..."The whole business thing is predicated a lot on the tax laws, " Keith Richards told Fortune. "It's why we rehearse in Canada but not in the US. A lot of our astute moves have been basically keeping up with tax laws, where to go, where not to put it. Whether to sit on it or not.. We left England because we'd be paying ninety-eight cents on the dollar. We left, and they lost out. No taxes at all. I don't want to screw anybody out of anything, least of all the governments that I work with. We put thirty percent in holding until we sort it out." Keith may fancy himself a symbol of '68, but he channels the fiscal policy of Grover Norquist.
The last time the Stones were out on the road, between 2005 and 2007, they took in more than half a billion dollars -- the highest grossing tour of all time. On Copacabana Beach, in Rio de Janeiro, they played to more than a million people. Few spectacles in modern life are more sublimely ridiculous than the geriatric members of the Stones playing the opening strains of "Street Fighting Man." The arena is typically jammed with middle-aged fans, who have donned après-office relaxed-sized jeans, paid the sitter, parked the minivan in the lot, and, for a few hundred dollars a seat, shimmy along with Mick Jagger, who, having trained for the tours as if for a championship bout, prances inexhaustibly through a two-hour set, at his best evoking the spawn of James Brown and Gumby, at his worst coming off like someone's liquored-up Aunt Gert, determined to trash her prettier sister's wedding with a gruesome performance on the dance floor...David Remnick, in a profile of Keith Richards in the New Yorker