Ann Powers: The Top 12 meet the Rolling Stones

For any rock fan who has learned to love "American Idol," the theme of Tuesday night’s first showing for the Top 12 -- the music of the Rolling Stones -- was fraught with tension. Imagine if you’d had two high school boyfriends, one the student body president and one a pot-smoking juvenile delinquent, and they got to talking at your 10-year reunion. There you would sit, sheepishly sipping your Grey Goose and tonic, caught in a crossfire of mutual disbelief: How could you have liked that loser?
The value systems represented by the deeply hierarchical, ostentatiously nice, often Christian "Idol" crew and the iconoclastic, brashly nasty, expressly demonic Rolling Stones couldn’t be more different.
Right? Well, for all their gritty blues attitude and wasted outlaw high jinks, the Stones were always witty in that Noel Coward way, and cute too; Mick Jagger perfected pouting for the cameras. It may be revisionist history, but it’s not wrong to say that the Stones helped forge the foppish Brit-rock tradition that led to glam, Duran Duran, "Idol" favorite George Michael, and finally, to Simon Cowell himself.
Yet this year’s "Idol" contenders, winnowed to an anxious 12, had to know that they couldn’t approach this songbook the way they might, say, Whitney Houston week. Previous "Idol" contestants such as Chris Daughtry and the unmatchable Adam Lambert (oh, what he could have done this week!) may have already exposed rock 'n' roll attitude as just another pop affect -- a different sweep of the Kohl eyeliner pencil -- but still, the Stones demanded a certain seriousness and respect. These songs, so monumental within rock history, would require thought and the most important kind of respect: the self-regard to approach one’s choice with both dignity and serious playfulness.
A few succeeded. Siobhan Magnus made the biggest impression by reworking "Paint It Black" as an Evanescence song: drama-drenched and full of the clear high notes that signal greatness in a female hard rock voice. The judges loved her, rightly; she was one of the few strivers to express the complexities of her song, milking its morbidity with enough theatrical flair to show she understood that Jagger’s Dark Prince swagger was always just another role.
Magnus had the courage and awareness to really consider what a Stones song means now, four-plus decades after the sweet sounds of the rough boys ripped apart English manners and mores. It was wholly appropriate that each contestant’s introductory segment featured his or her families; this is their parents' music, after all, and plenty related to it second-hand. Most delivered decent performances: The material’s so good, and so forgiving in that messy rock way, that it’s hard to completely blow it. But, as is often true with this bunch, most also seemed a bit disconnected.
Crystal Bowersox disappointed slightly with a Bonnie Raitt-style reading of "You Can’t Always Get What You Want." Didi Benami frowned cutely and was overpraised for her version of "Play With Fire." Lee Dewyze, Lacey Brown and Katie Stevens proved competent but uninspired. Tim Urban’s calypso take on "Under My Thumb" stripped the song of both menace and sex.
Who did better? Strangely enough, Aaron Kelly, who gave a torchy reading of "Angie" -- a song far beyond the grasp of most teens -- that revealed a profound melancholy streak behind those well-scrubbed ears. Casey James also stood out, honoring the Stones’ country rock fixation with a roadhouse blues run on "It’s All Over Now." Michael Lynche did the same on the soul side with "Miss You."
Yet the night’s two real risk-takers (both of whom received only mild approval from the judges) were Andrew Garcia and Paige Miles. Both confronted the Stones' legacy of white men stealing fire, Prometheus style, from black traditions, and did so as people of color inserting their own identities into the mix. In Garcia’s bold Latin soul take on "Gimme Shelter," a cumbia rhythm and plenty of inner city heat bubbled under his testifying.
And Miles! A black woman taking on "Honky Tonk Woman" -- beyond that, declaring herself a honky-tonk woman -- claimed redemption for all those Jagger and his mates shagged, stole from and occasionally dishonored, from backup singer Merry Clayton to mentor Tina Turner to the anonymous slave women fetishized in "Brown Sugar," a song that will never make the "Idol" cut.
After she sang, Miles revealed that she was suffering from laryngitis. And yet she hit every big, high note. She would not be silenced. Hers was not the night’s flashiest performance, but its most meaningful star turn.