Keith Richards has made a career of performing indifference to things that should produce awe. It is part of the persona — the weathered, seen-everything cool of someone who has been at the center of one of the most extraordinary rock careers in history and has developed the specific equanimity of someone for whom extraordinary things have become the baseline. He is not easily impressed. He has trained himself not to show it when he is.
Mick Jagger is the exception. Not always — not in the casual performances, not on the average Tuesday night of a stadium tour. But in the specific moments when Jagger transcends even his own extraordinary capabilities. When something arrives in a performance that exceeds what performance usually contains. When the room changes temperature because the man at the microphone has gone somewhere that the room was not expecting.
Richards has described these moments in interviews with the characteristic indirection of someone who does not want to be caught in the act of admiration but cannot entirely suppress it. He talks around them. He says things like: Mick surprised me that night. Or: I wasn’t expecting what happened in the second set. The language of deliberate understatement from someone who was, in the moments he is describing, standing in the wings with his mouth open.
1. Altamont, December 1969. The worst night in the Rolling Stones’ history by most measures — the violence, the death in the crowd, the specific horror of an event that has been processed and reprocessed for fifty years as the end of the 1960s dream. Jagger performed on that stage knowing things were wrong in ways that no performer should have to navigate. Richards has said that what Jagger did onstage in those circumstances — the specific way he managed an audience that was disintegrating around its edges while trying to keep the music happening — was the greatest act of performance courage he had ever witnessed. Not the best show. The bravest one.
2. Madison Square Garden, 1972. The Exile on Main St. tour. A show where something happened in Jagger in the third song that Richards has described as a shift — as if a different frequency became available. He has said that by the fifth song he had stopped playing on autopilot and started actually listening to Jagger in a way that he did not usually need to because the listening required it.
3. Wembley Stadium, 1990. The Urban Jungle tour. A show in front of hundreds of thousands of people where Jagger — by this point in his mid-forties, by this point in the complicated middle period of his relationship with Richards, by this point carrying everything that the previous two decades had accumulated — performed with a physical and vocal intensity that Richards has said made him feel twenty-two years old again. Not nostalgia. Actual present tense electricity.
4. A small club, unannounced, 1978. The specifics of this show have been described differently in different accounts. What is consistent is that it was small — very small by their usual standards — and that the size seemed to remove something from Jagger and replace it with something older. Something that Richards recognized from their earliest shows in the small rooms of early 1960s London. He stood in the wings for the entire show. He did not play. He watched.
5. Havana, Cuba, 2016. The Rolling Stones’ historic concert in Cuba — the first major rock concert since the revolution. Half a million people. A moment of specific historical weight that both Jagger and Richards understood as something larger than a concert. Jagger performed with an awareness of where he was and what it meant that gave the performance a gravity that Richards has said he felt from the stage as a physical force. After the show he found Jagger and said four words: “You knew, didn’t you.” Jagger said yes.
He always knows. That is what Richards has been watching for sixty years.
The knowing. The specific, rare quality of a performer who understands in real time what the moment requires and delivers exactly that.
Five nights he could not pretend not to see it.