The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • Page C6

Today Page 6c Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2005 The Sun Susan Reimer Stones plan first stop in city since '69 Stones, from Page lc Rolling Stones When: Feb. 1 Where: 1st Mariner Arena in Baltimore Tickets: On sale Saturday at 10 a.m. Prices are $62, $101 and $162. Gold Circle tickets also available.

Buy: At Ticketmaster locations, online at ticketmaster and cellardoor.com, or by calling 410-547-SEAT. It- Life is gooc5 Read memories of previous Stones' concerts in Baltimore online at baltimoresun.com stones. If you'd like to share your own reminiscences about the Stones for inclusion in a future story about the band's return to Baltimore, send us an e-mail with Rolling Stones in the subject line at sun.featuresbalt sun.com. Please include a phone number where you can be reached. A "Life is good" T-shirt For brothers, selling T-shirts is a good life Reimer, from Page lc a chance for that." He said the Rolling Stones could have returned for a second show in Washington but will be able to create more excitement by coming to Baltimore a few months after their D.C.

show. "The Stones are very, very smart about keeping the magic, and if they had announced another D.C. date, the reaction would have been, 'They were just Hurwitz said. "This is a great way to come back and play the general area again. And it's a great boon for Baltimore.

But I don't think it's anything significant." The biggest recent test of Baltimore's appetite for concerts is Rams Head Live, an club that opened downtown in December. Hurwitz said bands that play the club only sell half as many tickets as they do in D.C, but the club's owners say they're pleased with business. "Everything's going great," said Erin Brunst, vice president for Rams Head. "We continue to announce strong musical acts, and we continue to get rave reviews from patrons and from the musicians themselves." She said the club has had several sellouts, including last week's show by Bob Weir, a founding member of the Grateful Dead. "The crowds have been showing up," Brunst said.

There's no doubt crowds will greet the Stones' return to Baltimore. Dave Hill, program director for 98 Rock, said many of his station's listeners went through a Stones phase and have a soft spot in their heart for the band. He only wonders why the group took so long to come back. "It's a huge thing for Baltimore," Hill said. "We don't get a lot of larger acts through here because we end up playing second fiddle to Washington, and a lot of bands just assume that if they play Washington, they're taking care of Baltimore.

But that's not really the case. We're our own city, and we're happy the Stones decided to come to town." The Rolling Stones' last Baltimore show was Nov. 26, 1969, when 13,000 showed up at what was then the Baltimore Civic Center. The Sun reported that XwlII WINSLOW TOWNSON ASSOCIATED PRESS Keith Richards (left) and Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones play Sunday at Fenway Park in Boston. on Main Street (1972).

The quartet stumbled through the later part of the '70s and the '80s. They never matched the creative exuberance and sheer energy of those early albums. But in 1989, the Stones went back on the road (the first time in seven years) with the highly successful Steel Wheels tour. And musically, the band bounced back in the '90s with critically well-received albums like Voodoo Lounge (1994) and Bridges to Babylon (1997). This week's tour kickoff before 36,000 at Fenway Park was well received by critics and fans.

Jagger, now 62, raced across the stage even two hours into the set, and The Boston Globe's headline was "Stones hit it out of the park." And The New York Times, in a review of the Fenway show, said of the Stones' somewhat older incarnation and sound: "It may be classic, but it still rocks." Sun pop music critic Rashod D. Ollison and Sun researcher Jean Packard contributed to this article. watermelon seeds to riding in what might be the Tour de France. And he and his new dog, Rocket, who also wears sunglasses, will bring in about $55 million this year. But, as you might guess, it isn't about the money.

The brothers Bert is 40 and John is 37 don't even advertise. The idea of a glossy magazine campaign made them queasy. It is all grassroots, word of mouth. And boardwalk shop windows. That's where I bought a "Life is good" T-shirt.

Its design included a beach chair and a beach umbrella, representing my favorite outdoor activity. But I confessed to Bert Jacobs that I didn't buy the T-shirt because I think life is good. I bought it so I would remember that life is good. "That's the whole point," he "People think we just hang out on couches, but we bust our butts." Bert Jacobs, co-creator of "Life is good" T-shirts some fans clashed with police, and 20 were arrested on charges ranging from assaulting a police officer to marijuana possession. But, the paper said, "The crowd of youngsters was, for the most part, orderly, although one teen-aged miss leaped into the orchestra pit and nearly climbed up onto the stage before two burly guards carried her bodily to the sidelines." The Washington Post, in a review of the show, described Jagger as "dressed in black bell-bottomed pants set with metal studs down the outside seam, long-sleeved black T-shirt and a long, red scarf draped across his neck." The paper also called him "the closest thing to an incarnation of evil that rock music has." The Stones are touring in support of a new record, A Bigger Bang, which is due out Sept.

6 and is their first in seven years. The tour kicked off Sunday night at Fenway Park in Boston and will conclude March 9 in Little Rock, Ark. One of the most enduring bands of all time, the Stones pioneered a raw, blues-based sound in the '60s that would come to define hard rock and presage punk by a decade. They began as the sexier, more dangerous alternative to the Beatles, epitomizing the rebellious attitude of the era. Over the years, Jagger's upfront machismo and campy antics gave the band a strong visual identity, while Keith Richards' and Brian Jones' vibrant guitar work marked the band's sound.

Over the years, as the group delved into psychedelia and even disco, the Stones never abandoned their blues foundation. The band's most celebrated albums include Beggars Banquet (1968), Let It Bleed (1969), Sticky Fingers (1971) and Exile Lamenting end of a 24-year run KEN HIVELY LOS ANGELES TIMES Workers demolish 1019 N. Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, Calif. Its residents included George and Ira Gershwin. Home of Gershwins Witcover from Page lc suited from financial considerations, she said.

"Editorially, as an institution, The Sun has opposed the war in Iraq, so it would make no sense to banish Jules from the op-ed page because of his opposition to the war," Donovan said. A year ago, Witcover, along with 16 other Sun staff members, accepted a buyout offer from the paper, which formally ended his status as a full-time member of its Washington bureau. But he then signed a one-year contract with The Sun to continue writing a column, for significantly less money he made about $30,000, Witcover said than the almost $88,000 he had been receiving while on staff. Donovan said she was unable to sign Witcover to the same deal again this year. "I don't have it in my budget to make an offer equivalent to the contract that he had," she said.

Sun editor Timothy A. Franklin said he had learned Witcover was leaving only by reading his column last week. "He's a Washington institution, and he's extraordinarily knowledgeable about politics and elections," Franklin said yesterday. "But in terms of content and the mix on the editorial page, that's up to the op-ed editor and the editorial-page editor." Witcover, speaking yesterday from his beach house in Delaware, said he and Franklin had haggled over the terms of his contract last year. The money on the table, he said, was "not satisfactory." He said he accepted the contract anyway, to avoid losing medical benefits.

"I was not thinking about retirement then, and I'm not now." Witcover said he had asked for a four-year contract and was told it was "not company policy to offer more than a one-year contract." But, he said, Franklin told him it would be "no problem" to extend it when the time came. Franklin said it was made clear that the contract would be reviewed after a year. The contract stipulated that it would automatically be renewed unless either side decided to terminate it 60 days or more from its conclusion, Witcover said. A few days before the 60-day period was to commence, in June, Witcover received a letter from Dale Cohen, a vice president of human resources at The Sun, informing him that the contract would not be renewed. "It said they appreciated my long service and wished me well," Witcover said.

"To this is reduced to rubble moment, I haven't heard by phone from the editors." Asked how he felt about the end of his years at The Sun, he said, "I'd rather the facts speak for themselves." Witcover covered Washington as a reporter and columnist for more than 40 years, and, for the most part, aimed his thoroughly researched conclusions equally across the political spectrum. In a March 1998 column in the Columbia Journalism Review, Witcover remarked that in the fallout from President Bill Clinton's sex scandal, the president was not "the only loser." "The explosive nature of the story, and the speed with which it burst on the consciousness of the nation, triggered in the early stages a piranha-like frenzy in pursuit of the relatively few tidbits tossed into the journalistic waters," he wrote. "Into the vacuum created by a scarcity of clear and credible attribution raced all manner of rumor, gossip, and, especially, hollow sourcing, making the reports of some mainstream outlets scarcely distinguishable from supermarket tabloids." On July 27, in his Sun column, he wrote about President Bush: "Much is made, and not always in derogation, of this president's machismo, reassuring Americans shaken by the horrible experience and memories of the terrorist attacks of 2001 that they have a tough guy at the helm bent on vengeance and retribution. "A good part of this exercise has been his ability to convince a pliant public of the false view that the enemy he attacked in Iraq more than two years ago was the same one that caused the unforgettable havoc of 911." said. "We aren't about the guy in the yacht or the guy in the Mercedes," Bert said.

"We're about the guy who knows it is about today." Bert and John get letters from parents, thanking them for giving kids the kind of optimistic message that isn't out there anywhere else. But they get other letters, too. "We get letters from people going through chemo, and they buy our hat to cover the fact that they are bald. They tell us they look at the hat every day and decide to be strong," Bert said. "Sometimes they write us these letters, and you feel like you aren't even worthy to read them." It seems ironic that a T-shirt with such a carefree, care-less message would have such a sad back story.

But the Jacobs brothers (they were both called "Jake" as kids) have used these lemons to make lemonade as well. With the "Life is good" T-shirts and ball caps as the centerpiece, the brothers and their co-workers stage festivals to raise money for kids who are facing what Bert calls "unfair challenges." For example, this fall they are going to try to light 30,000 jack-o-lanterns in Boston Common to earn a spot in Guinness World Records and to raise money for Camp Sunshine in Maine, a place for kids who face life-threatening illnesses. The goal is to hold fundraising festivals like this all over the country, and then, all over the world, Bert Jacobs said. The brand is expanding, too, and there are now "Life is good" baby clothes, dog food bowls, stickers, coffee mugs and all sorts of other gear. Unlike their ice cream counterparts Ben and Jerry, the brothers vow never to sell Jake to a corporate overlord, although there have been many mega-million-dollar offers.

"People think we just hang out on couches and throw Frisbees, but we bust our butts," said Bert, of his company's shorts-and-flip-flops culture. "But we have a smile on our faces while we're doing it." He said it was about good vibes and good karma. "No question about it. My brother and I are not geniuses by any stretch. Never, since Day 1, did we think this was because of us.

There is just good karma all over the place." Thhe Dance Vhchtiqn without leaving town. Learn the right moves and steps to the music you enjoy. Practice today's styles, turns, and feel the rhythms. Enjoy the tun. Couples and singles invited.

CALL NOW! www.arthurmurray.cam By Martha Groves LOS ANGELES TIMES Property rights have once again prevailed in Beverly Hills, Calif. a city that has thrived on its role as a cradle for popular culture but has tended to accommodate wealthy homeowners who would rather tear down than restore dwellings where the entertainment elite once lived. The latest structure to be reduced to rubble is 1019 N. Roxbury Drive, the house where tenants George and Ira Gershwin wrote "They Can't Take That Away From Me," "Shall We Dance" and "Our Love Is Here to Stay." Singer Rosemary Cloo-ney lived there for half a century. Despite a letter-writing campaign by preservationists and Gershwin admirers, Beverly Hills issued a demolition permit for the property last month, and the place where the visiting Bing Crosby once crooned "White Christmas" is now all but gone, along with its lush landscaping.

"Obviously, this is a significant loss to the musical legacy of our nation and the history of Beverly Hills and its role in shaping American culture," said Ken Bernstein, director of preservation issues for the Los Angeles Conservancy. The demolition, he said, was "wholly avoidable" and occurred because Beverly Hills, unlike neighboring cities such as Los Angeles and West Hollywood, lacks a historic preservation ordinance. "Despite repeated pleas from local residents, Beverly Hills still has no mechanism to protect its historic and cultural treasures," Bernstein said. The city is conducting a sur vey of properties to determine which ones should be considered historic. When a similar survey was done 20 years ago, the Gershwin house did not make the list.

A place on the historic roster, however, doesn't necessarily protect a structure from demolition. "This city has so many properties associated with celebrities," said Mahdi Aluzri, Beverly Hills' community development director. "We'd pretty much have to put a hold on a substantial amount of housing stock." The Spanish Colonial Revival house at 1019 N. Roxbury won notice as a wellspring of the American popular song. Over the decades, it had a string of owners and residents, many of them prominent entertainers of their day, said Judy Cameron, a former Beverly Hills resident who has tracked many of the property's owners and tenants.

Palatial and grand, with pool, tennis court and chauffeur's quarters, the house was built in 1928 for Monte Blue, a silent film star. "Roxbury is our dream street," said Ned Nik, who bought the property this year from Fisch Properties. Although Nik said the sellers stipulated that the transaction price remain confidential, sources in the real estate community put it at $9 million. Nik said he considered keeping "as much as possible" of the original structure and remodeling. He changed his mind, however, after engineers found mold and termite damage.

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