Word: band
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...boat starts to move. That's encouraging. After all the band's public bickering and rheumatic concertizing, after all this time and all these damn years, the Rolling Stones can still rock the boat. They are back all right...
...band must know it too, because finally, on the last song, they face it. Slipping Away is a song about -- indeed, almost consumed by -- a sense of impermanence, of loss, of lives eliding into compromise. It's about ending. It's about dying, and it's a great Stones song. Jagger and Richards have some supernal ballads to their credit (As Tears Go By, Wild Horses, Moonlight Mile), but busy being naughty, they did not cultivate their more sensitive side. Slipping Away is an autobiography that could be anyone's life story...
Jagger and Richards have spent a fair part of the '80s separately pursuing extra-Stones interests, playing the Bickersons in the rock press whenever they were queried about the plentiful tensions within the band. It was tough to pin down, even when the sniping drew a little blood, precisely what the boys were bitching about. Keith wanted to tour, Mick wanted to cruise the night life; individual ambitions ran contrary to the good of the band. Whatever it was, it seemed likely that they had been together too long -- 27 years, to be exact. So when Slipping Away begins...
...There's a lot of energy in the band right now," says Keith. "This new record's been miraculously fast for us. Mick and I are still holding our breath, saying, 'This can't last.' We pretty much wrote it in a month and laid down the basic tracks in about five weeks." To get the steel wheels on track so quickly, Jagger and Richards set aside those publicized vexations to find a common footing...
What will save them is that in a positive way, in a way that rock was never expected to tolerate, they are acting their age. The fan keeps coming back to Slipping Away and thinks about the deaths in the band family. There was, famously, the passing of Brian Jones, one of the formative members and chief sybarites, overdosed in 1969, found dead floating in his swimming pool. And more recently and just as crucially, there was Ian Stewart, the keyboard player, who died of a heart attack...