Giving corporate rock the ‘Fingers’
Writer Steven Kurutz rides alongside Glen Carroll, the Mick Jagger of Sticky Fingers, a Rolling Stones tribute band, to questionable gigs all over America. Band mates and girlfriend/managers come and go. Gigs are poorly attended. Carroll passes out onstage at a casino and is arrested after a show at a frat house. His enthusiasm for playing rock ‘n’ roll is unfazed.
Kurutz has a revelation at a ‘real’ Stones concert at Fenway Park. He buys a $163 ticket “in the nosebleeds” and witnesses the world’s greatest R&R band on the biggest, most expensive stage set ever built … but can only see it on a JumboTron screen. The Stones are isolated from fans and press. Kurutz is watching a franchise, not a rock show.
Success for Glen Carroll, on the other hand, means playing with reckless abandon to a basement full of drunken, sweaty kids. Which is the ‘real’ rock ’n’ roll?