In Keith Richards' memoir, Life, the Rolling Stones guitarist says: "Music is a language that doesn't speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it's in the bones, it's in the bones."
My take on what the legendary axeman was saying is that music can break any cultural, language and political barriers. His band proved that when they rocked Havana in 2016 with a historic free concert that will be hard for anyone else to top for years to come.
Citizens of Fidel Castro's Cuba for decades had been banned from listening to rock music on the radio and state television. But that didn't stop some 700,000 fans from flooding into the Ciudad Deportiva de la Habana stadium, and 500,000 more listening outside.
"Years ago it was difficult to hear our music but here we are," Stones frontman Mick Jagger told the crowd in Spanish. "The times are changing," he said to a roaring reception before he kicked off the night with Jumpin' Jack Flash. The hits kept coming in the 18-song set that ended with the classic Satisfaction.
An event rich with symbolism and political significance, this was no ordinary concert for the band on the stage and the rock and rollers on the ground. But there was another group of people who are often left out of the conversation when talk turns to landmark events, even though they are the ones who actually make things happen.
That would include Adam Wilkes, who rates Havana very high on his personal Satisfaction scale.
"The most rewarding individual concert project that I have worked on is when we brought the Rolling Stones to Cuba," the president and CEO of AEG Asia told Asia Focus recently in Bangkok.
"It was very special because it was a milestone for a band that has basically defined a genre, defined multiple generations of music, and for the Rolling Stones to do something they have never done before, that was pretty cool."
It was "gratifying", he says, to be involved in the project, especially since it was a free show that drew more than a million people, and where everyone present could feel the euphoria in their bones.
"If you were in the audience, it wasn't just a great concert, it wasn't just fun. There was this incredible energy there that can only be described as hope," he recalls.
"President Obama had been there several days earlier and it was the first time a US president had been to Cuba, I think, in 89 years. He had made an incredible speech side by side with Raul Castro and there was all this enthusiasm and excitement about where Cuba was going, the opening up to the world and the world embracing it, and then the Rolling Stones show up and put on an awesome concert."
MUSIC LOVER
Mr Wilkes says his love of music means that he still gets excited every time an artist gets on stage. The vibe in the venue when there are 20,000 people yelling for their idols reminds him of why he's still in the event promotion and management business.
"You really feel the excitement in the room," he says with passion and energy in his voice. "Meanwhile, there is this behind-the-scenes action where everything that happens that day, the day before or six months building up to it that nobody really knows about, and it's kind of exciting to stand there and see the energy right before the show starts. I still feel that every single time."
The enthusiasm he expresses is palpable, even after promoting hundreds of concerts and sports competitions in the region, including tours with Celine Dion, Katy Perry, Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber and Metallica. He still feels the same excitement he felt when he booked his first gig -- in China of all places.
Mr Wilkes was already an old hand on the Chinese entertainment scene -- he speaks Mandarin fluently -- before he joined AEG. He had been a managing director and partner in Taihe Interactive Media, a director of Live Events at Ticketmaster-owned Emma Entertainment, a founding partner of China West Entertainment, and a special project consultant to Shanghai Epic Music, the joint-venture partner of Sony Music in China.
The road to China was a long and winding one that began when he was around 17 years old. The young American travelled through Spain and Colombia and ended up in Cuba at the University of Havana where he studied Cuban-American politics from the communist side, where the perspective is very different from the United States.
After two years of travelling and learning different points of view, he was reluctant to return home before seeing Shanghai. The plan was to spend two weeks there but it ended up being a 17-year journey instead.
"I got there and stayed for three weeks before I completely ran out of money, which kept me there for a couple of more weeks because it was a captivating place," he recalls with fondness.
"China around that time period was, and still is, an incredible place but there was a lot of specific change happening and as a young guy showing up there, I don't think I was able to articulate exactly what was going on but I don't think anybody can truly say what was going on either and that kept me there longer and longer."
He enrolled in East China Normal University where he attempted to learn Chinese which was "a slow and painful process" but he is now proud to say that he has learned how to speak "decent" Chinese because he's been working in the country for more than a decade.
"It is absolutely useful now because I live in Shanghai and we run the China business for AEG Asia and the Asia Pacific side of the business, so there is an active business where a whole potion of the day is in Chinese," he says. "My wife is also Chinese. We speak Chinese at home, which means she wins most of the argument," he adds with a smile.
THE FIRST GIG
After making a lot of friends at various parties during his first two weeks in Shanghai, Mr Wilkes happened to meet a woman who owned a very successful nightclub and several other venues at a time when such places were rare. He somehow convinced her that he was an event organiser, even though he wasn't.
"I was just a poor student and she rented a club, put on an event and I was in charge of finding people to fill it," he says, describing the moment of his reality check vividly.
"I printed the flyers, handing them out, and I was very depressed when nine o'clock came and nobody showed up, and then at ten o'clock it was totally empty, and then somehow by eleven o'clock, the place filled up."
One of the bands he promoted was called the Realistic, a New York punk trio who showed up with $10 between them. Their performance, Mr Wilkes, says, was highly memorable.
"We put them on stage with a Beijing hard-rock band which at the time was called Thin Man … and it was a good night."
From that first mini-concert which earned him some seed money, Mr Wilkes went on to promote more club shows throughout China and then started to bring over small bands from the States and to his delight, the Chinese seemed to like what he lined up for them.
"It was very, very early and none of them made any significant amount of money but they made enough to sustain my pretty basic lifestyle and it was interesting and fun," he says.
Everything was going well until the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) which began in Guangdong province in 2002, and that's when Mr Wilkes said his "tiny empire of putting on nightclub parties" was "quickly defeated".
He started asking himself why he had come to China in the first place, and decided to return to Colombia for a break and some soul-searching. But then a Chinese executive who was heading Sony Music on the mainland at the time called and asked him if he wanted to return.
"He was a good friend who encouraged me to come back, saying that Sars was over. He offered me a job, so I worked for Sony Music for a little while," he recalls. The record industry was undergoing an upheaval with the rise of digital music, and the job represented his last attempt at selling physical product.
"Back then there was a lot piracy in China and it was an interesting place to learn, but it is clear that all the excitement and all the growth opportunity in the music industry was really on the live side and that was always where my passion lies," he says.
"I am somebody who loves music and going to shows and in college I worked for some concert promotion companies and that's my story with China West, which was me and two partners, where the first big show for us was Norah Jones in 2004," he says of the first time China started welcoming big-name pop artists from the Western world before the likes of Black Eyed Peas began showing up.
SOUTHEAST ASIA POTENTIAL
Headquartered in Los Angeles and owned by the American billionaire Philip Anschutz, privately held AEG is the world's leading sports and live entertainment company. It owns around 150 concert venues and sports stadiums including the Staples Center in Los Angeles, The O2 Arena in London, the Sprint Center and Mercedes-Benz Arenas.
Another part of the conglomerate is AEG Presents, where Mr Wilkes heads the Asia Pacific operation. It is engaged in all aspects of live contemporary music performances, including producing and promoting global and regional concert tours, music and special events and world-renowned festivals.
"AEG came into China in 2008 on the back of the Beijing Olympics and we got involved with one of the arenas that was being contracted for the Olympics, the one that was specifically for basketball, and at the time I was working for Ticketmaster where I was running the concert side for them," he explains.
As AEG was trying to further expand the software of its business into China, Mr Wilkes was a natural choice since he already had almost 10 years of experience under his belt.
"It started out very China-focused as we started by programming the Beijing and Shanghai buildings but it quickly grew into a business where we were taking artists from Tokyo to Dubai and from Beijing to Auckland," he says.
"This can happen because the content side of the business or the software side can move a lot faster that the hardware side of the business which is the architecture side."
AEG this month signed a deal in Thailand with the local retail giant The Mall Group to build what Mr Wilkes proclaims will be two of the best arenas in the world in Bangkok, as he foresees Southeast Asia as the next great destination for music lovers.
"Location is the key for this and what we are building in Bangkok is not just going to be good for Bangkok, these buildings are going to be the best in the world," he says.
He believes that the two arenas, EmLive arena at The EmSphere and Bangkok Arena at Bangkok Mall, will put the city in the leadership position for Southeast Asia where other markets such as Kuala Lumpur, Ho Chi Minh City and Jakarta will have to look to Bangkok as "the path forward".
"Hopefully this will stimulate other projects like that around the region," he says. "We started in to China on the back of the Olympics and we have been looking strategically at where we want to go from here. We want to start big at the right place and Bangkok is the right place for this."
Japan is also on AEG's radar because of the Rugby World Cup next year and the upcoming Olympics in 2020. The recent decision by the Japanese government to legalise gaming and support for e-sports could also lead to a large-scale integrated resort in Osaka, similar to what has happened in Singapore and Macau, he adds.
"Japan has a thriving domestic live entertainment industry in music, sports and e-sports as well as international music … and there are other places in Southeast Asia as well, but these projects take a long time and it has to be right," says Mr Wilkes.
"We're not a fast-food chain and we don't have to be on every corner but we need to be on the right corners and in the right situations, so we take our time, quite methodically, about how we get involved in different countries. And while we're hopeful that this will lead to more developments like this around Asia, the focus of the company right now is very much on Bangkok."
