The Biggest Bang

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合計収録時間 : 00:00:00
Just as the Rolling Stones chronicled their tour promoting the 2002 compilation Forty Licks with a box set of DVDs; their tour promoting the 2005 album A Bigger Bang is covered on this DVD box set, with a running time of seven hours. The first -- and best -- disc presents the group's concert in a park in Austin, Texas. Playing on a massive stage built to look like a couple of modern buildings, and featuring a hydraulic section that travels out to the center of the audience about halfway through the show, the Stones play the usual hits, but also add some nods to their location in a version of Waylon Jennings' "Bob Wills Is Still the King" and (sung by Keith Richards) Buddy Holly's "Learning the Game." The second disc features the massive show performed on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro before an audience estimated at over a million. It impresses due to sheer size, although the performance itself is average. The third disc contains excerpts of shows in Saitama, Japan; Shanghai, China; and Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the fourth disc is a documentary film on the tour called Salt of the Earth. Two issues that interested the press during the tour are touched on lightly. The Chinese show was agreed to only after censors threw out some of the Stones' songs as unsuitable; Mick Jagger diplomatically states at a press conference that China isn't the only place where there's censorship and notes that the band has another 400 songs it can play. Keith Richards' head injury from falling out of a tree in Tahiti, which caused shows to be postponed, comes up only in passing; Richards says it was more of a bush than a tree. Some of the best moments in the many hours include guest appearances from Bonnie Raitt, Eddie Vedder, and Dave Matthews, as well as unusual songs from a warm-up show in a club, including a version of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh's "Get Up Stand Up." The bandmembers look remarkably spry for their age (which Ronnie Wood states as "almost 60," though he is actually referring only to himself), with the 62-63-year-old Jagger in particular showing off a thin physique and running long distances across the stage and down the track into the crowd. The audiences, in contrast, often seem very young, which bodes well for the future of an already long-lived band. ~ William Ruhlmann