BEFORE: I'm spending this weekend on tour with the Rolling Stones, which is something I never thought I'd say, even figuratively. Mick Jagger (and company) carries over from "Crossfire Hurricane".
THE PLOT: Concert doc following the Stones on their 2016 tour, culminating in their historic stop in Havana, Cuba.
AFTER: This is the kind of stuff that fascinates me, really - not just rock music, or watching a movie or TV show filmed in a part of the world that I'll probably never visit, but the logistics of a band being out on tour, what machinery has to go on behind the scenes to make it all happen. This was almost explained in "Long Strange Trip", when that doc mentioned that not only the touring was weighing down on Jerry Garcia, but also the knowledge that there were many people who depended on the band to make a living - not just the musicians but the roadies, the managers, staff, publicity people, set designers, wardrobe people, etc. Any rock band, especially one that's been around for four or five decades, has to keep touring and keep making albums just to feed the corporate machine that's built up around them. If the band doesn't tour for a few years, that means people they know are going to be out of work.
(Way back around 1990, I got to work on a documentary about a band called the Residents, which was hosted/narrated by Penn & Teller. Well, Penn Gillette, anyway, Teller didn't talk but he was there. In one of the segments, Penn made a quip about the Rolling Stones, using a pie chart to show where their income comes from, how much was album sales, how much was from touring, and how much - the biggest part - from T-shirts and other merchandise. History, therefore, would eventually regard the Stones not as musicians but as very successful T-shirt salesmen.)
About five years ago, my current boss finished an animated feature, and we hired a booker to get it played at theaters across the U.S. Now, since he's a celebrity in the animation world, and he's used to appearing at this film festival or that comic-con to introduce his films (and also sell some DVDs) he got the idea that he wanted to go to as many of the different theaters around the country that would be screening his film, to meet more fans (and also sell some DVDs). It was impossible to visit them all, because two or three theaters would be screening the film in different cities at the same time. But he asked me to chart a course for him to visit as many as possible, assuming that in most cases each theater would pay for one night's stay at a hotel, and a one-way plane fare (to or from that city). Now, this is the kind of real-world puzzle that I love to solve - I admire those people who drive across the country in order to see a baseball game in every MLB stadium over the course of a summer, or similar endeavors.
After some struggling, I figured out that it was possible to send him out on the circuit, to those cities that would pay for plane fare and hotel, and then started to think geographically - it would make no sense to send him from Florida over to Oregon, then to Chicago, etc. criss-crossing the country several times over. No, he needed an itinerary that would go from Chicago to maybe Denver, then up to Seattle, down to Oregon, on to San Francisco and such - something that made some kind of sense. I worked it all out and determined that he could visit about 17 cities in three weeks, and only had to pay for one plane fare, I think from San Francisco to Los Angeles, which was quite reasonable. And I thought, "This must be what rock tour managers do, figure out the best route for the band to take across the U.S., so my boss must be a real rock star now!" Of course, I only had to plan HIS trip around the country, a real tour manager has to get all the gear, the lights, the sets, and the extra personnel from place to place as well. The rock stars take the planes, which is relatively easy, everyone else probably has to take the bus or ride on a truck.
Of course, I've had to ship merchandise and supplies out to Comic-Con many times, but that's nothing compared to the amount of stuff that has to get from place to place to support a band like the Stones. Whenever I see one of those tour T-shirts that lists all the cities the band played in, I sort of mentally lay it over a map of the U.S. to see if I can figure out the logic behind the order of cities. Philly to Pittsburgh, sure, then over to Cleveland, Chicago...then Seattle? WTF? But I'm sure it makes sense to someone, somewhere in the chain.
So in 2016 the Stones set out across Latin America, with concerts in Santiago, Buenos Aires, Montevideo (Uruguay), Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Lima, Bogota, and Mexico City. Some cities they'd been to before, and others had been under repressive or conservative governments for decades, with rock music practically outlawed. All the while, their management team was negotiating for a concert to be held in Cuba, the last Communist stronghold in the Americas, which was JUST starting to loosen the travel and cultural restrictions from the Castro regime. So it became this mix of re-visiting some countries where the Stones were well-known, and others that might have never heard their music before. Not officially, anyway.
This sort of thing happened back in 1987 when Billy Joel played a concert in Moscow, and then I think McCartney finally got there in 2003. So rock has a long history of breaking down cultural barriers, but it's funny that it only seems to go in one direction, with US or UK rockers bringing culture to "regressive" countries like Russia or Cuba. You almost never see bands from Communist countries catching on in the underground scene in the U.S., right? I can't name one Russian band. Rock is freedom, rock is expression, rock is love, and it's everything that they didn't have behind the Iron Curtain, or in a South American dictatorial regime. But enough about politics, let's catch up with the Stones, or as they're called across Latin America, "Los Rollings".
It was probably another logistical nightmare to get a good cross-section of Stones songs included in this film - if they kicked off every show with "Start Me Up", for example, then they couldn't show the start of every stop, because then the audience of the documentary would get sick of hearing those opening chords in every stadium. So sometimes the band had to open with "Jumpin' Jack Flash" just to vary up the footage a little bit. Then some poor editor probably had to watch 14 versions of "Satisfaction" just to figure out which one should make the final cut, and then, what criteria do you use? The one where the sound was the best, or the one where the camera coverage was best, or the one where Mick jumped around the most? Again, I'd love to see the thought process that had to go into this.
Another thing I enjoyed was seeing the Stones get out among regular people, which they could do in some countries (they jam with a family of drummers in Uruguay), but not in others - they'd be mobbed by their fans, the "rolingas" in Argentina. Those are some hardcore fans, almost like a gang or a cult built up around the Stones. In Brazil, we get to here a samba band play the drumline from "Sympathy for the Devil", and the film wisely transitions to that same song being played by the Stones in concert, where they've also given it more of a samba-style rhythm. There's a Mariachi band seen in Mexico that plays a Stones song, too - "Happy", but I don't happen to know that song. Oh wait, the one that goes, "I need a love to keep me happy..." yeah, sure, I know that one, but I just couldn't place it at the time. It's not on any of their Greatest Hits CDs so I didn't know it by name.
Finally the band gets the OK to play in Cuba - after a delay caused by President Obama visiting the country, for some reason the country couldn't handle both visits at the same time, and then the Pope, who spoke out against the Stones playing in Cuba on the make-up date, which was Good Friday. Hey, Pope, it' wasn't the Stones' fault, for the first time in my life, I say blame Obama for this one. Then once the Havana (or Ha-VAAH-na, as Mick says...) concert is set, the organization has to ship the sets over from Belgium. I didn't really get this part, like, didn't the Stones have gear with them in Brazil, Peru and Mexico? Why didn't they ship THAT set from Mexico City to Ha-VAAH-na?
Well, Latin America, I hope you enjoyed the Rolling Stones. Since Mick just turned 75 and Keith's not far behind, who the heck knows if they'll make it around to your country again, those guys aren't buying any green bananas, if you know what I mean. Then again, maybe Mick and Keith WILL outlive us all in the end. That would be sad, the Stones playing to an empty stadium because they're the only people left...
But hey, no rock stars died tonight! And nobody talked about taking a lot of drugs, either! This makes me happy, because the rock chain so far has been constantly tainted by those things. I also really enjoyed the Jagger/Richards acoustic version of "Country Honk" that took place backstage in Brazil. After watching "I Saw the Light" I could really hear the influence of Hank Williams in that song, and I'll probably think of that every time now.
Also starring Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Ronnie Wood (all carrying over from "Crossfire Hurricane"), Darryl Jones, Chuck Leavell, Bernard Fowler, Matt Clifford, Tim Ries, Karl Denson, Sasha Allen, Joyce Smith, Jane Rose, Adam Wilkes, Paul Gongaware, Dale Skjerseth and archive footage of Barack Obama.
RATING: 6 out of 10 tattooed logos
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