You heard right.  The Rolling Stones are on tour.  Beginning with a blast from the past in London that rocked the rafters as surely as when the band was young, they’ll be coming to Brooklyn December Eighth to take America by rock and roll force.

Anyone who has seen a recent televised performance of Mick Jagger knows he’s still got what it takes to rock down.  Fans are in for a very special treat because not only is guitarist and master song-writer, Keith Richards, still holding staunch and true, Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor returned to the ranks, adding a thrill to this fifty year revival of the greatest of the greats.  Taylor hasn’t been with the Stones since 1974, when he broke away to do his own blues solo renditions of “Midnight Rambler”, but he doesn’t appear to have been abducted unwillingly.

Jagger is in top form, giving his classical strutting performances down a stage, where he intimately speaks to and sings for an audience that understand such messages as “Get off of My Cloud” and “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”.  The years seem to fall away and you forget there was ever a time beyond the time when Rolling Stone magic cast a spell that kept all rock and roll fans under cover of the night.

The amazing part is, their energy doesn’t stop.  They exploded onto the London stage to the cheers of 20,000 wild fans, and the critics, who are usually everything but generous, applauded their sound delivery and choice of great sound tracks.  According to the critics, the biggest secret behind the success of a Stones performance is that the band actually listens to each other while they play, losing themselves in the music.  With skill, with the instinct and finesse of master showmen, they still keep it together.

It’s easy to pull up their list of achievements and awards.  They are rock and roll’s biggest success story, rivaled only by The Beatles.  During their fifty years of entertainment, they have released over one hundred singles, over two dozen studio albums and numerous compilations and live albums.  While they creamed the rock and roll charts for number one hits throughout the sixties and seventies, by 1978, their popularity began to wane as punk rock began taking over the scene.  This changed abruptly in 1980, when their album, “Emotional Rescue” hit the top of the charts on both sides of the ocean and became the number three title track in the United States.

They haven’t stopped kicking it out.  When the band headlined the Molson Canadian Rocks for Toronto in 2003, to help the city recovering from a SARS epidemic, they sold out to an audience of 490,000 people.  A double live album, “Live Licks”, put out that same year, went gold in the United States.  In November 2004, the Rolling Stones were among the inaugural inductees into the UK Music Hall of Fame.

It doesn’t matter how old you are, if you’re a rock and roll fan, you are not going to want to miss the kings of rock and roll.  Get your tickets for the fiftieth anniversary of the band that made rock what it is today.