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.