Nobody Asked Me But: ‘Return from the other side’ tours next for legendary rock stars

They’re back at it again. As you read this, the Rolling Stones, arguably the greatest rock and roll band of all time, are in the midst of their April to July 16- city North American tour. Following many decades after their first rock tour, which some archeologists have narrowed down to having taken place in a cave in south-central France during the Triassic Age, these bad boys of popular music keep on refusing to end the chapter on their influence on modern culture.

Flaunting wrinkles galore, lizard-faced front man Mick Jagger, and iguana-visaged lead guitarist Keith Richards, both aged 80, have been rolling out an 18-song, two hour set bound to keep their legends alive for at least one more go-around. Along for the ride is relatively baby-faced 76-year-old guitar virtuoso Ronnie Wood. Of course, all the venues were instantly sold out as soon as tickets were made available, thereby leaving everyone involved in this entertainment business venture with a great deal of “satisfaction.” No siree bob, these rolling stones may indeed be gathering more than a bit of moss, but the cash continues to flow in.

This brings us to the subject of the “farewell tour.” There comes a day when the members of a band are so weary of the demanding rigours of life on the road, of sleeping in a different city every night, of living in a moving tour bus, of consuming buckets of alcohol and handfuls of pills, and of servicing legions of groupies between shows that they come to a collective decision to put an end to their creative entity and exit stage left with a grandiose farewell tour. This move is often precipitated by the fact that record sales have started to decline and attendance at concert dates has begun to dwindle. Added to this desire for closure is the inescapable realization that the group members have developed a deep hatred for each other but are aware that dissolving the band has far fewer consequences than murdering one another.

The farewell tour gives the band one last chance to squeeze a remaining few drops from the cash-cow rock audience. The iconic band The Band played one final concert, dubbed The Last Waltz, at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in 1976, although they were at the point where they could hardly stand to play together, let alone dance a spirited waltz. Simon and Garfunkel kissed each other (and Mrs. Robinson, presumably) goodbye metaphorically with their final concert in New York City’s Central Park in 1981.

The Eagles ended their breakup tour in 2004 with a final concert in Melbourne, Australia. Ironically, this tour has been given the name “Final Tour 1” because the band has gone on to perform at a number of final tours. They may have wrapped it up last fall with one last farewell tour which they appropriately named “The Long Goodbye.” A sidebar to the Eagles and their precarious formats as a band can be witnessed by drummer Don Henley, when asked in 1980 after the Eagle’s first breakup, when the band would play together again. His answer was “when hell freezes over.” Displaying a touch of humour in their irony, when the band reformed 14 years later, they called the resulting tour The Hell Freezes Over Tour. Other founding member, the late Glenn Frey, commented in 1982 on the band breakup with “I just rule out the possibility of putting the Eagles back together for a Lost Youth and Greed tour.”

As often happens, a successful farewell tour can rekindle the passion for group members to the point where they are again willing to perform together as well as record new material. This happens so often that they might as well call the exercise “The Just Kidding Farewell Tour.” Putting money back in their pockets again also doesn’t hurt.

As the Eagles have demonstrated more than a few times, farewell tours can be revived and even superseded by the ever popular “reunion tour.” These kinds of tours are especially popular once the band members have aged only to discover that the endless sums of cash have been whittled down to zero by constant indulgence on beer and blow. The obvious solution is to reform the original band in hopes that the target audience will buy tickets in order to recapture the youth that was in such abundance so many decades ago. Even if it means banging their canes against their walkers in time with the beat, it will give audience members fond memories of times when they could still flick their BICs.

As often occurs with these reunion tours, not all of the original band members are available or attracted to resuming life on the road. Some are just in plain poor health while others are among the dearly departed. The Grateful Dead, for instance, had to endure the “keyboard seat curse” as one after another after another of their keyboardists kept dying off.

Sometimes lawsuits rear their ugly heads when disputes occur over which of the original band members can use the band name in their reunion tour. The resulting animosity has torn apart life-long in bands as diverse as Pink Floyd, Steely Dan and Canada’s own Guess Who. Perhaps the reunion tour name for the latter should be Guess Again.

Drugs remain a recurring problem in these reunion tours, except instead of cocaine, LSD and marijuana, the culprits tend to be Geritol, statins and Ozempic. An unlimited supply of reading glasses and hearing aids are commonly written into the contracts.

Nobody asked me, but it seems obvious that the next logical step after farewell and reunion tours would come after the last surviving member of a rock group passes on to that great bandstand in the sky. This would set the stage for the posthumous or post-mortem tour, where our favourite rock and rollers return from the “other side” in order to give us yet another chance to sing along with those golden, mouldy oldies. Surely, with the advances in cloning technology, cryogenics, and artificial intelligence, this scenario is more than just a pipe dream.

Don’t think it’s possible? Take another close look at the Rolling Stones.