Rolling Stones Techie Shines A Light On Mick's Love Of The iPod

Richard Kerris, the chief technical officer of Lucasfilm,  was also technical adviser to the last two Rolling Stones tours and in a recent interview with Variety's David Cohen he touted the Stones' technical adventurousness.
Kerris was the first person to show Keith Richards an iPod."I said ‘This can hold 4,000 songs.’ He looked at it and looked up and said ‘I better start writing.’"
Kerris says: "On the 40 Licks tour, which is where it started, they’d record every single show. They’ve done that for years, but what they’d do with the Licks tour, they would actually record it to a laptop. If you look at any of the old videos from that tour you’ll see a laptop, a Mac laptop sitting behind Charlie, everything’s recorded with these two stereo mics, so they have a rough, they have a full 48-track underneath, but everything goes into that laptop. Everything’s connected to a little distribution amp with five Firewire cables hanging off of it. So while the band was doing their bows and the fireworks were going at the very end, the backline crew would plug in their iPods, synchronize the thing, and put in their bathrobes an iPod that had that night’s show, so when they came offstage, they’d grab their stuff, get in their car and they would have the show with them right then and there. No one had done anything like that at all."
Soon after the iPod came out, "Mick was right on it. He was like, 'I want to get every night’s show so I can listen to it that night and know what was good and what didn’t work, etc.' So they established this whole thing working with the background crew, I showed them where you could daisy-chain the iPods and synchronize them at once. So it was really fun. From there they used GarageBand for their last album as they did all their demos. That was mainly Mick and Keith. Keith doesn’t use the computer as much, he just recognizes what part it plays."
There are two shots of Kerris in "Shine a Light" - he's stage left about 20 rows back. "Having seen the band as many times as I did, aside from rehearsals and backstage jamming, that was the best show they’ve ever done that I’ve seen. They were on fire."
On a  personal note, a few quick thoughts on the superb Imax version of the film "Shine a Light." Great version of "Some Girls"; using the sound mix to emphasize the musician on the screen is a risky choice that works almost every time; camerawork is so tight and steady one could count Mick's noticeable number of fillings; intimacy within a performance is impossible for Mick and Keith; "Sympathy for the Devil" is the best shot tune in the pic; Christina Aguilera should record "Live With Me" on her next album; and it's time to retire "Far Away Eyes."