“You start out playing rock’n’roll so you can have sex and do drugs, but you end up doing drugs so you can still play rock’n’roll and have sex.”
-Mick Jagger
A few weeks ago, I saw the Rolling Stones in New Jersey. I’m not here to talk about the concert, which if you want the blow-by-blow you can read about in Rolling Stone (fittingly) or even in stodgy old New York Times. I’m instead here to tell you about the aftermath.
Though my friend Kyle had generously offered me a ticket on him, which to paraphrase Don Corleone, was an offer I couldn’t refuse, and though I’ve never seen the Stones before (“that’s a bucket-list event,” another friend told me, “you gotta go”) I was still hesitant. As with the Beatles or Zeppelin, whom I also loved last century, I often reach for the skip when the Stones come on because, well, for how many decades can you listen to the same songs?
Many more, I discovered (I’m listening to them now). The vitality of their performance was even more astonishing considering Keith Richards and Mick Jagger are 80 and Ronnie Wood is 77. Their first tour was 62 years ago. When he turns 81 this summer, Mick Jagger will have lived three times as long as the band’s founder, Brian Jones. Or to put it another way, he’ll have lived as long as Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Kurt Cobain combined (feel free to mix and match with Jimi Hendrix or Amy Winehouse: every one of them died at 27).
These guys weren’t stooped and shuffling, nor were they Milli Vanilliing their way through a lipsynched set due to arthritic fingers or atrophying vocal fold muscles. They did what they always do: they stuck a huge cherry red tongue out at the aging process and they rocked.
It was awesome to witness. I’ve seen twenty-somethings more low-energy (let alone frontrunner political candidates). That’s the speed I want to cruise at in my 80s. Whatever their secret, whether the music or sex or drugs or combination of all three, the Biden and Trump apothecaries and debate preppers would be wise to reach out to the Stones for advice (as the Katz’s Deli customer in When Harry Met Sally put it after watching Meg Ryan fake an orgasm, “I’ll have what she’s having”). And Jagger can then shout back, “You can’t always get what you want.”
That it was held at the MetLife arena, a venue thrillingly named after a giant life insurance company (the names of venues always reveal the gods a society worships), and that the concert was hosted by the AARP, formerly the American Association for Retired Peoples1, made the whole thing especially apt.
But, like I said, this isn’t about the concert. It’s about the afterparty. The line for this afterparty wound around the parking lot and was at least a half-mile long at its peak, which is exactly when I got in. It was the line for the bus back to NYC.
The only reason I queued in that bus line at peak rush hour (shortly after midnight) was because our seats had been up in the nosebleeds of the stadium, so winding back down to Earth behind 65,000 people from what felt like a jetliner’s cruising altitude took a solid twenty to thirty minutes.
Once on ground level, I’d made my way past the stadium kiosks displaying $50 tour t-shirts and past the solo sellers hawking their $20 generic brand concert tees draped over their forearms and past other late-night entrepreneurs making the most of supply and demand economics by hawking water and Gatorade and pretzels at 3x pricing. On I went through the same parking lot I’d traversed on the way in, now a scene of no-nonsense evacuation instead of unhurried pre-show tailgate parties.2
On I wound through this great Exodus, relieved to see in the distance a row of parked buses. No way would they fill before I got there. But then I arrived only to see on the other side of the buses a line of people snaking away, folding back upon itself through the distant recesses of the parking lot. That’s when I realized that getting from the nosebleeds to ground level was just the opening act of my exodus from Egypt.
By by the time I reached the end of the line I’d already cycled through the first four stages of grief – Denial, Anger, Bargaining, and Depression – and finally found peace in the fifth, Acceptance. There was nothing to do but wait.
In front of me was a man and a woman who, judging by their mutual disinterest, were more likely a couple than a date. The woman was on her phone tweaking an Instagram selfie of herself smiling at the camera with Mick Jagger behind her on the catwalk. As a nosebleed spectator who wouldn’t have been able to make out Mick Jagger from Mickey Rooney without the Jumbotrons, I despised them both instantly. The choice of Instagram filters was clearly overwhelming her. Should she go Clarendon? Juno? Lark? Ludwig? Sierra? I couldn’t tell the difference, but perhaps my view from over her shoulder didn’t allow for artistic nuance.
Now and then some straggling late arrivals would break through the wall of people and you’d see their jaws drop as they took in the breadth of the queue, their wide-eyed expressions of horror something the rest of us could both commiserate with and take sadistic glee in.
We wound slowly towards the buses, or rather away from them, because the line extended to the far end of the parking lot and then looped back. I did briefly regress back into the second stage of grief as I gazed upon the passengers shuffling in the opposite direction to us toward the Promised Land of Coach USA. It wasn’t until I rounded that final corner that things started looking up. Finally on the home stretch, it was now my turn to gaze with smug self-satisfaction upon the woebegone Israelites lumbering parallel to us in the wrong direction.
Operating within this eight-foot-wide strip between the two parallel and diverging human currents were the Pretzel Men: thick-necked, barrel-chested, crop-haircutted men in tan Bermudas (or just regular shorts that were too big) and sleeveless black tees pushing shopping carts full of critical goods for the Exodus. Like Jagger, the Pretzel Men too knew how to sing their wares to the world: “Get your hot pretzels heeeeree! Hot pretzels here, Cold soda, cold soda! Hot salty delicious pretzels heeeere!” Though they looked firmly New Jerseyan, their musicality and climbing cadences suggested Italian ancestry.
There were no bitter competition between them. When two Pretzel Men crossed paths, they would pause to chat and to size up one another’s pretzels, and then with a “yup, hooooot pretzels” they would cheerfully press on. I didn’t see anyone buy anything from them, possibly due to a lack of cash (credit-card only purchasing being yet another pandemic-era measure that insidiously stayed with us). Then again, I’m not even sure the Pretzel Men were there to sell. They were there to sing, and we were there to listen.
One couldn’t say the same about the t-shirt entrepreneurs, whose clearance cries of $10-per-tee now had an air of desperation as they scrambled to offload their loot, this being the last Stones concert in the greater New York / New Jersey metropolis.
After another half hour of shuffling, and in my neighbor’s case, Instagram tweaking (and of the same goddam selfie the entire time, I kid you not), we finally boarded and within twenty minutes—an intimate twenty minutes, because the largest man in the Tri-state area sat next to me—we were weirdly dropped off on a midtown Manhattan side street somewhere near Port Authority Port Terminal.
By now it was 1:15 am on a Monday. I’ve seen a lot of weird shit in New York, including people shooting up on subway steps and beating off under dirty blankets on the street, but the walk to the subway was my grimmest experience yet. Granted, the areas around train stations and bus stations in major cities are always seedy, especially in the late-night / early a.m. hours, but this was next level hopelessness. The homeless paced about chattering to themselves, convulsing in rags under doorways, wacked out on heroine or fentanyl or who-knows-what. I almost stepped on someone laid out outside of a bleak Hilton Lobby. Plastic and bones and food bits were strewn everywhere across the sidewalk where the hungry had scavenged through trash. This didn’t look like the Manhattan I knew. It looked like the start of a Brooklyn crime scene from a 70s movie.
Upon entering the subway station, I recognized a woman who’d been on that same bus from the show. When I mentioned how grim that walk was, she just looked at me, pale and shaken, and murmured that that’d been the craziest thing she’d ever seen.
While we may marvel at how Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards and Mick Jagger can still play arenas at their age, what is more mind-boggling is that people can live this way on the street at any age, drugged-out, half-crazed, penniless, scrounging, exposed to the elements, to hunger, madness, addiction, and yet still somehow make it to the next month, the next year, and with some luck and change of fortune, the next decade.
One of the final songs in the Stones set had been “Gimme Shelter,” a song explicitly about the brutality of war which, considering the state of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, feels no less relevant today than it must have been during the Vietnam war. But when I hear it now, I also think of those homeless guys bug-eyed and raving and sleeping on concrete in filth and how next time I’m whining over being stuck in a long line, I should never forget how good I have it.
Ooh, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Oh yeah I'm gonna fade away
AARP changed its name to disassociate themselves from the connotation to retirement, since 44% of its members aren’t retired and the minimum age to join is 18. And considering the increasing disparity between wages and costs, which squeezes Americans to work into ever deeper twilight years, and that these same squeezed Americans will pay hundreds of dollars to come out, often with their teenage kids, to cheer on as the paragon of success a trio of unretired sept- & octogenarians, I’d say the AARP nailed it on their sponsorship.
The pre-show parking lot scene was a more pleasant and hospitable scene. One guy invited me over to his family’s tailgate party for a beer and told me over a Miller Lite that this was his 24th Rolling Stones concert.
Uncontrollable pissing and shitting is the full circle of life, so what we do in between better count more than that. The Stones have figured that out, and had the good fortune to recover from when drugs were quality instead of spiked.. However, I've no intention of standing in a long queue, though the walk to the subways is enticing.
I was hoping there was an otherworldly portal somewhere. I only read your posts on Substack, I don’t read anyone else’s. 🤔