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Wednesday, March 10, 1999 By Gene Collier, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Saw two incredible guitar slingers, 250 miles apart, on two consecutive nights. You can do worse than to have this happen to you.
The first played at Soldiers and Sailors Hall. An unabashed blues guitarist, he was in maniacal command of the instrument. He made it talk big, in its full range of color, and he made it cry soft and helpless. He played soulfully and joyously and brought to the old stage a searing understanding of the blues craft and of his own ambitions.
And in three more years, he'll be able to buy a drink legally in Pennsylvania.
That was Jonny Lang, 18, of Fargo, N.D.
Some in the audience were twice his age, some older.
Tickets were $30.
The second played at the new MCI Center on F Street inWashington's northwest quadrant. An unyielding rock icon, he played go-to-hell licks that pulled 'em out of their seats. He used the instrument as though ripping at a open wound, which is the way great rock guitar is played, because he said so by the way he plays, which is like nobody else.
And in three more years, he'll be able to buy Pennsylvania a drink if not buy Pennsylvania. That's if he can't already.
That was Keith Richards, 55, of England.
Some in the audience were half his age, some younger.
Tickets were $300, some of them, $150 on average.
Their circumstances couldn't be more different, so why am I sensing that these men couldn't be more alike?
As the monstrous musical and chaotic force behind the phenomenon known as The Rolling Stones (they're at your Civic Arena tomorrow night for the first time since 1972), Keith Richards and his life's legend has probably been outstripped only by its reality.
Once, legend has it, he was actually "electrocuted" onstage, his guitar bumping a live mike, leaving him unconscious for seven minutes. Keith always looks like that happened about 10 minutes ago.
Legend has it, for example, that when Keith was but a few years older than Jonny Lang is now, he sat down heavily on a hotel room bed in Clearwater, Fla., after a long night of refreshing pharmaceuticals, and clumsily taped a guitar riff that he didn't want to let slide from his addled brain permanently. When he awoke, he turned on his recorder to hear "Satisfaction" or at least what would become its throbbing structure. He didn't remember playing it.
Now "Satisfaction" wasn't the greatest rock 'n' roll song ever written ("Honky Tonk Woman" was, but they didn't write that for another four years), but "Satisfaction" did a lot to convert The Rolling Stones from five insolent maybe-maybe not pop peddlers into the artistic machine that would define the genre into the next millennium. That was 34 years ago.
Whether by legend or real life, good little musicians learned the lesson: Take your drugs. Do the stuff. Get on the juice. Keith didn't invent this parable. In blues, jazz, and rock particularly, mind-altering chemicals have laced the history of the undisciplined disciplines. Musicians have lived the parable all the way back to the time of Mozart, in whose biographies you will find the phrase "many were the nights when the floor came up and hit young Wolfgang in the face" or some such witticism.
All of which makes the common spectator wonder if there's another way for Jonny Lang.
Seeing him in Pittsburgh, looking as much like 14 as 18, you had to force the imagination toward a meeting between him and Keith. On two stops on the current Stones tour, Minneapolis and Fargo, Jonny Lang was the warm-up act. Did he meet the rock icon guitarist, and what did he think, besides, you know, "Oh my God, did he almost get electrocuted again?"
In a serio-comic 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley a few years ago, in which Bradley almost coyly tries to get the Stones to admit to all kinds of debauchery they freely admit to anyway, Mick Jagger explains that the band did at some point come to the conclusion that there needed to be a more sober pursuit of music, and of life.
"About how long," Bradley says, leaning forward, "did it take you to reach that conclusion?"
"Oh about 25 years," Mick says, his giant mouth ripping with laughter.
In a world of a million choices, I wish Jonny a great run.
Gene Collier's e-mail address is gcollier@post-gazette.com.
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