Sympathy for The Rolling Stones at Jazz Fest

The Rolling Stones, by Mark Seliger

The accommodations for the rock ‘n’ roll legends at the Fair Grounds that we know of are serious; how do we process all this?

Really, Thursday, May 2 isn’t a day of Jazz Fest. The festival has changed itself too much to be thought of that way. The tickets cost more than twice of those for any other day of Jazz Fest, and there were a limited number of them. The day is a sell-out, so there’s no walk-up price for casual fans. The day offers fewer than half of the acts normally onstage at the Fair Grounds, and the Grandstand will be closed, so there won’t be a Lagniappe Stage or an Allison Miner Music Heritage Stage. The craft tents will close down at 4:30 p.m., a half-hour before The Rolling Stones start, and the band will perform unopposed.

Bottom line: It’s a Rolling Stones concert with Jazz Fest opening.

One upside is that Thursday will in many ways live up to one of Jazz Fest’s promises. Festival Productions has generally made an effort to put Louisiana acts in front of national headliners to give the locals exposure, and every act on Thursday is from Louisiana except for Colombian groups Batámbora and Enkelé, and the Mississippi-based blues pianist Eden Brent. While that’s a strong positive, it’s fair to wonder how much traffic there will be on the other stages, and if a lot of people won’t simply find their spot at the Festival Stage and settle in for the lineup that includes The New Breed Brass Band with Trombone Shorty, Samantha Fish, Dumpstaphunk (who sadly lost bassist Nick Daniels last weekend), and the Stones.

It’s also fair to wonder if the local bookings are an aesthetic choice of an economic one. Realistically, it’s probably a little of both. I don’t doubt Quint Davis’ commitment to New Orleans’ music and culture and take his good intentions seriously, but he’s also a business man running a major music festival, and festivals are an expensive way to make money. The ticket price, the closed stages, and the cabanas at the back of the Festival Stage all look like measures to cut costs and/or raise money to cover what is surely a very hefty payout for the Stones. In 2021, one source put The Rolling Stones’ asking price at $8.1 million, and another calculated their earnings in 2023 on the “No Filters” tour to be around $9.4 million a show. Anywhere in that ballpark—give or take a million or so—is a hefty number that will require some fiscal creativity.

Part of the premise of the day is that people who paid the money will be able to see the Stones, which means the day’s capacity will be the capacity of the Festival Stage. Thursday is officially a sell-out, so whatever the number is, it has been reached. Jazz Fest has special rules for Thursday that limit the space attendees can occupy—no tarps, no folding chairs except foldable tripods, telescoping stools, and chairs that have smaller than a 19-inch footprint—so that capacity is larger than it would be for regular festival days when tarps and chairs are allowed. It’s a sign of how big Jazz Fest expects the crowd to be that, according to a recent Nola.com story, it circulated a memo to vendors that read in part, “While May 2 is a limited capacity day and we have carefully scaled down the audience size, it is important that ALL staff, vendors and volunteers DO NO venture to the Festival Stage environs to see this performance.” The Festival Stage is only for paying customers and staff that has to be there; others will be able to see and hear the set at the Congo Square and Shell Gentilly stages.

How many people will the Festival Stage hold? At Nola.com, Keith Spera reports that he has sources that put the capacity in the 40,000 range. That certainly sounds dense if true, but since we don’t know what the stage holds on a regular basis, it’s hard to really know if it will be worse than a day like Saturday, May 2, 2015 when Elton John fans swamped that stage and the track surrounding it. Fans can’t expect it to more comfy than it was for Sir Elton.

The booking has opened Jazz Fest to criticisms from people who see The Rolling Stones as a money move, and from diehards who live for the stages between Festival and Shell Gentilly see The Rolling Stones as straying too far from the Jazz Fest they love. Rather than being the bridge too far though, I think it’s where Jazz Fest would inevitably go, at least once or twice. In the ‘80s, ‘90s and much of the 2000s, the greatest stars of roots-based music from the ‘60s and ‘70s defined the festival almost as much as Louisiana music. In that musical pantheon, the biggest bands are the Beatles and the Stones, so of course Jazz Fest would try to get them. Also, on a personal level, you can understand that if Quint Davis has booked some of the biggest acts of the last half-decade, he’d also want to book the biggest one that’s still active. If he had the chance, how could he not?

And, obviously, Jazz Fest knows its market. While many people grouse about the day and the distortion of the festival, Festival Productions bet correctly that enough of its audience would want to see The Rolling Stones badly enough to buy the tickets and sell out the show. People not only did it, but they’re excited to see the band, even if Mick and Keith are in their 80s. For many fans, The Rolling Stones are the apotheosis of Jazz Fest, not the aberration. It has also got Jazz Fest national press coverage. My mom saw a story on Jazz Fest selling out in Canada and called to ask how Mick was.

As for the booking being an attempt to make money, of course it is, but so is producing a festival. The for-profit Festival Productions pays the non-profit festival owners the Jazz and Heritage Foundation for the rights to produce the festival, which also makes it possible for Festival Productions to profit from that agreement. It’s a very expensive way to make money, and I’m sure in the case of The Rolling Stones, an extremely stressful one with countless small details that have to deal with as a part of the challenge of preparing the Fair Grounds and the Festival Stage for the band and its entourage. I can’t imagine anyone sane would go through the headaches involved in producing a Rolling Stones concert if it wasn’t a potential moneymaker.

Will it be any good? Define “good.” The band hasn’t been relevant since 1983 when “Undercover of the Night” deployed keyboards in the way that dance music producers like Arthur Baker and Trevor Horn did, and even that felt like a last gasp. The show will have almost nothing to do with the state of popular music in 2024, but I doubt that’s a meaningful issue for people who bought the tickets. Will we learn anything new about Mick and Keith? Only by accident. They’ve performed for so long that they’ve long since learned to weed anything personal or revealing out of a run through the hits. Again—probably not an issue for fans who just want the hits. On that level, it’ll be fine. They’ve been doing this for so long that they’re professionally good entertainers and musicians, though it was funny to see Keith botch the intro to “Start Me Up” in Houston at the start of the tour. And it will be impressive to see two 80-year-olds and one guy in his late 70s still playing rock ’n’ roll hard in 2024.

For me, The Rolling Stones are a cover band for themselves at this point, but at a fundamental level, the show will be great because a lot of fans will hear one of their favorite bands play a lot of their favorite songs at one of their favorite festivals, and that matters.