got cancelled, and the Rolling Stones opened with the sounds of silence.)
Before we boarded our plane, we put our face masks on. Twinky quipped, "Now we know how it feels like to be Darth Vader. Ah, the things we’d go through for the Stones." Better safe than sorry, as the cliché goes, but those masks are really a hassle. Imagine attending the concert and singing, "I’m Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a gas, gas, gas!" through those glorified muzzles.
In Bangkok, we had a whole day to ourselves so we went to the mall (MBK or Mah Boon Krong) and the night market (Patpong). We also indulged in the famous Thai foot massage. God, I forgot the Rolling Stones (hell, even my goddamn name!) as the masseuse worked her soft, electric fingers on my heels.
In the evening we went to O’Reilly’s to drink heady Chang beer and listen to Beatles impersonators – moptops, natty suits and all. Those Thais aped the Fab Four’s every note, every move. But "John" looked so much like Dick Gordon I half-expected him to talk about WOW Philippines in between verses of Don’t Let Me Down, Strawberry Fields Forever, Revolution and Twist and Shout.
Ali and Christine said how fortunate we were to be listening to Beatles songs before watching the Stones the next day. Ali and I exchanged high fives when Dick and Co. played While My Guitar Gently Weeps. I was in nirvana.
Then, Nigel and I boarded a tuk tuk and saw the most revolting show on the planet, featuring acrobatic Thai women with their props of ping pong balls, soda bottles, arrows, cake, candles, pens, cigarettes, etc. in a place that smells of stale beer, sour powder, sweat and solitude. But that’s another story altogether.
WE DIDN’T GET NO SATISFACTION
The next day, April 10, the day of the
gig itself, Twinky learned that the Roll-
ing Stones concert had been cancelled.
Man, we were inconsolable.
According to the Thai broadsheet The Nation, a cargo truck hit the Stones’ Boeing 747 plane in India’s Mumbai airport. Jagger was already in Bangkok, filming a documentary of their Asian sojourn. The other Stones were aboard the luckless plane. Rumor has it that Keith, who equates flying with the plague, lambasted Mick for using his private plane to fly ahead of the group.
The mishap was so Seventies. It’s hard to imagine that an organization as tight as Rolling Stones Incorporated could experience a snag like that, leaving 10,000 fans (including this writer) in a lurch, and flushing the concert promoter’s 30 million baht down the drain. Especially in this day and age of rock n’ roll as a very lucrative business venture. Heck, the Glimmer Twins, Mick and Keith, were even featured in Fortune magazine. How will these guys make up to thousands of unsatisfied customers?
Anyway, the Rolling Stones Asian gigs (including dates in Hong Kong, China and Thailand) will be reset in September and October, according to a press release issued by Jagger. We’re just not sure what would happen next in the wonderfully wasted Rolling Stones galaxy.
Since the Stones show was off, we had nothing to do. As we rode a taxi towards more malls and more night markets, Twinky, Nigel, Ali, Christine and I sang Stones lyrics that commented on the dark funk we were in: You can’t always get what you want. We can’t get no satisfaction. Don’t stop, baby, don’t stop. Time is not on their side. Look at me – I’m in tatters/Shattered!
But as we moved from place to place, from plush malls to nocturnal markets to Tom Yang stalls to the forgotten crannies of Patpong Road, I had an epiphany: We could go see the Rolling Stones some other time (Mick, Keith and cockroaches will outlive us all), but at that precise moment we were like rolling stones.
All in all, it was the best Rolling Stones show I have never seen.
For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations, e-mail iganja@hotmail.com.
Not Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
(Knock on wood.) But Severe Anxiety over the Rolling Stones. You can replace anxiety with annoyance, agitation, amazement, ambivalence, amusement – all the applicable A-words you could think of.
Flashback to two weeks ago: I got an assignment to cover the Rolling Stones concert in Bangkok, Thailand slated on April 10. I felt just like that Pablo Neruda figure suddenly watching the heavens unfasten, plantations palpitate and shadows riddled with arrows, fire and flowers. I heard hallelujahs, man. I heard cherubs and seraphs buzzing in my ears. It was supposed to be a dream made flesh. I know it’s only rock n’ roll but I like it, like it, yes I do.
As a kid, I stole a cassette tape from our neighbor (a guy who worked in Saudi Arabia with tons of tacky gold chains and pirated tapes of rock bands). It was called "Stones Slow," which gathered dust and years in the guy’s bookcase along with "Beatles Ballads," "The Best of Fleetwood Mac" and "Slow Rock Memory Vol. 1 and 2." My angelheaded hipster uncle – who had a Ginsberg-tinted, Seventies mind – used to tell me the Beatles were great but the Stones were grittier. It was "The-Beatles-want-to-hold-your-hand-while-the-Stones-want-to-pillage-your-town" thing. He had evidence: pictures of John, Paul, George and Ringo wearing neatly ironed suits and dorky moptops; while Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, the late Brian Jones, Bill Wyman (who resigned from the group not so long ago) and Charlie Watts posed like edgy Alex and the rest of the droogs in A Clockwork Orange, shouting, screaming, killing the king, railing at all his servants on a sleepy London town like street-fighting men. They were the kind of blokes who’d snap, "Said my name is called Disturbance."
I just fell in love with Angie, Wild Horses, Fool to Cry, Heart of Stone, Lady Jane and the other more introspective Stones numbers in that cassette tape. (I still have it, by the way.) Since then, I got hooked on the Rolling Stones – eventually growing tired of aural clichés like As Tears Go By and (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (Britney Spears covered it for crying out loud), hardheadedly sticking to old favorites like Beast of Burden and You Can’t Always Get What You Want, and helplessly falling in love with obscure numbers like Torn and Frayed, Tumbling Dice, Salt of the Earth, Sister Morphine and Moonlight Mile (currently the soundtrack to my stupid, beautiful life).
Sound of strangers sending nothing to my mind/Just another mad, mad day on the road/I am just living to be lying by your side/But I’m just another moonlight mile, on down the road.
So, when Twinky Lagdameo, EMI Philippines’ marketing director, showed me our tickets to the Stones gig I said to myself this is that one apex, that one zenith in my linear, humdrum existence. This was my Almost Famous to a lifetime’s worth of Jackass or Gulong ng Palad. What a thrill it would be to see Keith (whom Dave Barry once called an iguana with a Telecaster) purvey those raw and raunchy five-string licks, to see Mick don his "Satanic Majesties" cape for the samba from hell called Sympathy for the Devil, to see Charlie Watts be the epitome of cool, to see Ron Wood fill Brian Jones’ and Mick Taylor’s shoes with aplomb. To see the "World’s Greatest Rock N’ Roll Band."
And this was part of their Forty Licks World Tour, so all the old stuff from "Exile on Main St." and "Let it Bleed" are dragged from the closet, dusted off, raved up to give the fans a dose of those hallucinogenic riffs and lyrics.
I imagine myself at the venue with Mick Jagger singing "War, children, it’s just a shot away, it’s just a shot away" or "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name!" Or Keith Richards doing the E-B-C#m-A intro of Beast of Burden.
Nothing could stop me from seeing the Stones live – except the possibility of a dead me.
The specter of SARS was (and still is) sweeping our part of the world. The Rolling Stones had to cancel gigs in Hong Kong, as well as in Shanghai and Beijing, China because of the outbreak of the mystery flu. And the disease is very real; those cancellations were called for. (Hey, aren’t you a bit baffled it’s taking so long for scientists, who can play God and clone f*cking sheep, to come up with a cure for SARS? Hmm…) The band very much wanted to play in China (it would’ve been the Rolling Stones’ first gig in Mao country), even going so far as to omit a couple of "censored" songs from the set list such as Let’s Spend the Night Together and Honky Tonk Women. But I guess there is an evil presence tangling with the fates of the Stones. Remember Altamont? Remember the drug bust with Marianne Faithful (Mick’s girlfriend at that time) wearing nothing but a rug? Remember the tragedies, the travesties, the tabloid fodder, the rock n’ roll circus of it all?
My girlfriend Cathy tried to discourage me from going. There are more important things in life than a rock n’ roll band, she said. My editor, Ma’am Millet Mananquil, sweetly told me that if I were her son she wouldn’t let me go to Bangkok for the concert (and I appreciate her more for that). One of my friends texted me, "F*ck the Stones, pare, the Replacements pa rin!" Man, that’s like comparing Yul Brynner and Telly Savalas – absolutely not in the same universe. So, I just trashed his message.
My friend Ayvi said it illuminatingly: If you waste this opportunity to watch the Rolling Stones because of fear of the mystery flu, that’s like being infected with SARS of the soul.
So I went.
I tell you, if you’re going to a Stones concert (even if it gets cancelled and everything) these are the best people to go with, since they’re very friendly, generous and hip to music. And like me, they all are Rolling Stones junkies. Each of us acknowledges the fact that there’s something redemptive about the band’s music despite the decadence of its members. (Hey, Picasso and Miles Davis were monsters, but that doesn’t tarnish the greatness of their art.)
We talked incessantly about Rolling Stones songs. Twinky, who knows infinitely more about music than some of the music writers I know, adores Let it Loose from the excellent "Exile on Main St." Ali, Christine, Nigel and I even betted on what the opening number would be. My bet was Brown Sugar, the first song in the Stones’ Bombay show. The others thought it would be Start Me Up. (Of course, the gig got cancelled, and the Rolling Stones opened with the sounds of silence.)
Before we boarded our plane, we put our face masks on. Twinky quipped, "Now we know how it feels like to be Darth Vader. Ah, the things we’d go through for the Stones." Better safe than sorry, as the cliché goes, but those masks are really a hassle. Imagine attending the concert and singing, "I’m Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a gas, gas, gas!" through those glorified muzzles.
In Bangkok, we had a whole day to ourselves so we went to the mall (MBK or Mah Boon Krong) and the night market (Patpong). We also indulged in the famous Thai foot massage. God, I forgot the Rolling Stones (hell, even my goddamn name!) as the masseuse worked her soft, electric fingers on my heels.
In the evening we went to O’Reilly’s to drink heady Chang beer and listen to Beatles impersonators – moptops, natty suits and all. Those Thais aped the Fab Four’s every note, every move. But "John" looked so much like Dick Gordon I half-expected him to talk about WOW Philippines in between verses of Don’t Let Me Down, Strawberry Fields Forever, Revolution and Twist and Shout.
Ali and Christine said how fortunate we were to be listening to Beatles songs before watching the Stones the next day. Ali and I exchanged high fives when Dick and Co. played While My Guitar Gently Weeps. I was in nirvana.
Then, Nigel and I boarded a tuk tuk and saw the most revolting show on the planet, featuring acrobatic Thai women with their props of ping pong balls, soda bottles, arrows, cake, candles, pens, cigarettes, etc. in a place that smells of stale beer, sour powder, sweat and solitude. But that’s another story altogether.
WE DIDN’T GET NO SATISFACTION
The next day, April 10, the day of the
gig itself, Twinky learned that the Roll-
ing Stones concert had been cancelled.
Man, we were inconsolable.
According to the Thai broadsheet The Nation, a cargo truck hit the Stones’ Boeing 747 plane in India’s Mumbai airport. Jagger was already in Bangkok, filming a documentary of their Asian sojourn. The other Stones were aboard the luckless plane. Rumor has it that Keith, who equates flying with the plague, lambasted Mick for using his private plane to fly ahead of the group.
The mishap was so Seventies. It’s hard to imagine that an organization as tight as Rolling Stones Incorporated could experience a snag like that, leaving 10,000 fans (including this writer) in a lurch, and flushing the concert promoter’s 30 million baht down the drain. Especially in this day and age of rock n’ roll as a very lucrative business venture. Heck, the Glimmer Twins, Mick and Keith, were even featured in Fortune magazine. How will these guys make up to thousands of unsatisfied customers?
Anyway, the Rolling Stones Asian gigs (including dates in Hong Kong, China and Thailand) will be reset in September and October, according to a press release issued by Jagger. We’re just not sure what would happen next in the wonderfully wasted Rolling Stones galaxy.
Since the Stones show was off, we had nothing to do. As we rode a taxi towards more malls and more night markets, Twinky, Nigel, Ali, Christine and I sang Stones lyrics that commented on the dark funk we were in: You can’t always get what you want. We can’t get no satisfaction. Don’t stop, baby, don’t stop. Time is not on their side. Look at me – I’m in tatters/Shattered!
But as we moved from place to place, from plush malls to nocturnal markets to Tom Yang stalls to the forgotten crannies of Patpong Road, I had an epiphany: We could go see the Rolling Stones some other time (Mick, Keith and cockroaches will outlive us all), but at that precise moment we were like rolling stones.
All in all, it was the best Rolling Stones show I have never seen.
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