Through the past with the Rolling Stones

Struggling through the first half hour of a cardio class on a stationery bike in a local gym, I suddenly feel a jolt of energy when hearing the distinct guitar sound at the start of “Paint It, Black,” the Rolling Stones hit from 1966. I smile, and pedal faster.
---
Just days earlier, while riding an elevator with a co-worker known for his liking of the Rolling Stones, a middle-age businessman asked if the band might be touring again this year.

“I don’t think so,” his colleague, a white-haired attorney, replied. “I don’t think the four of them will be able to do it until 2013.”

“But, they’ll be a year older,” the man remarked, disappointed.
---
A New York City boy first heard “Paint It, Black” on an AM radio station, and went to a music store on Broadway to look for the single. A year earlier, in his neighborhood’s recreation center, he and his friends enjoyed listening to “Get Off My Cloud” over and over and over again.
---
Shortly after the first Super Bowl telecast ended one Sunday in January 1967, the Rolling Stones appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. They sang “Ruby Tuesday” and, in deference to Mr. Sullivan’s wishes, a slightly different version of the flip side of the single, “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” It was better than the game, and soon a young New Yorker made his way to a local Woolworth to buy the disc.

Almost 40 years later, during halftime of another Super Bowl, the Rolling Stones performed a 14-minute set that, again, turned out to be more entertaining than the game. Proving some things just never change, two of the three Stones songs had lyrics censored by the television network.
---
The album with the zipper on the cover, “Sticky Fingers,” couldn’t make it past the censor of a Bloomfield, NJ family in 1971, around the same time the famous tongue graphic became synonymous with the Rolling Stones and started appearing in shirts and other clothing.

Four years later, in Madison Square Garden, the band’s on stage and it’s one of those nights. As the opening licks of “Honky Tonk Women” sounded, the stage opened slowly with a band member at the tip of each point of a star-shaped structure. Life was never quite the same for a college student.

In 1981, at a Meadowlands Arena concert, Mick Jagger dashes up the aisle during a song, just feet away from a newlywed couple. Nearly everyone is up from their seats at the new arena, excited.
---
New Rolling Stones discs have come less frequently since the mid-1980s, as have concert tours, as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards occasionally bitch in public like siblings or lovers and do their own things. The quality of Stones recordings and performances, however, have never abated – their discs and tours during the past 25 years stand up well to their earlier work.

One more Rolling Stones concert remains on my bucket list. No doubt, it will make me smile and feel like that young New York boy at the neighborhood recreation center, at the Broadway music store, in front of the TV after the first Super Bowl, or the young man at Madison Square Garden or Meadowlands Arena.