After every road game that his team wins, Nick Saban listens to his favorite Rolling Stones song. The Alabama football coach doesn’t know how or why the tradition started, but during each post-victory drive home from the airport, he and his wife, Terry, turn up “Gimme Shelter.” Mick Jagger once likened it to the apocalypse. It still amazes and confounds Saban.
“I try to wonder, ‘Exactly what are we trying to say here?’” Saban said from Tuscaloosa. He’s not exactly sure what the track is about, even if it does capture the feeling of what it’s like to play Alabama. “I mean, I love the song,” he added. “But you know, if you’re digging for purpose, I can’t really give it.”
When we spoke, the owner of six national championship rings breathed none of the fire that typically sweeps the Crimson Tide sideline on fall Saturdays. The first practice of the season was still a ways off. Saban sounded … relaxed.
For years in interviews, the coach has mentioned his love of the Rolling Stones. Warren St. John’s 2013 GQ profile, headlined “Sympathy for the Devil,” features a scene in which Saban champions Jagger’s singing voice to the author. With the band kicking off the No Filter tour in Chicago on June 21, I thought it’d be a good time to ask Saban to expound on his fandom.
Like most boomer dads, Saban marvels at the fact that the septuagenarian Stones—Jagger (75), Keith Richards (75), Charlie Watts (78), and Ronnie Wood (72)—can still shred. The last time he saw them live was in 2015 at Georgia Tech’s Bobby Dodd Stadium. “The first thing is ‘Start Me Up,’” he said. “When you hear that beat, it really is something.” Back then, Saban reminded me, Jagger was 71. “The energy, the enthusiasm, the dancing, all the stuff that goes with what he does, it’s just unbelievable,” the coach said. “But he’s always kind of been that way.”
[Read more from Alan Siegel's conversation with Rolling Stones superfan and Alabama football head coach Nick Saban.]
