The Paducah Sun from Paducah, Kentucky • 31

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jTf I ID Friday, November 22, 2002 'f 1 lut Jf TGIF section editor: i fj sff It'JI I If 11 Christopher Lawrence, 575-8675 tSNf Jrm I I r4Vv I I klawrencepaducahsun.com Static wvv Plincr I in ,1 i Still Rolling Along Stones confound experts, musical and medical ft Jlo "A Associated Press They just keep going and going: The Rolling Stones are in the middle of their 40th anniversary tour. Local UPN affiliate says it's working to fix signal By Shelley Street The Paducah Sun Viewers who see snow when they flip to WQWQ or WQTV to watch UPN programs should get a different picture soon, according to the station manager. The station, which broadcasts on less power in Murray and is Channel 14 on the Comcast Cable system, is working its way through technical difficulties, said Mike Smythe, vice president and general manager of WQWQWQTV and KFVS-Channel 12 in Cape Girardeau. Mo. KFVS parent company Ray-corn Media, based in Montgomery, bought WQWQWQTV on Oct.

1 from Engles Communications Inc. of Goleta, Calif. Before that it had been owned by Murray State University. "We're working the bugs out of the system," Smythe said. "We're about there." KFVS is helping WQWQ WQTV enhance its signal by using satellites to grab the UPN programming out of the air.

The satellite signal for WQWQ WQTV, the UPN affiliate, is encoded in KFVS' high-definition signal. Transmitters in Murray and Paducah separate the signal I and rebroadcast it so viewers in Paducah and Murray can see it. The station will also be transmitted to cable companies by KFVS. "It's a crystal-clear HDTV signal," Smythe said. "The signal is much, much better than Murray State was offering.

Our problem is that we've been hit by some technical snafus." An air conditioner in a transmitter building near Farley-failed during a storm about a week ago, causing the transmitter to overheat repeatedly, said Arnold Killian, the station's chief engineer. Each time it overheated, a safety mechanism caused it to turn itself off until it cooled. Then it came back on, and the cycle repeated. "If it goes to snow, that means the transmitter has been kicked off," Killian said. The problem was identified Wednesday and was expected to be repaired by the end of the day Thursday, Other problems have lingered, because there is no way to monitor the transmission signal in Paducah and Murray from Cape Girardeau, Smythe said.

A special phone line capable of sending high-speed data will be installed within a week to allow for monitoring, Smythe said, adding that Raycom Media has been working to get the line installed for three months. A computer in the transmission building hooked to the new phone line will notify people in Cape Girardeau immediately if there is a problem and will help identify it, Killian said. "We apologize for the problem," Smythe said. "We want to make sure our viewers know that, but also to hang with us." Nick Carter Backstreet Boy flies solo Personal stats: Even though Nick Carter has sold more than 36 million records as one of the Backstreet Boys, he thinks of himself as just another new artist with the debut of his "Now or Never" album. "I'm really like somebody who hasn't sold a record," says Carter, the youngest member of the group and the first to release a solo album.

"Whether I have two fans or 5 million, there are people out there, and I'm going to do my best to entertain those people who want to be entertained." Carter's road to solo stardom hasn't been smooth. His first single, "Help Me," wasn't a radio hit, and his debut album, released last month, hasn't garnered as much attention or sales as that of 'N Sync's Justin Timberlake, whose solo album debuted a week later. "Now or Never" sold 68,000 copies in its first week of release; Timberlake's "Justified" sold 439,000. His clean-cut image took a bit of a hit when he was arrested in January for refusing a police officer's order to leave an area outside a Tampa, nightclub. But Carter, who celebrated his 22nd birthday earlier this year, says he's taking his struggles in stride.

"(I'm) somebody who has got a single out that might not be meeting the expectations of what people thought in the beginning, but that's OK. I want to build up," he says. "There's going to be definitely criticism, and people who are going to doubt, but that's what makes it fun." rirfv HV i i it 'Potter' preview Author auctioning 93-word outline of next book. Miners movie ABC telling story of trapped miners. I is E3 By Bob Ivry The Record BERGEN COUNTY, N.J.

Daughters, lock up your mothers. The Rolling Stones are coming. The Stones, who've confounded liver specialists, anti-drug crusaders, and actuarial tables for decades, are marking their 40th year with an open-ended, international "Licks" tour. With the four Stones' combined age of 232 coincidentally, the same age Lud-wig vaa Beethoven would turn this year and a resume of extracurricular activity Caligula would envy, the question gains momentum each time the band hits the road: How do they manage to stay alive, much less muster the energy to tour? Doubts that Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, and Charlie Watts can still pack them in have long since been quashed. The Stones managed to gross a combined $1 billion-plus on their last three tours, "Steel Wheels" (1989), "Voodoo Lounge" (1994), and "Bridges to Babylon" (1997).

For the "Licks" tour, which started Sept. 3 in Boston, ticket prices topping out at $350 will contribute to an estimated gross of $300 million. See for yourself: The Rolling Stones bring their 40th anniversary licks' tour to Nashville on Monday. Call 615-255-9600 for ticket information. Still, they have to be able to stand up.

That hasn't always been the case through the years, and though the Stones have run a tighter operation since their bad-boy persona fell out of favor as rock became more corporate in the Reagan Eighties, fans and naysayers alike can't help but rubberneck, waiting for the cumulative effects of the Stones' debaucheries to finally catch up with them. After all, the band's escapades read like the Devil's to-do list: decades of heroin and cocaine and Lucifer-knows-what-else abuse; drug overdoses leading to traffic mishaps and episodes of self-immolation; a 52-year-old bassist marrying a 19-year-old after six years' courtship; a dead guitarist at the bottom of a swimming pool, and a ghastly 1970s infatuation with disco. Most of the I-can't-believe-they're-not-dead sentiment focuses on the 58-year-old Richards, whose continued pulse makes him the poster boy for Just Say Yes. "Good genes," is how Michael Main-ero, a West Paterson, N.J., gastroenterol-ogist and Stones fanatic, explains Richards' ongoing earthly existence. "Some people can take more abuse than other people." In Richards' case, 40 years' worth.

Smoking, drinking, drugging and that's only the stuff he's copped to have taken such a toll on him that rumors persist of Richards' periodic trips to a mysterious Canadian clinic where his body's entire supply of blood is replaced. "Ridiculous," Mainero reports. "Transfusing blood doesn't do anything. The toxins stay behind. Though you never know.

There are quacks everywhere." Hardy genes seems like a plausible The "Licks" tour's $300 million payday will smooth over plenty of mistakes. Richards, however, provides a more innocent reason for the Stones' getting out their ya-yas yet again, "The whole touring thing runs on passion," Richards told Fortune magazine. "Even though we don't talk about it much ourselves, it's always a sort of quest or mission." If part of that mission is to remain relevant in today's music scene, 1972's crotch-rock princes might encounter difficulty as geezer rockers in 2002. The Stones, for all their marketing genius, haven't reached out to the relatively impoverished younger set. Folks who ought to know say they haven't had to.

"Baby boomers are a big enough market for the Stones," says John Scher, a longtime concert promoter in the New York area. "The adult rock market didn't exist when I was a kid. My parents listened to Perry Como. The music magazines that want to be hip see the Stones as legendary, and legendary is not hip." For this tour, the Stones have dispensed with the formality of an album to flog. That frees up their set lists for the chestnuts nostalgic fans really queue up for.

Fans who couldn't get tickets can catch the act live on HBO Jan. 18. Though many die-hards doubtlessly will go to their graves clutching the vinyl version of "Sticky Fingers" in their cold, dead hands, even some members of the target adult-rock demographic feel a bit squeamish about enjoying such an ostensibly adolescent pastime as cheering on a rock band from a nosebleed seat. "I tell my friends I'm seeing the Stones, and they say, 'You're going says Jan Houtman, an employee at Rutgers University. "I'm in my 40s and I've loved the Stones for years, and now I'm finally going to see them for the first time.

It was something I wanted to do before I died." Houtman, and the rest of us, can take our time. However they do it, the Stones seem primed to outlive us all. explanation until the case of Brian Jones is considered. Jones, one of the group's founding members and its lead guitarist, drowned in 1969 under shady circumstances. He was a strong swimmer, but he spent most of his time blasted on barbiturates.

Perhaps Jones succumbed due to a poor gene pool, but Richards and the rest have avoided deep water and outlasted him by a generation. Could it be that the Stones finagled their celebrated relationship with the Devil into a pact guaranteeing them longevity in return for sympathy? "I don't think it's possible'to sell your soul to the Devil," says a man who should know, Cryss Blackwolf, a Northern California corporate middle manager by day and a "dark Pagan" by night. "The Stones were never real Satanists, they were just using it for its rebel value. The sociology of the Sixties and Seventies, when 'Their Satanic Majesties Request' and 'Goat's Head Soup' were made, was that it was cool and trendy to rebel against Christianity and the mainstream. I speak for many people who call themselves Satanists when I say that the Stones had nothing to do with Inauthentic Satanism aside, it's difficult not to view Richards and the rest of the Stones including Wood, 55, who's fresh out of his latest rehab stint as scofflaws who got away with it.

"Have you looked at them?" says Nicholas De Mauro, chairman of New Jersey's DARE program. "It's taken its toll." Not at the box office. Which prompts another question: With more money than the Devil's accountants, why do the Stones bother? The answer, fantastical as it sounds, could be that they simply need the jump-in' jack cash. Jagger, 59, recently had to shell out $7.1 million to ex-wife Jerry Hall, besides promising her $175,000 a year in alimony, People magazine reported. He also paid $1.5 million to Luciana Morad, the Brazilian mother of his youngest son, and owes her $200,000 a year in child support.

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