Rolling Stones Call Off 2026 Tour. Could This Spell the End of the Keith Richards Memes? – PJ Media

You’ve seen the memes. “We Need to Start Worrying About What Kind of World We Are Going to Leave for Keith Richards.” “For Every Cigarette You Smoke, God Takes an Hour Away From Your Life and Gives It to Keith Richards.” “These Are the Daughters of Keith Richards. When They Die, He Will Inherit Everything.” But now the Rolling Stones have called off their 2026 tour, and the reason why suggests that the indomitable Keef may not be quite as indestructible as we had hoped. 

Variety reported Tuesday that the Stones, who released their first album on April 17, 1964, when Joe Biden was a student at the University of Delaware and Nancy Pelosi was just a year out of college, “have called off plans for a 2026 stadium tour of the United Kingdom and Europe.” The cancellation appears related to physical difficulties that Keith Richards is suffering.

Richards will be 82 years old on Thursday. He’s only a year younger than Old Joe Biden. Apparently, Richards is “unable to commit to the rigors of another tour. Live dates in recent years have shown that he has faced challenges due to a long battle with arthritis, which he has called ‘benign’ and said has forced him to change his style of playing.” Variety notes that Richards “was in fine form during a brief three-song performance at the Soho Sessions in New York last month,” but three songs “a much different proposition than a multi-country, multi-week tour.”

The Sun quoted an unnamed “American music critic” Monday, saying that “the Rolling Stones had all the big promoters throwing loads of ideas and dates at them for next summer. But when they properly sat down to discuss the tour, Keith said he didn’t think he could commit and wasn’t keen on a big stadium tour for over four months.” Meanwhile, an unnamed spokesperson for the band commented: “The band were looking to tour earlier this year but couldn’t make it work either. It’s hard for their fans but The Stones will get back onstage when they’re good and ready.”

Maybe they will, but the realities of the passage of time ultimately catch up with all of us, even Keith Richards. The Stones, says Variety, “have toured nearly every year since the early 2000s, in increasingly small itineraries as the three principals — Mick Jagger, 82, Ron Wood, 78, and Richards — have grown older; original drummer Charlie Watts died in 2021 and was replaced by longtime Richards collaborator Steve Jordan.” 

Would they go out without Richards? That would be like touring without Jagger: It simply wouldn’t be the Rolling Stones, any more than Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr could go on tour together calling themselves the Beatles.

And so it looks as if time is finally running out for the Stones, and that Keith Richards isn’t made of iron and everlasting after all. The end of an era is in sight: the age of the rock and roll giants is swiftly drawing to a close. The old giants are coming to the end of the line, and there are no musical acts of comparable cultural stature in the next generation.

The Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Bob Dylan and the rest, and slightly later, Michael Jackson belonged to an age in which television, with its universality and limited choices, focused intensely lavish attention upon the pop stars of the day, and elevated them to the status of cultural heroes with a universal recognition and appeal that few of those who have followed after them have been able to attain.

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When Mick and Keith, and Paul and Ringo, finally pass from the scene altogether, so will some of the last elements of contemporary pop culture that bound nearly everyone together, at very least with a common frame of reference. The splintering of the political sphere in recent years is mirrored in the splintering of the culture: instead of one American people, now there are innumerable little groups, each with its own heroes, its own cultural frame of reference, its own music, its own art.

Can a nation long endure that kind of fragmentation? We can only hope that we can survive the age of identity politics and make our way back to some semblance of national unity before the whole thing breaks apart. If it does, we will look back fondly at the days when we could all laugh together over the indestructible Keith memes — everyone knew who he was, and why they were funny. We may never all know something like that again.