Rolling Stones 47: Light The Fuse

While gearing up for various celebrations of their 50th anniversary, the Stones quietly made some more official bootlegs available. Two were expansions of already documented tours, making Light The Fuse one of the more enticing titles. This was a club show to kick off their 2005 tour supporting A Bigger Bang, recorded at a Toronto theater with capacity of about a thousand. (Not the same place that spawned side three of Love You Live, a show that would have to wait another ten years to be put out.)

The club atmosphere is good for them, as it removes the distractions of the spectacle so common to Stones tours. Here they’re just playing, opening up with the new “Rough Justice”, and going back for a sloppy “Live With Me” and a slower, dirtier “19th Nervous Breakdown”. Any doubt that Charlie can’t keep up is dispelled by a sharp take on “She’s So Cold”, followed by “Dead Flowers”. With audible interplay between the instruments, “Back Of My Hand” works a lot better in this setting than it did on the album.

About halfway through Mick thanks the crowd and the city, and introduces all the people on stage, including the singers and horn players who’d turned up during “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg”. That provides a nice spot for Keith to sing “Infamy”, which stumbles to a close, and Mick comes back to yell “Oh No, Not You Again”. Things turn left for covers of “Get Up Stand Up” and “Mr. Pitiful”. Then it’s “Tumbling Dice”, “Brown Sugar”, a tease, and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”.

We pick on these guys a lot here, but it’s examples like Light The Fuse that demonstrate why they’re still worth having around. When it comes right down to it, they’re a pretty decent band.

Since we gotta talk about it somewhere, the Archive Download series would peter out in time, but vault releases would continue with multiple concerts from well-mined tours repackaged as CD packages with DVDs and/or Blu-rays and of course multicolored vinyl versions. The 21st century was eventually acknowledged with a rejig of one of the shows included in an earlier DVD box set, this one a free concert in Rio de Janeiro in front of an audience of over a million and a half. With the exception of a few songs from the new album, the set is pretty much the same as ever, with the exception of a cover of “The Night Time Is The Right Time”, featuring Lisa Fischer.

Rolling Stones Light The Fuse: A Bigger Bang Tour (2012)—3½
CD equivalent: none; download only
The Rolling Stones A Bigger Bang Live On Copacabana Beach (2021)—3