The Rolling Stones are coming to Chicago again. I have absorbed a great deal of Stones knowledge and experiences via marriage, so of course I saw their museum exhibit in New York a few years ago.
It was a reasonably typical pop-up museum: memorabilia and a re-creation of Mick and Keith’s first apartment and some multimedia presentations on the band, that sort of thing. The part of it that has stuck with me is a small video presentation on the history of their tours, starting with a local one in England, up through the present day (then maybe 2017), having played on six continents. The presentation ended with an announcement of future tours already being planned and the phrase, “If you are wondering how long they can keep this up, rest assured, they are just as curious as you are.”
Over the last couple of trips I have taken to Las Vegas, I have made a point of taking the opportunity to see great showmen on the downside of their careers. Not the guys who are on the back nine, the guys who are teeing it up on 18. I find this genre so fascinating. The Rolling Stones are still playing to stadium crowds, and God bless them for it, but performers like Wayne Newton and Rich Little, who have been famous for longer than I have been alive, are still doing their shows, too, but in front of 20-50 people a night.
Both of them rank among my favorite solo performances I have ever seen. What got them where they were in the first place still shines through, but what’s really endearing is that they are still out there, well into their 80s, doing the same acts that once made them megastars. You get the sense they do it not because they don’t know how to do anything else but because they absolutely love doing this and cannot imagine doing anything else with their lives.
Rich Little’s show is a time capsule. He’s still doing impressions of Nixon and John Wayne and Jack Benny. Howard Cosell! In 2024! He has added nothing I could see to his repertoire since approximately Johnny Carson retired (his Carson is terrific, by the way). He told terrible Catskills jokes in ancient-history voices, and the joy just shines right through. You get the sense that once the ticket buyers dry up, he might turn to busking. I loved it.
Wayne Newton has been a paid performer in Las Vegas since he was 15. He has had an uncanny, valley-level of cosmetic work done, but the happiness he got from telling a few stories and singing a few songs to 40 paying fans was unmissable. He repeatedly told the audience how grateful he was for them, and I do not believe anyone in the room even briefly questioned his sincerity. And all the more delightful: I am pretty sure Wayne doesn’t have to work.
I have mentioned before that movies became my pandemic hobby. One of the things we have discovered about watching old movies is that great classics are mostly considered great classics with good reason. (The two exceptions to this so far: Raging Bull and The Graduate, both inexplicably beloved and admired.) The thing about legendary performers, even the ones who have moved into self-caricature, is the same: Legends are legends for a reason.
