Jumping Back To Their Best (Godfather Records GR 678/679)
SuperDome Sydney, Australia -February 22nd, 2003
Disc 1 (79:34): Start Me Up, It’s Only Rock’n Roll, If You Can’t Rock Me, Don’t Stop, You Got Me Rocking, Let It Bleed, You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Bitch, Tumbling Dice, band introductions, Thru And Thru, Before They Make Me Run, Sympathy For The Devil, Gimme Shelter, Honky Tonk Women
Disc 2 (79:08): Can’t You Hear Me Knocking, Satisfaction, When The Whip Comes Down (B-stage), Like A Rolling Stone (B-stage), Brown Sugar (B-stage), Jumping Jack Flash (encore). Bonus tracks, SuperDome Sydney, Australia – February 22nd, 2003: Street Fighting Man, Sweet Virginia, All Down The Line, The Worst, Happy, Midnight Rambler, It’s Only Rock And Roll (B-stage)
The Rolling Stones returned to Australia for the first time in eight years for the Licks tour. The eight Down Under concerts started with a “club” date at the 2,000 capacity Enmore Theatre in Sydney on February 18th. The next two shows, on February 20th and February 22nd, were the “arena” gigs at the 17,000 capacity SuperDome.
Jumping Back To Their Best (the title taken from a newspaper review), is the first silver to document these shows. It contains the entire first show and about a half hour of the second, both in excellent sound quality. It serves as a very nice two disc set of the Sydney shows and is worth having.
Compared to the Enmore show, the setlists for the SuperDome concerts are more “traditional.” But it is still a fantastic concert. According to reviews on the IORR website, “It was business as usual when they changed back from the obscure Enmore setlist into the more traditional songs last night at the SuperDome.
“If You Can’t Rock Me” and “You Got Me Rocking” were great, rocking, and should have put the crowd on fire, but they were more quiet than I am used to during the opening songs. Strangely enough a slow song was needed to get to the hearts of the crowd. As they were doing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” the whole arena woke up, and the fans were singing along. A very popular song indeed.
Lisa had dressed unusual tonight. First of all she has now got long hair, following last month with very unusual and short hair. So the hair came before the Enmore gig… Secondly her dress was stunning. The production crew had realized that as well, and the mobile camera was on her all through the show, to show her attributes on the screen briefly at times.
Speaking of Lisa, when I got “Sympathy For The Devil” it was so much Lisa there, great vocals, I started to dream about the real Lisa song, the one I might pick if I had to get one song only at a Stones show: “Gimme Shelter”. The perfect Stones song, perfect last night as well, and spiced up with the new center stage performance by Lisa.
So why not have another Lisa song, the one that belongs to her rather than Sheryl Crow or anybody else – “Honky Tonk Women”. She made it a trio. And HTW was great too.
After Knocking I left for the B-stage. That was too early, of course, because we got Satisfaction first. But it was ok, because Satisfaction is so great to see and hear wherever you are in the arena, and the version they did last night was actually so great I totally forgot about the B-stage for a while. How can anyone say they don’t really want to hear Satisfaction anymore? I can never get enough of it, the way they play it now.
The B-stage was a real club gig. I was on Keith side. These days Ronnie don’t move much, and I did not see him coming over once, excpt when they left. Keith was sharp and great. He followed all our moves, just like we follow him. After having thrown some picks out to the crowd, he decided to give the next one to the fan in the front in person. So he just handed it over, smiled his great smile to her, and then picked up something that had been thrown on stage, and stacked it down in his pocket. Keith takes care of everything.
“Jumping Jack Flash” was back in the set, of course, for the encore. Keith took over the whole song. It developed into a cascade of red confetti, sound, visions, Keith’s guitar playing on center stage, and the rest of the band driving this ultimate Stones song into our hearts. I read that some fans at the Enmore were disappointed about not getting all the big hits.”
