LETTING ITBLEED
Has anybody else noticed how quickly anniversaries come around these days? How it barely seems a few years since we celebrated whatever album’s 40th, yet here we are at the 50th, and we’ll barely have time to make a pot of tea before we’re girding up for the 60th?
The Beatles are the gravest offenders, simply because they have so many dates to remember. Concert performances and record releases, naturally, but who else could bring North London traffic to a standstill to commemorate half a century since the last time they crossed a road together?
The Rolling Stones, on the other hand… well, they’re still crossing roads, and the last time, it appears, is still nowhere in sight. So, how do they mark off the milestones that are now falling like autumn leaves across their lives?
They don’t, really. Yes, there was that grandiose boxful of memories served up to mark the 50th anniversary of the band’s formation. But whereas most of their peers of similar vintage are now subject to all manner of Brobdingnagian super-deluxe resurrections, the Stones have remained almost lackadaisical on the subject.
Which isn’t a bad thing.
Commemorative editions of one’s favorite albums can be exciting. But they can also grow a trifle wearisome, because how many more superlatives can truly be added to the next edition of anything before deluxe… super deluxe… ultimate super deluxe… begins to feel redundant?
Before it becomes nothing more than fancy-schmancy hyperbole designed to justify another $100 or so being syphoned from your collecting budget for the sake of another book written by the same people who wrote the last one; another poster, slightly larger than the one they gave you with an earlier edition; another digital remastering job, still trying to get back to the way the album sounded the first time it was released on vinyl. Oh, and some out-takes that you may or may not have owned on bootleg forever.
All spread over half a dozen different editions that completist collectors will feel
