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In his essay for the seventh release in the Rolling Stones From the Vault archive series, San Jose ’99, Paul Sexton adopts a wizened but nonetheless insightful perspective writing about the career of a band that was returning to one of its first-ever American tour stops after an interval of nearly thirty-five years. Inside a booklet designed with graphics of a piece with the colorful, almost garish digipak cover enclosing it, the often wry prose is offset with photos showing the four principals in the band morphing even further into aged Charles Dickensian characters first introduced so vividly with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”
Which makes it all the more appropriate the band opens with that vintage cut, the original release of which in 1968, along with the Beggars Banquet LP, signified a return to rock and roll basics after the Stones misguided trip into psychedelia via Their Satanic Majesties Request. The group’s inclination to lavish stage production has often been suspect since the advent of the inflatable penis in 1975, but to their credit, the group has often eschewed such theatrics and. in fact. did so on this follow-up to the more elaborate road offering the year before in support of the Bridges to Babylon album.
The tour from which this concert is taken finds the Rolling Stones in comparably smaller venues than 1998, but not the intimate likes of the clubs they inhabited in 1995 for Stripped dates or the launch of 2015 roadwork Live at the Fonda Theatre: April 19 is one of two performances at the San Jose Arena before a combined thirty-thousand plus. Sufficiently and rightfully confident as a musical unit to forego elaborate stage settings (largely Jagger’s domain), the Rolling Stones’ inner mechanics as a band are Keith Richards’ province: see him dig into the groove of the soul ballad “I Got The Blues” with bassist Daryl Jones (who pumps and prods throughout “Some Girls” as well).
Former Allman Brothers keyboardist Chuck Leavell is also involved in band leadership as well, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent, but that doesn’t stop him from utilizing the ivories to weave in and out of the bottleneck guitars on one of Keith’s two spotlights, “You Got The Silver.” He also ups the barrelhouse boogie quotient with his piano on “Honky Tonk Women.” Meantime, other individuals in this expanded Stones live ensemble, each in his or her own way, look and sound as engaged as the principals,: saucy vocalist Lisa Fischer, for instance, wails away right into Jagger’s face on the latter tune.
Carryover from the previous tour, the small stage set up mid-floor of the California venue becomes the sole concession to overt showmanship during San Jose ’99. But this platform also offers the core sextet a chance to grind away on this modified blues “Midnight Rambler,” sans the five-piece horn section that elsewhere so stylishly accentuates “Bitch” (and compensates for the hurried pace of “Brown Sugar”). That said, the band might better have relegated this mini-set to nothing but the vintage likes of “Route 66” and “Get Off My Cloud” plus “Paint It, Black,” offered earlier in this single set.
Sam Wheat’s sound mix and Tim Young’s mastering carefully accentuate the bottom end of the register on both configurations of this CD/DVD package, making sure drummer Charlie Watts’ bass drum kicks really boom. But the mix also captures the detail of the rhythm guitar riffs Richards tosses off with such nonchalance on “Start Me Up” and reflects the video cuts and transitions that, in both panoramic long shots or closeups around the stage, seemed intrinsically timed to the music. Specific credits for visual direction are curiously (and grievously) lacking, but there’s no denying how homing in on Ronnie Wood aids in demonstrating the main reason he seems so absolutely delighted to be part of this band: chance after chance to let rip solos and fills ringing as loudly of Chuck Berry as the blues on “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (But I Like It).”
Perhaps less dangerous than enduring at this point in their career, the Rolling Stones make a rousing case for credibility with No Security: San Jose ’99, all the more so because they have continued to tour regularly since this near two-decade old concert. In the interim, too, the group has released comparably arresting archive pieces like Live at the Tokyo Dome that, like this one, need no bonus features to supplement the main content. As much as some latter-day Stones originals seem designed as much (or more) for stage value as the ingenuity of the material itself, it’s with perfectly good reason that Voodoo Lounge‘s “You Got Me Rockin’” plays over the DVD menu here.
