Notebook dump: the Rolling Stones, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, May 2, 2024

jukeboxgraduate dot com is a newsletter about rock and roll, written by Caryn Rose. everyone is able to subscribe for free and most posts are free to subscribers; some posts in future will be for paid subscribers, but most will remain free to everyone. Thanks for your interest and support.

I wrote a review of yesterday's Rolling Stones show in New Orleans for Variety, so you can go read the full thing there. But I thought I'd do a traditional notebook dump of the unfiltered thoughts here. The quotes are things I actually wrote down or cut out of what I filed.

The Festival Stage was modified to accommodate the Stones’ appearance, with the distinctive lips and tongue logo on displayed on either side of the stage and along the back wall with a small version of the Jazz Fest logo, the silhouettes of a traditional New Orleans second line, which normally dominates the stage display. The 3D image of Professor Longhair – the man that Dr. John declared “the guardian angel of the roots of New Orleans music” – that crowns the top of the Festival Stage remained firmly in place.

I would have paid the ticket price just to see this moment:

Jazz Fest sells a line of branded Hawaiian shirt-type wear (called "BayouWear") that has an exclusive pattern to each year of the Fest. Because Irma Thomas is Irma Thomas, BayouWear provides her with each year's fabric which she then has made into a dress or other item of clothing, as illustrated above. Everyone in the crowd knew it was BayouWear and it was a moment.

Another the traditional elements of Jazz Fest is that each act is announced by an elaborate handwritten sign that is displayed next to each stage as they perform. Attendees rely on the Jazz Fest schedule known as "the cubes" to decide who they want to see and know where the act is performing, but if you've never seen that act before, you have no other way of knowing who is onstage. Also, you're walking from stage to stage at the Fairgrounds and if you stroll by a stage and hear something interesting, you know who it is without having to dig out a schedule. I was absolutely delighted to see that the Stones got their own sign and it's still a life goal of mine to interview an artist at the Heritage Stage where I will then get to have a sign that will display the artist's name and "interviewer: Caryn Rose." (I was booked to do an interview at the Heritage Stage for the 2020 Fest that got cancelled.)

Ivan Neville's Dumpstaphunk was the band on the Festival Stage before the Stones, and I got to the press/guest enclosure in the middle of his set. Ivan played on two Stones albums and is a member of the Xpensive Winos, so he earned that billing, but you have to know what you're getting into as an opener for the Stones. I mean, Prince Rogers Nelson himself got booed off the stage opening for them at the LA Coliseum in 1981. That's not a great look for the audience but it's also completely unsurprising given everything I know about Stones fans.

The big stages at Jazz Fest have reserved standing areas for the various flavors of VIP that are available to attendees. Dumpstaphunk seemed a little frustrated that they weren't getting the kind of audience reaction they would be accustomed to receiving in New Orleans, but everyone in the areas immediately adjacent to the stage had paid big bucks to be there for the Stones.

There was an otherwise lovely woman standing in front of me who had purchased a shaker-type percussion instrument from one of the Fest vendors earlier in the day and who thought that it would be a great idea to play this instrument during the entirety of the Stones' set. Except that she did not have enough of a sense of rhythm to make this exercise into anything that was not incredibly grating. I actually considered giving up my spot and moving somewhere else and only being able to see the stage on the video screen because I did not think I could endure it one more second. Oddly enough, she did not wield the instrument during "Sympathy for the Devil," the one song in which it would have made some kind of sense.

In the last newsletter I wrote about how Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band are one of those bands you want to see later in the tour because it takes them a couple of shows to get warmed up and dialed in, but that their energy rises as the tour progresses so the last few shows of the tour are usually off the charts. The Stones, on the other hand, are usually at their best when the tour kicks off, and by the time you get to the end of the tour start to fray at the edges a little bit, so you take that into account when planning what shows you want to see. (And of course you still might want to see opening night / last show for symbolic reasons.) I had made a lot of jokes about how getting the Stones onstage at 5pm – Mick arrived around 2:30 – was going to be a challenge for whoever was tasked with making that happen. This is one of the elements I attribute to causing some of the – less precise – moments of yesterday's show (in addition to the heat/humidity).

Little T&A: Could we all play the same song? Do the horns help

YCAGWYW: Not too long.

There are two songs that Mick has a habit of extending into the a zone where it starts to be painful, and "You Can't Always Get What You Want" is one of those (the other is "Tumbling Dice." Listen to any 1975 show if you don't believe me.)

I was a little bummed at having to watch a daytime "Sympathy for the Devil" because it's probably the most masterful example of Jagger's stagecraft, and how that stagecraft transforms not only his onstage persona, but how it extends to the energy of the entire band. If you want to get all woo-woo, it's because that song has a lot of juju attached to it and if you don't mind your own energetic house, the universe will do that for you. But I also have always believed that it's an element Jagger is particularly gifted at and I relish witnessing that ecstatic moment in "Sympathy" when the band is focused and locks in and the crowd is with them. That was not going to happen at the Fairgrounds even though I could see he wanted to try to make it happen.

Also, the Stones' wardrobe is designed to be worn onstage, in the dark, under stage lighting. Keith's shiny shirts I think suffered the worst in the daylight from a visual perspective, while Mick and Ronnie were just hot. Ron had one costume change and I think he wore his jacket for all of 15 seconds before giving up on it.

People started leaving the enclosure when "Satisfaction" started and so I got to grab a spot on the rail separating the Guest enclosure from the Sponsors enclosure (and then there were still several other enclosures before we got to the stage), which gave me a little elevation and separation, and I also could put my notebook away and just watch. It made me surprisingly emotional – "Satisfaction," of all things! – because it is literally one of rock and roll's most perfect songs and here I get to watch them play it live in front of me, one more time.

Comments are closed to everyone except paid subscribers because it's so much fun to be a woman writing about rock and roll on the internet.