I don’t want to make a big thing of it, but Joe Biden is the same age as Keith Richards, and nobody is telling the venerable guitarist to hang it up. The indestructible Stone might look like the picture of Dorian Gray, but he stopped by the Jimmy Fallon show the other night after the New York debut party for the new “Hackney Diamonds” album and showed that even with a plug-in acoustic instrument of less than top quality he’s pretty slick with the licks. Fallon, naturally, couldn’t pass up the opportunity to imitate Mick.
One of the licks Richards broke out was this 1981 banger, which ironically addressed the cooling ardor of middle age back when Jagger was a doddering dinosaur of 38. The video was one of the first to air on the fledgling cable channel MTV.
The most notable cover of the song is the acoustic treatment by the Folksmen who do a much better job of enunciating the lyrics than Mick does. This Conan O’Brien clip is from 2003, when they were promoting their appearance in “A Mighty Wind.”
