Philip wrote on Nov 30
th, 2008 at 6:24am:
Someone I knew thought that Sticky Fingers was the stones first album!
Its an odd paradox when you see the Stones portrayed in the media as being a relic of the 60's and then read some of the message boards, where you would get the impression that as far as a lot of Stones fans are concerned, the band dont seem to exist musically prior to 1968. If anything, they come across as almost exclusively a 70's act.
Seen plenty of examples over the last few years where people attending Stones concerts have been asked about Brian Jones, and they genuinely didn't know who he was. Not just the stereotypical casual concert attendees either - I remember seeing that ignorance admitted by a group of fans who had travelled from England to the ABB tour openah at Fenway in 2005.
To get back to Ian's post, its a natural result of music on radio and TV becoming more and more genre-specific. You can quite happily exist in a vacuum and only listen/watch the sort of music that you know will interest you. To some extent, most of us are a bit like that. There's a lot of music I know that I have no interest in from what little of it I've heard, so I have no inclination to listen to it willingly and therefore am pretty ignorant of it.
In the Stones case, aside from media ageism, you can put it down to those two factors which have been the problem for most of this decade. Not producing/promoting new material and also making their main product (ie their live shows) an elitist form of entertainment which is unaffordable to a large section of a potential audience. They're not getting new, younger fans because those people dont see their 'product' on TV, hear it on the radio and because they cant afford to go and see them. You have to ask yourself, despite the band's large success down the years, that if they stopped now, how many people in 10-20 years time are going to be around to care?
At the end of the day, the music industry targets a certain type of consumer and ends up getting the type of fans it deserves. Some of the acts who adopt the same ethos end up doing the same.
There's a generation of society who, unfortunately, can only name the members of the Stones (or most of them) because their names are still in the media spotlight for reasons that arent to do with music. So, Mick is nothing more than an ageing lothario, Keith is that ancient looking eccentric who falls out of trees and Ronnie is that dirty old man who ran off with a teenager - just like that other guy in the band did over 20 years ago.