#(if that somebody is mick or keith. since they’ve established the grotesque precedent that everyone else can be replaced)

[waugh-bao]

It makes me sad that Keith only performed one song yesterday. I believe it’s the first time he’s done this in over 40 years! I really do hope that this was just a one-off for opening night and not indicative of any serious issues within the band or with himself.

I’ve watched quite a bit of the footage from yesterday and I just don’t think Keith was up to doing two solo songs by himself. He messed up the opening riff to the first song, “Start Me Up”, and through the whole concert he wasn’t playing a lot of the time/was frequently pausing and sort of wiping his eyes or staring off into the middle distance. It may be that he’s exhausted from rehearsals and needs some time to recoup before he takes on his normal load, but I kind of doubt it.

Honestly, they sound worse than when I saw them in 2021. For all the ‘new energy’ talk, Keith has never kept up well with Steve in the Stones (he plays too forcefully and too fast, for a start) and the more severe his arthritis becomes the worse that dynamic gets. I was kind of shocked at the amount of negative comments on the videos I watched. There were the typical Boomers jumping in to defend this, but most of what they could scrape together was “how dare you judge 80 year olds like this!” and the like, which didn’t seem to be convincing anyone.