Kurt & Courtney

Year 10, Day 216 - 8/4/18 - Movie #3,012

BEFORE: I'm going to use "27: Gone Too Soon" as an excuse to skip from the 1970's to the 1990's, because that's what the "27 Club" curse apparently did.  I'll get back to the 1970's and also the 1980's in a bit.  I'll also get back to Amy Winehouse in a bit, but for now I'm going to follow the Kurt Cobain link to this documentary from 1998.

If I remember correctly, it played at the Sundance Festival the first year that I went there - but I didn't get to see it, or maybe I didn't even try.  It seems, though, that it may not have screened there at all because of potential lawsuits, first because of uncleared music rights (that's death for any festival screening or release these days) and then Courtney Love was threatening to sue the Sundance Festival if they screened the film, for defamation of character.  Of course, something like that only makes people want to see the film even MORE, to see what she might be trying to hide.  I remember there was some scuttlebutt about the film suggesting that she was somehow responsible for Cobain's death, but I don't remember the exact details - so I guess I have to watch the film now to find out.

I don't give a crap about Nirvana's music, but the suggestion that Courtney MAY have killed Kurt is just intriguing enough for me to finally get around to watching this one.  And though it's not on Netflix, it is on iTunes - and also, someone posted it on YouTube for free.  Guess which way I'm watching it?

THE PLOT: A documentary on the life of Kurt Cobain and his relationship with Courtney Love.

AFTER: I don't know much about this filmmaker, Nick Broomfield, but I generally oppose a person so blatantly inserting themselves into their own documentaries.  This guy might be British, but he comes from the Michael Moore school of "ambush" journalism - showing up at a business with no warning, starting to film without permission and then acting shocked - SHOCKED - when they're asked to turn the camera off.  Everyone has rights, and those include NOT being filmed if they so choose, so being asked to stop filming and leave a place of business is a very reasonable request.  Using that footage later to imply that anyone who requests to not be filmed has something to hide is a form of dirty pool.

Somehow I don't think that the Washington State Lottery office (a business that Cobain allegedly used to fire a pellet gun at when he was a teen, just because it was across the street) has anything to hide, unless Cobain was killed by lottery tickets somehow.  So why not just go through the proper channels to speak to someone at that office, why show up with the camera already running?  This is not a war zone, it's a small Seattle town, where most people are probably polite to each other, provided that you don't sneak into their business unannounced to film them.

This is documentary sin #1 here, and #2 is blatantly leading his interview subjects to get the answers he wants - in some cases asking the same question over and over, phrased slightly differently with more clues about the answer he wants to get.  "But didn't Kurt have a fascination with death?  What do you think that means?  But couldn't it also have meant THIS?"  At this point, most interview subjects might agree with anything, just to move the conversation along.  The best documentary filmmakers are neither seen NOR heard - this is in fact the first time I've heard anything from a director in the whole chain so far, and I'm 19 films in.

When he's not ambushing people who haven't agreed yet to answer questions on camera, Broomfield is making excuses for everything he's doing, why a certain song can't be played, or why this person never gave him the photos that he asked for, or why he went back again to see Kurt's aunt again, because some of her answers from before weren't very clear.  I half expected to hear something like, "I had this great chance to interview this guy who knew the details of Kurt's suicide, but my car had a flat tire and I couldn't find the spare..."  Sure, and the dog ate your homework, too.

Again and again, we hear that "Courtney Love wouldn't allow us to play any of Kurt's music" or "We tried to get in touch with Courtney's people, but they never called us back."  Dude, we get it, Courtney Love doesn't like you - can you blame her, if you're investigating every conspiracy theory that you can find?  Instead he goes to interview Courtney's father about their relationship, a former stripper about Courtney's heroin use, and a large man named El Duce from a band that had a song called "Sex Slave", who claimed that Courtney offered him money to kill Kurt.  What may have started out as a film about Kurt Cobain somehow became a film about Courtney Love once the director lost his original focus.  I realize the two people were tied together, but it's another case of narrowing the search for information while also discounting any evidence that might not support the theory in question.

The director finally catches up with Courtney Love at an awards ceremony for the ACLU, and manages to ask her a few questions before she takes the stage to present an award, but fails to ask her how she can both support the ACLU while also trying to suppress his free speech in making the film. So then since he basically blew that interview opportunity, he takes the stage unannounced to point out the irony of the situation, but just because he views himself as the injured party in the transaction, that doesn't give him the right to interrupt an organization's annual awards.

There's just no way this director can be counted upon to make a fair film at that point - he's too focused on Courtney Love and playing the victim role, just to make her into a villain.  Whether she really is or not, I can't say - it would take an unbiased person to try to figure that out - or perhaps information that doesn't come to the screen second- or third-hand.

Also starring Courtney Love (last seen in "Tapeheads"), Nick Broomfield, Mari Earle, Tracey Marander, Alice Wheeler, Hank Harrison, Rozz Rezabek, Amy Squier, Tom Grant, Dylan Carson, Al Bowman, Jack Briggs, El Duce, Victoria Mary Clarke, Pat Smear, Larry Flynt, with a cameo from Vincent Schiavelli (last seen in "The Great Gatsby")

RATING: 4 out of 10 car trips

27: Gone Too Soon

Year 10, Day 215 - 8/3/18 - Movie #3,011

BEFORE: This seems like the perfect Netflix documentary to watch here, to sort of sum up the first 17 films in my chain (centered Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison...) and also provide a solid intro to the next few subjects coming up (Cobain, Winehouse).  Already I'm realizing it's the same story, over and over again - form a band, get famous, get rich, get stoned, get dead.  But does the pattern have to be that way, or is there even a pattern at all?  People sometimes like to find patterns and coincidences where they don't really exist, so is the "27 Club" just a myth, and if not, what exactly is going on here?  That's what I aim to find out today.

 Jim Morrison carries over from "The Doors: When You're Strange"

THE PLOT: An examination of the lives and deaths of the famous members of the "27 Club" - musicians who died at the age of 27: Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse.

AFTER: And so I'm back to the "talking heads meets archive footage" format, actually I've been stuck on that format for three days now, but when your archive footage included Jim Morrison collapsing on stage, or threatening to expose himself, at least that's very enthralling.  This film basically contains a bunch of journalists and music "experts" talking about what it means to be famous, in hopes of arriving at some explanation for why so many rock stars burned out and died at the age of 27.  I'll admit it seems like there are a lot of those, but I'd like to see more of the stats, how people arrived at the conclusion that this "keeps happening" to people at this particular age.  One expert mentions in this film that "when you add in the number of rock stars that died at 26, and 28, the numbers go up."  Yeah, thanks, genius, and if I keep going and include the rock stars that died at the age of 29, 30, 25, and 26 they'd probably go up even further.

That doesn't answer the question about whether this is a statistical anomaly, or if the analysis has chosen to make it SEEM that way - in other words, if you only include the people who DID die at the age of 27, and ignore any stats that don't support your theory, yeah, you're going to get a result, but you've skewed the results in order to get there.  A better way of crunching the numbers would be to look at ALL the rock stars who've died, and be as inclusive as possible, to see if there's some kind of spike at the 27-year mark.  For example, and this is just based on the 17 movies I've watched so far, you've got to lump in Joplin, Hendrix, Brian Jones, Morrison, Cobain and Winehouse with John Lennon (age 40), George Harrison (age 58), Jerry Garcia (53), Terry Kath (31), Elvis Presley (42), Ray Manzarek (74) and Chuck Berry (90).  OK, even after I factor all of those people in, there's clearly a spike at 27, and I didn't even include Ron "Pigpen" McKernan from the Grateful Dead (but then again, neither did this film...) who died at 27.  So that's 7 rockers who didn't make it to 28, and 7 who did, and died later.

OK, but what about all the ones who are still alive? What about McCartney, Clapton, all the OTHER guys from the Grateful Dead, all the OTHER guys from Chicago, the guys from the Doors and from Big Brother and the Holding Company that are all still above ground.  What about Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, both turning 75 years old this year, huh?  We can play around with numbers all we want, but the truth is, we don't have enough statistical evidence to make conclusions about when rock stars tend to die, because we don't have enough of a sample set yet.  It's still in progress.  If you narrow the focus to only accept the evidence that supports your theory, yeah, you may end up "proving" your theory, but you cheated to get there.

My point is, when you take a long enough view of anything, everyone and everything withers and dies if you give it enough time.  People have also talked about the "Superman" curse, where the actors who've played Superman over the years all seem to have some kind of tragedy in their lives, like Christopher Reeve's paralysis, and Margot Kidder going crazy and wandering around other people's backyards.  But guess what, there's tragedy in EVERYBODY'S life, eventually, and so we all must face our own mortality at some point.  When you look at a classic film like "Casablanca" or "Gone With the Wind", it's disheartening to think that everyone who appeared in those films is now dead, but it doesn't mean that those films are "cursed", it just means they were made a long time ago, and nobody can outlive the clock.

But it's the concentration of the period between 1969-1971 that saw the death of four big rock stars, all from drugs, we can assume, that makes the coincidence appear.  Then there wasn't another high-profile 27-year old drug-related death for about 23 years later, when Kurt Cobain blew his brains out.  I'll get more into the Cobain thing tomorrow - but can this statistic survive with this huge gap in the timeline?  Furthermore, what, exactly, causes the kind of mentality that allowed so many people in this field to burn out at the same age, at the height (or thereabouts) of their careers?

Is there something going on with rock and roll musicians that prevents them from making it to their 28th birthday?  Well, yeah, it's called drugs, and money enough to buy the drugs, and influence enough to have people buy the drugs for them, and to get the press to look the other way while they take the drugs and get addicted to the drugs.  You've got to figure if someone starts a music career at the age of 18, or even 21, there's some pressure there to get famous before the age of 30, which is probably too late to be taken seriously by the fans.  So by 27 there's probably an impetus to craft that masterpiece album that will make them famous before they run out of time.

Then you've got to figure that a certain percentage of people who attempt that will succeed, so there they'll be at the age of 25 or 26, suddenly famous, suddenly richer than they planned, and with a lot of free time to spend, and a gold record or Grammy Award up on the shelf.  Time to celebrate with some alcohol, or pot, which leads to coke, which leads to heroin, and I think we all know where THAT can lead.  As some of the talking heads in this film point out, nobody in the 1960's really knew how much was "too much", and it seemed that the richer a star was, the better (stronger) drugs they could buy, thereby making it easier to overdose. 

On top of that, supposedly what all of these members of the "27 Club" had in common was some form of childhood trauma, either Mommy died or Daddy went away or the other kids made fun of them, and therefore that type of person is always going to be looking for something chemical to take the pain away, and then having the money and the influence to get those substances is going to lead them down the spiral.  Unfortunately it's all idle speculation, and third-party hearsay, because I didn't hear one person being interviewed here who claimed to know the subjects directly, it all seems like they're repeating the stories they read in the news or heard from other documentaries.  By all means, if you want to get inside the heads of rock stars, you should ask a bunch of writers who are not rock stars.  Where's the logic in that?

The closest they get to talking to a real rock star here is an interview with Gary Numan, who you might remember from the early 80's song "Cars", and then pretty much nothing after that.  He describes some of the social anxiety and brushes with self-destruction that he encountered during his 14 minutes of fame, but since he always brings the topic back to his Asperger's, we can never be sure if his experiences were anything close to the ones encountered by Joplin, Morrison, Hendrix and Cobain.  So ultimately it's impossible for this film to lead to a conclusion other than the one they reached by skewing the data in the first place, that a lot of 27-year old people have died.

Yet again, somebody somewhere failed to properly submit the list of both interviewed people AND archive footage appearances to the IMDB.  I know this is going to sound crazy, but for a film that set out to cover these six rockers as its subject matter, NONE of them were listed in the IMDB as making appearances in this film - not Janis, or Jimi, not Brian Jones or Jim Morrison, not Kurt or Amy, but the film is wall-to-wall stock footage of these 6 people!  This is not just insane, it's gross negligence!  I stepped up and submitted the names of 16 interviewed subjects that were not listed, and 38 people who appeared in archive footage, including the SIX MAIN SUBJECTS!  Still, a day later, IMDB has not made all of the corrections, most notably they still have not added Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse!  What's the hold-up?  The film is ABOUT THEM, it says so right in the plot synopsis!

NITPICK POINT: This film is probably hardest on Amy Winehouse, because this was the most recent music-related drug death covered, and supposedly people around her knew that she had a problem, hell, she even had a song about not going to "Rehab", and by now you'd think that a music label would take better care of its talent.  But just because she showed up a few times with her hair in a bad beehive, that's not enough evidence to state that she was self-harming.  Sometimes a bad hair day is merely that.  Also, who cares whether Kurt Cobain listened to ABBA records?  Even if it's true, it added nothing to the debate, so why include it?

The bottom line is, everybody's got to go some time, and did we really want to see what Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison would look like at the age of 75?  I've seen Keith Richards at that age, and it's just not pretty.  So maybe it is better to burn out than to fade away.

Also starring Olly Alexander, Dave Ambrose, Steve Blame, Keith Cameron, Paul Gambaccini, Dan Gillespie Sells, Dr. Cosmo Hallstrom, Ann Harrison, Barney Hoskyns, Peter Jenner, Chilli Jesson, Dylan Jones, Lesley-Ann Jones, Martin Lloyd-Elliot, Korda Marshall, Gary Numan, Mick O'Shea, Pete Paphides, Tris Penna, Tom Robinson, Chris Salewicz, Paul Trynka, with archive footage of Janis Joplin (also carrying over from "The Doors: When You're Strange"), Jimi Hendrix (ditto), Brian Jones (last seen in "Keith: Under the Influence"), Mick Jagger (ditto), Keith Richards (ditto), Bill Wyman (ditto), Charlie Watts (ditto), Elvis Presley (last seen in "Elvis Presley: the Searcher"), John Lennon (ditto), Paul McCartney (ditto), George Harrison (ditto), Ringo Starr (last seen in "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars"), Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (last seen in "It Was Fifty Years Ago Today"), Chas Chandler (last seen in "Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child"), Andrew Loog Oldham (last seen in "Crossfire Hurricane"), David Bowie (last heard in "Atomic Blonde"), Anita Pallenberg, Monika Dannemann, Bing Crosby, Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork, Benny Andersson (last seen in "Mamma Mia!"), Björn Ulvaeus (ditto), Agnetha Fältskog, Anni-Frid Lyngstad,  Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse,  Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic, Courtney Love, John Lydon, Glen Matlock, Diane Sawyer, Lucian Grainge, Mitch Winehouse, Blake Fielder-Civil.

RATING: 4 out of 10 coroner's reports

The Doors: When You're Strange

Year 10, Day 214 - 8/2/18 - Movie #3,010

BEFORE: This is my 17th Rockumentary in a row, which means I'm just about 1/3 of the way through this chain, assuming the final count stays at 52 films.  So far, Mick Jagger has appeared the most times via interview, concert footage or archive footage - not too surprising, since I programmed four films specifically about the Stones.  Tied for 2nd place with 7 appearances are Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and Keith Richards.  Tied for third with 6 appearances are Brian Jones, Paul McCartney and Charlie Watts, and tied for fourth with 5 appearances are Chuck Berry, Dick Cavett, George Harrison and Little Richard.  There's still a lot of game to play, so someone with a lot of face time late in the chain could still shake things up, but appearing in over HALF the films I watched shows you just how much influence Mick Jagger has had on rock.

My main focus so far has been on the 1960's, but that's going to shift in a couple of days.  I'm going to take this initial third as sort of a coherent unit, since even the film about Elvis concentrated mostly on the 1960's.   Elvis Presley carries over from "Elvis Presley: The Searcher" to appear in more archive footage today...

THE PLOT: A look at the late '60s and early '70s rock band The Doors, including rare footage.

AFTER: On this day in music history, August 2, 1968, the Doors had the number one single on the U.S. charts, which was "Hello, I Love You", their second No. 1 U.S. hit.

This film got sort of "artsy" here, with an actor resembling Jim Morrison getting out of a car wreck in the desert, then hitchhiking his way to L.A., waving to other cars, and then listening to the news on the radio that rock-star Jim Morrison had just been found dead in Paris.  This made the footage very trippy, sort of "Twilight Zone" style, like maybe that's Morrison in the afterlife, and the car wreck is a metaphor for death, and then his soul's got to thumb a ride to heaven or something.

There was no actor credited as playing Morrison, so it turns out that IS the man himself, the doc used footage from a rarely-seen 1969 film called "HWY: An American Pastoral", where Morrison is basically just driving to L.A. - that's the whole plot of that film.  (well, he hitchhikes, gets picked up, kills the driver and takes the car, but you get the idea...)  Adding the news report of Morrison's death to the soundtrack, though, is what gives the footage that spooky vibe.  That's a little bit of editing genius.

The rest of this documentary, though, is just more of what we've seen before, in countless news stories and "Behind the Music" segments about The Doors - where the band's name came from, who wrote "Light My Fire", disagreements in the band, alcohol, drugs, bad behavior on stage, failure, success, overdose.  It's not just the story of the Doors, in a way it's the same story as EVERY band from that decade, more or less, it just all played out so much faster for Morrison.  Under five years from the band's first recording to the news of his death, and it feels like maybe he was burning the candle at all three ends.  (Or the candle that burns twice as bright only lasts half as long, take your pick from the many available candle/flame metaphors...)

Of course, I've seen the Oliver Stone biopic about the Doors, starring Val Kilmer, who bore a great resemblance to Morrison at the time that film was made, 1991.  (So if you want to get an idea what Jim Morrison might look like if he hadn't died, check out photos of Kilmer now.  Warning - the results are not that pretty.)  Watching the footage today of Morrison from 1969, I wondered if anyone now working on a film about the Doors might consider casting Paul Rudd.  Just a thought.  He had long hair and a beard in the movie "Our Idiot Brother" and also gave off a Morrison vibe.

I sort of forgot about Morrison's side career as a poet, and also the fact that he attended film school at UCLA, the same school that Francis Ford Coppola, Gore Verbinski, Alexander Payne and many other fine filmmakers attended.  But Morrison was reportedly a "C" student there, made only one film during his time there, before graduating in 1965.  Apparently he'd completed most of his college coursework at Florida State before transferring to UCLA.  You don't find many rockers with a background in both filmmaking and comparative literature, but hey, art is art, whatever form it takes.

There's a strong focus here on Morrison's behavior on stage, where, during the times when he was conscious, he would work up the crowd by threatening to expose himself, and this got him in some trouble in Florida when he was accused of doing exactly that, only somehow no pictures of his little Mr. Mojo Risin' managed to be taken, so did the event really happen?  Despite a lack of evidence, he was convicted in 1970 on counts of profanity and indecent exposure.  In early 1971 he moved to Paris, and you have to wonder if he was trying to get out of serving any time.

He died in July 1971 in a bathtub in a Paris apartment, and I'm still waiting for the parts of rock history that aren't now all sad and connected with drug and alcohol abuse.  Guess I've got to learn to lower my expectations on that front.

I want to get a plug in tonight for an animated movie opening at the IFC Center in New York City tomorrow, and then in L.A. at the Laemmle Monica Film Center on August 10.  It's called "Revengeance", and I worked as an office manager for the animator who co-directed it, and also provided the voice of one character.  I should write a full review, but I don't have a slot for it, and anyway, I'm biased.  But I thought I'd mention it here because it's all about the L.A. counter-culture, like motorcycle clubs, the drug scene, the club scene, the sleazy underbelly of California, and The Doors' song "L.A. Woman" seems like the perfect backdrop for all that.  Please check it out if you're in one of those major cities, and we're going to try to bring it to San Francisco, Seattle and other big cities soon.

Also starring the voice of Johnny Depp (last seen in "Yoga Hosers"), and archive footage of Jim Morrison, John Densmore, Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek, Jimi Hendrix (last seen in "Janis: Little Girl Blue"), Janis Joplin (ditto), Ed Sullivan (also carrying over from "Elvis Presley: The Searcher"), Richard Nixon (ditto), Martin Luther King Jr. (ditto), Robert Kennedy (ditto), John F. Kennedy (last seen in "How the Beatles Changed the World"), Lyndon Johnson, Adolf Hitler, Andy Warhol, Pam Courson, Paul A. Rothchild.

RATING: 5 out of 10 published poems

Elvis Presley: The Searcher

Year 10, Day 213 - 8/1/18 - Movie #3,009

BEFORE: This worked out pretty great, by adding in the Chuck Berry documentary on the fly, that also gave me a connection to this two-part HBO documentary about Elvis. Now I can go backwards a little and finish off rock from the 1950's before I move forward and tackle the 1980's and 1990's.  It would have been a little ridiculous to cover Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse BEFORE Elvis, right?  And I can also give a shout-out to Tom Petty (one of the narrators of this film), who I dedicated Year 10 to back in January, when I had no idea that I was going to be devoting over a month of my time to a look at rock music.  Maybe that did influence me a bit, though - or set the tone for the year perhaps.

For my purposes, I'm going to count this two-episode series as one big movie.  That means it's over three hours of my time today to finish off both parts, but I've watched longer in this chain - "Long Strange Trip" was almost FOUR hours!  Once I get through this one, the movies should get shorter, I'll have crossed the two longest docs off the list, so it's downhill from here, I hope.

Bruce Springsteen carries over from "Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll" as an interviewed person.  And coincidentally I'm also ripping my CD of Springsteen's Greatest Hits into iTunes today so I can listen to his music once again.

THE PLOT: Elvis Presley's evolution as a musician and a man.

AFTER: A little over nine months ago, my wife and I were in the middle of our BBQ Crawl across the south (Part 1: Dallas to Nashville) and there were only two things I wanted to do during our time in Memphis.  One was to visit Graceland, because I felt it was the most truly kitschy American thing I could think to do, and the other was to visit Sun Records.  Now, of course a lot of people had these same ideas, because they're both holy sites of rock and roll, and if you're going to make some form of pilgrimage (or take a break from your BBQ tour), there are many worse places to go.  Now, I didn't take the full tour of the Sun Records studio, because we were headed out of town, and the place was very crowded with two generations of people - one generation was there because Elvis, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis all recorded there, and the younger generation was there because U2 recorded tracks for "Rattle and Hum" there, and they even left a drum set behind, so I don't know what Larry Mullen Jr.'s been playing with all this time, but the folks at Sun Studios would really like him to come back and pick up his kit.

But with Graceland, we took the full tour - the house, the grounds, the handball court, the garages, the stables, the office, and then the museums.  One museum just for Elvis's cars, trucks, boats and motorcycles, another one just for his jumpsuits and other clothing, and so on.  And each museum had its own gift shop, and then I think each gift shop had its own gift shop, and so on.  You could buy Elvis shirts, Elvis socks, replicas of Elvis' belts, glassware, cookbooks, etc. etc.  Hey, after paying to get in to the place, I really didn't have much money for souvenirs.  We also paid the extra $5 to see Elvis' planes - yes, planes, plural.  He traveled in one private jet, and Col. Parker traveled in the other, smaller jet, to get to each concert venue the day before and make sure everything was set up for the King.  What, like I was going to travel all the way to Memphis and then NOT see Elvis's planes?  That would be ridiculous...in for a penny, in for a pound.

After seeing all the, umm, everything at Graceland, my wife remarked that "this is what happens when you give a twenty-year-old a few million dollars", and of course, she was right.  Think about what Justin Bieber's house and property probably looks like, and that was Graceland, only a few decades before.  Now, it's not the world's biggest or most elegant house, but it was never supposed to be.  Elvis bought it for his parents to live in, and then just sort of moved into it himself when he got back from military service, and it became a very comfortable place for him to live.  There's not much space on the main level, but there was a second floor, and then down in the basement were the TV room and the billiards room, and I'll wager Elvis spent a lot of time down there.  Our tour didn't cover the upstairs, and I believe that's because he died there, and you know, respect.

But I've stood in the infamous "jungle room", I've walked Elvis's shooting range, I've seen nearly all of his cars, and he had a LOT of cars.  I stood by his grave, which is next to the graves of his parents, his grandmother, and the memorial to his dead twin baby brother.  It feels like some kind of holy place, there's a reverence for what took place there in the 1960's and 70's.  But with that comes a sort of a deification of Elvis, he's almost portrayed as a saint there, with no mention of any wrongdoing, or drug addiction, or divorce, etc.  Like someone whitewashed his life story, and decided that only happy photos of Elvis and Priscilla could be displayed there, when obviously their marriage had its ups and downs.  People love his music, I get that, but there's no reason to fool ourselves into thinking he was a choir boy.  Oh, here's his collection of police badges from every state in the country.  Great, but just think of what he could get away with in any state in the country with those.

And there's a bit of whitewashing history in this documentary, too.  When it comes time to talk about her divorce from Elvis, Priscilla mentions that "family was very important to Elvis".  Umm, OK, but apparently not enough to stop doing 120 concerts per year and stop traveling enough to spend TIME with his family.  Why do I have to read between the lines to figure this stuff out?  There is mention of drug use, but in this case, the U.S. government is given the blame - Priscilla claims that Elvis was given speed pills in the army, so that he could stay awake for sentry duty.  Sure, sure, only as far as I'm aware, it doesn't sound like the army would condone drug use just to have more alert soldiers.  It sounds more like the kind of lie that an addict tells to justify his addiction.  Then when he was out on tour in the 1970's, he apparently turned back to drugs so he could maintain his busy touring schedule. Again, this is how it starts, when you need to get "up" for the show, and then take more drugs to come down after - and it's the schedule's fault, not the addict's fault, of course.

And let's go back to the army thing for a minute - doesn't there seem something weird about Elvis being drafted in 1957?  When there wasn't even a WAR going on?  I mean, I get it, back then it was like jury duty, you got the notice, you went and served - but why would the army want a big celebrity pop star on duty, when that would cause many more problems than it would solve?  He was granted a brief deferment in order to make the movie "King Creole", but right there, that should have been a big red flag that military service probably wasn't necessary for him, and I think he should have skated.  I know that many Hollywood stars and baseball players in the 1940's also served in the military, but that was different, because World War II meant that all hands needed to be on deck.  What practical purpose did drafting Elvis for two years serve, unless it was for show, to prove to the public that nobody was above the law.  Then immediately Col. Parker brought Elvis to the recording studio to make a bunch of records to be released while he was overseas, serving in Germany.  Seriously, why didn't the army just ask him to play a soldier in a movie, that would have done much more for their cause than shipping him off to a military base, was this all done just to keep him humble?  Or was someone at the Pentagon trying to kill rock and roll?  Like, could you imagine someone like Justin Bieber going in to the army today?  That would be ridiculous.

Then, while he was away, Col. Parker released new Elvis material, but not at the rate that it had been released before.  Ostensibly this was done to make the public more "hungry" for his music, but it's quite possible that it had the opposite effect, causing his fans to get by without his records, and then turning their attention to the new faces of rock and roll, like Bob Dylan and the Beatles.  By the time Elvis got back from Germany and got rolling on a new album, it was probably as if music had matured without him, and left him behind.  So he turned to movies and gospel music instead, and if my memory serves, that's actually where he had the most success, at least in terms of Grammy Awards.  By the time Elvis got back to rock and roll with the 1968 "Comeback Special", and then tried to record more modern music like "In the Ghetto" after that, it was almost too late for that.

On this date (OK, yesterday, July 31) in music history, 1969 to be exact, Elvis Presley started a four-week run at the Las Vegas International hotel.  This was shortly after the Comeback TV Special, and was his first live shows played since 1961.  Reportedly he earned $1.5 million for these shows, and this is portrayed in "The Searcher" as one of several key points in Elvis' touring career.  What I want to know is, after getting over a million damn dollars for four weeks' work, why not take some time off?  If, as we're told "family was very important to Elvis", why wouldn't getting a cool million then translate to a few months of quality time, at least, with his wife and daughter?  Why go back out on the road the following year for another tour, and another, and another?  Of course, since Elvis didn't write his own songs, he wasn't getting the full royalties from album sales, so maybe touring was the only way he could make money?  Just speculating here - but when does a rock star have enough money, or is it never enough?

A very interesting fact was revealed in this documentary - Col. Tom Parker, Elvis' manager, who was rarely seen without a cowboy hat and a big, fat cigar, the stereotypical southern "Boss Hogg" type of manager, was in fact not a U.S. citizen.  He was born in the Netherlands, so as Southern as he seemed to be, it wasn't the whole truth.  And because he exerted control over Elvis, and always made sure that Elvis was dependent on him to arrange everything for his tours, that's why Elvis never toured outside the U.S.  Col. Parker was afraid that if he left the U.S. to arrange a concert in another country, he would not be allowed back into the U.S., so Elvis never toured Europe, never did a show in Japan. And yet he became a superstar, but he could have been so much bigger, a worldwide superstar.  Or maybe touring the world would have only killed him faster, it's very difficult to say.

What I'm considering now is the contrast between Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, and now I'm doubly glad that I watched their documentaries back-to-back.  Both were born and raised in the South, in working-class families, but that's about where the similarities end.  Chuck Berry played clubs with vigor and then knocked on the door of Chess Records in Chicago, while Elvis drove past Sun Records many times before he got the nerve to visit Sun Records in Memphis.  Chuck chased after fame, while it almost seems like Elvis had to be dragged into it before he played a session.  Chuck was the bad boy who'd been to jail several times, while Elvis was the mama's boy whose only crime seemed to sneaking into black churches.  Chuck drew his sound from the blues, while Elvis was more of a fan of gospel, it seems.  Chuck Berry was the first real singer-songwriter of rock and roll, while Elvis worked his way through the Lieber-Stoller songbook and other standards, and I don't think he wrote any of his songs.  They both toured extensively through the 1970's, only Chuck would show up at the last minute, drive himself to the concert with just a guitar case, and Elvis had a whole entourage, a manager that would arrive the day before, and require massive road crews, costume changes, hair, make-up, towels, etc.  But together they're somehow the co-founding fathers of rock music, and yet now I don't think they could have been more different.

Of the people interviewed, I found both Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen's comments on Elvis to be incredibly insightful - in a way, it takes a couple of rock stars to help us normal people understand what it's like to exist and produce art in that kind of bubble.  Plus their musical knowledge helped take us all through the various stages of Elvis' recording career.  I'll get back to both of these guys later on in the chain - for a long while this film was being used as a link between another doc with Petty and one with Springsteen, but things changed - I'm sorry I couldn't keep the two Tom Petty appearances next to each other, but c'est la vie.

Once again, it appears to be up to me to save mankind by properly making adjustments to the cast list of a music documentary on the IMDB.  Before I got involved, the cast list on the IMDB listed only 8 people appearing in a three-hour documentary that covered over 20 years of Elvis' life, when in reality interviews were conducted with over 30 people.  Those interview subjects were all listed in the closing credits, why couldn't someone associated with the production of this film, or someone at HBO, make sure that they received proper credit in the movie database that we ALL rely on?  I also kept track of people who appeared in archive footage, and those were ALL missing from the IMDB.  So now after I made several submissions to the IMDB this afternoon, the cast list is up to 55 people, and I still have a way to go. (I can't understand why the IMDB believes me when I say that Dean Martin is in this film, but doesn't believe me when I say that Frank Sinatra also is, for example...)  I'm listing the more notable people below, but there were plenty of other people (like Elvis' parents, for example) who appeared in footage - it just might take a while longer to submit all those names, especially if they haven't appeared in other movies.  I'm trying to leave the world of cinema just a bit more organized than it was when I found it, but it's not easy.  After tomorrow's film I'll give a brief recap of who's appeared in the most music docs so far.

Also starring Priscilla Presley, Tom Petty (last heard in "Appaloosa"), Emmylou Harris (last heard in "Ricki and the Flash"), Robbie Robertson (also carrying over from "Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll"?), Cissy Houston, Chris Bearde, Steve Binder, Hal Blaine, David Briggs, Tony Brown, Nik Cohn, Bill Ferris, D.J. Fontana, Anthony Heilbut, Bones Howe, John Jackson, Ernst Jorgensen, Jon Landau, Preston Lauterbach, Alan Light, Victor Linn, Bill C. Malone, Dave Marsh, Portia Maultsby, Scotty Moore, David Porter, Norbert Putnam, Jerry Schilling, Mike Stoller, Larry Strickland, Ronnie Tutt, Red West, Warren Zanes and archive footage of Elvis Presley (last seen in "Keith Richards: Under the Influence"), Howlin' Wolf (ditto), Dean Martin (ditto), Col. Tom Parker, Ike Turner, Chuck Berry (also carrying over from "Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll"), Little Richard (ditto), Jerry Lee Lewis (ditto), John Lennon (ditto),  Paul McCartney (last seen in "The Other One: The Long, Strange Trip of Bob Weir"), George Harrison (last seen in "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars"),Aretha Franklin (ditto), Frank Sinatra, Mario Lanza, Sam Phillips, Steve Allen, Ed Sullivan (last seen in "The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - the Touring Years"), Chet Atkins, Floyd Cramer, Boots Randolph, Bill Monroe, Bob Dylan (last seen in "Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child"), Ann-Margret, Martin Luther King Jr. (last seen in "How the Beatles Changed the World"), Richard Nixon (ditto), Robert Kennedy (ditto), George McGovern.

RATING: 6 out of 10 gold records on the wall

Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll

Year 10, Day 212 - 7/31/18 - Movie #3,008

BEFORE: Well, sometimes a film will suggest ITSELF for the chain. I didn't plan on watching this one, but clips of it appeared in "Keith Richards: Under the Influence", and that reminded me that I've heard of this film but never seen it, and if I don't add it in here, when else would I watch it?  But once I've decided to watch it, the next question becomes - "Can I add it in to my chain, without the linking falling apart?"  Well, yes, in fact though this doesn't link to the next film I had planned, I can move up a documentary about another rock legend that started in the 1950's, and then just move DOWN one other concert film, and the gap will just close up nicely if I do that.  And it didn't make sense to have all the 1950's rock so late in the chain anyway, I'd much rather move it up sooner and deal with it now, before moving on to music makers from the 1980's or 1990's.

In retrospect, maybe I should have started the whole thing with Chuck Berry and Elvis, instead of starting with the birth of the Beatles, because that would have been more representative perhaps of the real chronological order of things, but that Beatles film really provided the best link-in.  Now, if I had had this film on the list from the beginning, it would have been as easy as pie to go from the Beatles docs to the Clapton doc to this one, and if I had to do it all over again, that would have been a better way - but the die is cast.  By the time I finish everything, it's not going to matter.

Except now after adding "Havana Moon" and this one, the rockumentary chain is going to be 52 films instead of 50, and that leaves fewer slots for the rest of the year.  I hope I don't need those slots in November or December.  52's almost as good a number as 50, it's not a round number, but it's the number of weeks in a year - as long as the number's not 51...

Next problem - this film's not on Netflix, or premium cable, or even iTunes.  And Amazon wants $90 for a copy on DVD, and there's not even time to have that delivered if I'm going to watch it today.  But I found it posted on a far corner of the internet - not YouTube, one of the YouTube wannabes, and I don't even want to say which one, for fear it will disappear.  (But if you want to watch this film for free, like I did, check out the fourth page of Google's video search results...)  Hey, if it had been on iTunes I would have gladly rented it there first.

Keith Richards carries over from "Under the Influence" to this one, where he acted as the leader of Chuck Berry's backing band, complete with powder blue 50's style prom-type suit. And on THIS DAY, July 31, in 1967, Keith Richards' conviction charge for drugs was turned over on appeal and he was released from jail in the U.K.

THE PLOT: This documentary covers two concerts at the Fox Theatre in St. Louis, to celebrate Chuck Berry's 60th birthday, and also discusses his life and career.

AFTER: Already I've learned that the best rock music documentaries cover three bases: interview footage, travelogue and concert performance.  Too much focus on any one of these, to the exclusion of the others, and the balance seems off.  The first Hendrix film, for example, had too much "talking heads" interview footage, and then some concert footage, but that's just two out of three.  Same goes for "How the Beatles Changed the World", it was all interview + archive footage, WHERE WAS THE MUSIC?  The "Olé, Olé, Olé" Stones film got it right, there were interviews with the Stones, plenty of exotic travel footage, and then concert performances along the way in various countries. So by the time I got to "Havana Moon", which was nearly a complete concert, then it's more like WHERE ARE THE INTERVIEWS?

So this one was released in 1987, and perhaps it set the standard - there's interview footage with Chuck Berry, and other rock icons from the old days (Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis) to the newer guys (Bruce Springsteen, a sober Eric Clapton).  Chuck Berry also goes back to some key locations in his career, like the old Cosmopolitan Club, before preparing for his birthday show at the Fox Theatre. Chuck went on to live another THIRTY YEARS after this concert, he died just last year at the age of 90.  But in 1987, people sort of re-discovered 1950's rock again, and there was a wave of these all-star tribute concerts.  The line-up put together for this show was fantastic, but then I think it sort of got overshadowed by the one they put together for Roy Orbison's "Black and White Night" that came out a year later (Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Jackson Browne, Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt, k.d. lang, Jennifer Warnes).

But maybe that's just me - I'm more of an Orbison guy than a Chuck Berry fan.  For the past two years, I've been replacing the cassettes in my music collection (which I can no longer listen to) with digital files, two tapes per week, and if the albums aren't available on iTunes then I buy CDs off of Amazon and rip those.  I went alphabetically, staring with Aerosmith, and I'm working my way to ZZ Top.  OK, so technically I started with ripping the Beatles CD Box Set, but other than that, I've gone mostly A to Z.  Right now I'm on "S", and this week I'll replace the tapes from the Steve Miller Band.  In about two weeks my download schedule should line up perfectly with the film I'm watching...

But let's get back to Chuck Berry.  I already know that Keith Richards put this great jam band together, and that he said working with Chuck was even worse than working with Jagger - rock stars, am I right?  What are you gonna do with them?  He even punched Keith one time for touching his guitar without permission, and Keith did not retaliate.  Chuck was a charter member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and on the other side of the scale, served three terms in jail.  So he's really the original "bad boy" of rock, in addition to being one of its founding fathers.  But as I learned in this film, he's also the original singer-songwriter, because he wrote all of his music, unlike Elvis, who mostly sang songs written by others (a lot of Leiber-Stoller tunes).

At least when Chuck Berry ripped off the country song "Ida Red" to turn it into "Maybellene" he had the decency to change the name. But that sort of puts him in the same boat as Led Zeppelin ripping off the old blues numbers, right?  I think in time this maybe sort of evens out, because Chuck's song "Sweet Little Sixteen" got ripped off when the Beach Boys made "Surfin' U.S.A.", and then Berry's lyric "Here come a flat-top, he was movin' up with me" morphed into the opening line of "Come Together" by the Beatles, turning into "Here come old flat-top, he come groovin' up slowly".  Everybody seems to steal from (sorry, "pay homage to") everyone else.  But Berry's music publisher sued John Lennon over this, which forced Lennon to cover THREE Chuck Berry songs on future solo albums so that he could get a share of that album's royalties.

Of course, plenty of people have covered Berry's songs legally, from the Beatles ("Rock and Roll Music") to ELO ("Roll Over Beethoven"), and even David Bowie ("Around and Around").  The Stones covered quite a few of his songs, from "You Can't Catch Me" and "Little Queenie" to "Bye Bye Johnny" and "Carol".  Which is ironic, because this film shows Chuck Berry berating Keith Richards over and over about the proper way to play the whammy sound in "Carol", to the point where Keith looks like he's ready to explode.  (Who else would have the nerve to tell Keith Richards the "proper" way to play a riff?)  And what band HASN'T covered "Johnny B. Goode", it's the most classic rock song.

But how many songs did Berry really write?  He says that once he made contact with Chess Records in Chicago, he wrote four songs in one week - but I bet those songs sounded a LOT alike, I'll wager he wrote the same song four times with different lyrics.  I get the feeling he had only three or four different song templates, and just kept re-working them over and over.  Aren't "Johnny B. Goode" and "Little Queenie" really the same song, in the end?  I mean, he talk-sings the verse in the second song so you might not notice, but the choruses are virtually identical - "Go, Go, Johnny Go" overlaps with "Go, Go, Little Queenie".

From the story that Bruce Springsteen tells, it seems that for years Chuck would make bookings, show up 5 minutes before he was set to go on stage (thus ensuring that the promoter couldn't back out of their deal, since a bustling audience was already in place, waiting to see Chuck Berry) and then with no rehearsal, he'd expect whatever band was hired to already know all of his songs, with zero rehearsal together.  That's ballsy, and if anything went wrong in the performance, Berry would just blame the backing band for not knowing his songs, and still collect his money.  One night that backing band happened to be the E Street Band, and fortunately Springsteen's bass player was something of a Chuck Berry historian and was able to tell the other band members what key to play in.  But overall, it can't be THAT hard to back up Chuck Berry, if he expected any given band to already know the chord changes.

Bringing out Julian Lennon to sing the harmony on "Johnny B. Goode" here was so smart, especially after running the footage of Chuck and John Lennon performing the song together on TV in 1972.  Julian's voice sounded so much like his father's that it made me wish he could get together with Dhani Harrison and Zack Starkey and some McCartney offspring to form some 2nd generation version of the Beatles.  Wouldn't that be great?

If you have time, check out the full John Lennon/Chuck Berry TV performance on YouTube.  They also sang another song, "Memphis, Tennessee" which was nearly spoiled by Yoko Ono's weird howler-monkey noises.  Why Chuck Berry allowed that to happen, I have no idea.

Also starring Chuck Berry, Steve Jordan, Johnnie Johnson, Bobby Keys, Chuck Leavell, Joey Spampinato, Little Richard (all carrying over from "Keith Richards: Under the Influence"),  Eric Clapton (last seen in "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars"), Robert Cray, Bo Diddley, Don Everly (last seen in "The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir"), Phil Everly (ditto), Etta James, Julian Lennon (last seen in "It Was Fifty Years Ago Today"), Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Robbie Robertson, Linda Ronstadt, Bruce Springsteen, Ingrid Berry, with archive footage of John Lennon (last seen in "Janis: Little Girl Blue").

RATING: 7 out of 10 one-nighters

Keith Richards: Under the Influence

Year 10, Day 211 - 7/30/18 - Movie #3,007

BEFORE: I'm done with the Rolling Stones, but not done with Keith & Mick - I'll deal with Keith now, Mick's probably going to pop up a few more times before Labor Day, assuming the IMDB listings are correct. Today, Keith Richards obviously carries over from "The Rolling Stones Havana Moon".

THE PLOT: A portrait of Keith Richards that takes us on a journey to discover the genesis of his sound as a songwriter, guitarist and performer.

AFTER: OK, so this one needs a little bit of a set-up.  Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are besties and bandmates, but there was a period in the 1980's that Keith refers to as "World War 3", when he and Mick were fighting for four or five years.  Mick had released a couple of solo albums, and seemed to be doing all right without the Stones, and then Keith released his first solo album in 1987.  He formed a backing band named the X-Pensive Winos, and many of the band members came from a group that backed up Chuck Berry for a concert documentary called "Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll" that Richards was involved in.  (Put a pin here, it could become important tomorrow...)

The drummer in "Hail! Hail!" and in the X-Pensive Winos is Steve Jordan, whom I remember as the first drummer in the World's Most Dangerous Band on Dave Letterman's "Late Night" show back in his NBC days, from 1982-1986. (Jordan was replaced by Anton Figg, of course...)  I always felt that the talk show band guys maybe have the best gig, they've got the day job which is probably just a few hours work each day, then they can play concerts or do session work at night, it's the best of both worlds.  Anyway, Jordan fell in with Keith and the Winos, and they released three albums, the third one, "Crosseyed Heart", had a release date very close to the release date of this documentary, hmmm....

Now, I'm not familiar at all with Keith's solo work, but in this documentary we do get a feel for how he goes about composing a song such as "Robbed Blind".  He tinkers on the guitar, he tinkers on the piano (yes, he plays piano) and he fools around on the bass - and he claims to be an even better bass player than a guitar player, but I don't see how that's possible.  We don't really learn where the words come from, unfortunately that's a form of magic that can't really be explained.  "They just sort of come to me..." Richards says.  OK, fine, but from WHERE?

But we do know that Keith's third batch of solo songs came from weekly sessions with Jordan, the only songwriter other than Mick Jagger that he's collaborated with.  It's a very exclusive club.  Even though there's still a fair amount of mystery in that process, Richards also gives away some of the tricks used in making famous Stones songs, like "Sympathy for the Devil", which started out as a solo acoustic guitar number, akin to a Bob Dylan song, and then slowly got more complicated and "juiced up", by adding the piano track, then the maracas and then finally that samba beat.  Archive footage of the Stones working in the studio on this song is exactly what I want to see - I wish I could see a whole feature of this, with various famous songs slowly taking shape.  By the time all the Stones are standing around a microphone going "Woo Woo" in the later verses, it really started to sound like something.

Richards also tips the secret of the opening chords of "Street Fighting Man", where the guitar sounds all warbly and fuzzy, but it's just a regular acoustic guitar recorded by an amateur home cassette recorder, with a very shitty microphone, held so close to the guitar that the sound is overloading the mike, there's literally too much sound for the recorder's mike to handle, so that's why it shimmies and sounds so electronic, when it's not.  Fascinating stuff. 

But this is supposed to be about Keith's influences, because the title isn't just a bad pun about taking drugs or drinking alcohol.  Who were the people that influenced the Stones?  Chuck Berry, obviously, but also Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley to a lesser extent.  There's footage of the Stones backing up Muddy Waters, who had fallen off the radar by the times the Stones were chart-toppers, and they tried to put the stoplight back on him, and other blues guys too - unlike Led Zeppelin, who would sing a Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf song, change a couple of words and not give the original artist any songwriting credit, then claim by default it was an original Zeppelin tune.  Not cool.  (Like how "Travelling Riverside Blues" became "The Lemon Song"...look it up.)  The fact that Keith lists Mozart as an early influence is somewhat surprising. 

I'm not a guitar guy, like I don't know a Gibson from a Fender, like Duane Allman thought everybody should.  I only know what I hear on the record, still it's great to see a song come together - hell, it's great to see an artist create in any medium.  But ultimately this ends up being more of a promo piece for Keith's album and other projects, and then a tour of places like the Grand Ol' Opry in Nashville and Muddy Waters' house in Chicago, rather than an in-depth look at the creative process.  But I'll take it.

Also starring Tom Waits, Steve Jordan, Waddy Wachtel, Buddy Guy, Johnnie Johnson, Chuck Leavell (also carrying over from "The Rolling Stones Havana Moon"), Joey Spampinato, Pierre de Beauport, Patti Hansen, with archive footage of Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Ronnie Wood (all three also carrying over from "The Rolling Stones Havana Moon"), Chuck Berry (last seen in "The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir"), Brian Jones (last seen in "Crossfire Hurricane"), Bill Wyman (ditto), Nicky Hopkins, Chris Hillman, Bobby Keys (last seen in "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars"), Bernie Leadon, Little Richard (last seen in "Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child"), Muddy Waters (ditto), Gram Parsons, Elvis Presley (last seen in "How the Beatles Changed the World"), Gene Vincent, Howlin' Wolf, Tom Hanks (last seen in "The Post"), Jeffrey Hunter, Dean Martin (last seen in "Scared Stiff"), Marilyn Monroe (last seen in "The Prince and the Showgirl"), Paul Muni, John Wayne (last seen in "The Train Robbers").

RATING: 5 out of 10 unsold copies of Keith's autobiography "Life".  

The Rolling Stones Havana Moon

Year 10, Day 210 - 7/29/18 - Movie #3,006

BEFORE: Since I dropped "Gimme Shelter", I've got an open slot, so I'm going to drop in this sequel to last night's film (which only showed two songs from the Havana concert).  I probably should get in a FULL Stones concert before I move on to other acts - I've also got "Let Spend the Night Together" but I'm fairly sure I've seen that before, and I don't want to pay to rent "Shine a Light", but I'll consider watching that one in the future if it airs on premium cable again.  Or if they run it on PBS during pledge week, which is how I caught The Beatles film "Eight Days a Week".

Mick Jagger & Co. carry over from last night's film, which had WAY too much punctuation in the title (like, an exclamation point right before a colon?  What is that, some weird emoticon?) to tonight's film with NO punctuation, not even a colon to separate the name of the band from the name of the concert.

Charlie Watts said something in last night's film about how his drumbeat is usually a fraction of a second behind the rest of the band, which sounds like a very weird thing for a drummer to say.  Isn't the main job of the band's drummer to be ON the beat?  Didn't Chicago fire their drummer for exactly that, because the horn section couldn't tell where "1" was?  I field-tested some Stones songs this afternoon, and sure enough, in songs like "Sweet Virginia", and "Let it Bleed" I could hear it now, either the drummer is behind, or Mick's ahead on just about every beat.  Now I can't NOT hear it - so I'm going to be listening for that tonight, as this concert works its way through the Stones' catalog.

THE PLOT: For the first time in their 50-year long career, the Rolling Stones play in Havana, Cuba, showing how music can work as a tool of social improvement.

AFTER: In a sense, this is double-dipping of the highest order - the overlap between last night's material and tonight's is evident, the two films come from the same director so the question then becomes, is this second film even necessary?  Couldn't the two films have been combined into one, with the travelogue section first, followed by the full Havana concert?  Well, no, because then the film would be three hours long, or they'd have to cut out the performances seen Argentina, Colombia, etc. because those songs would be duplicated in the Havana set list.  Already I've heard "Midnight Rambler" three times this weekend, and now I'm itching to move on to songs by other bands.

I haven't always had the best relationship with Rolling Stones songs, and I think a lot has to do with the lyrics - Jagger's accent doesn't allow for the best enunciation, and then when they play the songs at an even faster tempo in concert than on their albums, it makes many of the lyrics hard to understand.  My favorite Stones song is "Sympathy for the Devil", but it took a long time for me to understand all the words, especially the line "Anastasia screamed in vain."  Back in my day, we didn't have the internet to look up song lyrics instantly, so if a band didn't print the lyrics on the record sleeve or inside the CD booklet, you had to take your best guess.  "Use all your well-earned politesse?"  Jeez, I always thought he said "politics".  "As heads is tails, just call me Lucifer" - I never caught that "heads is tails" bit until just now.  I always thought he sang "hesitates" or something.  It's a tough song, with words like "Blitzkrieg" and "troubadours" and I wonder if anyone ever thought he was singing about a pilot (or even a pirate) instead of "Pilate".

Another song that tripped me up for a long while was "Honky Tonk Women".  Even that opening line about a "gin-soaked barroom queen in Memphis" - well, you don't hear the word "gin-soaked" a lot, so that gave me some trouble.  Then in the second verse he "laid a divorcée in New York City" - I guess when I was younger I didn't know what a "divorcée" was - it sounded to me like something was "for sale" in New York City - maybe a "dick for sale" in New York City?  I'm sure there have been plenty of those, especially in the 1970's, but that misheard lyric makes for a very different song.  Then there's the chorus, which goes "It's the honky tonk women / Gimme, gimme gimme the honky tonk blues".  As a sentence, this just doesn't work - but in last night's "Country Honk", the Hank Williams-style version of the same song, Mick slipped the word "that" into the sentence, and I finally got it.  The whole chorus should be "It's the honky tonk women THAT give me, give me, give me the honky tonk blues" only the "THAT" is usually silent.

My worst offense, though, is probably the Stones cover of "Ain't Too Proud to Beg", which is an old Temptations song that used to go "Ain't Too Proud to Beg / and you know it" only the Stones changed this to "Ain't Too Proud to Beg / Sweet Darling" and not knowing the Temptations song, when I first heard it I thought Mick sang "Aunt Jemima Babe, Sweet Darling" and for many years I wondered why he was so keen on Aunt Jemima, like did he really like pancakes and syrup, or what?  Even later in the chorus when it changed to "Ain't too Proud to Plead / Baby Baby" that just sounded like "Aunt Jemima Please / Baby Baby".  But eventually I heard the Temptations version and put two and two together.  Mick, you've got to work on enunciating your consonant sounds.

A little research tells me I'm not the only one affected by this phenomenon - some people have thought that when Mick sang "I'll never be your beast of burden" it was really "I'll never leave your pizza burnin'" or in "Gimme Shelter", instead of "War, children, it's just a shot away" he was singing "Whoa, children, this is the shadow way".  "You Can't Always Get What You Want" also caused listeners some trouble, instead of "I saw her today at the reception" some people heard "I sold punch today at the reception" - makes sense, because you drink punch at a reception, right?  (And if you try some limes, you might find you get what you need...). And somebody else thought that "Here comes your 19th Nervous Breakdown" was really "Here comes your nasty service station."  Of course, the most famous mis-heard Stones lyric comes from "Jumpin' Jack Flash" when Jagger really sings "I was raised by a toothless, bearded hag" and in some people's ears this was heard as "I was raised by two lesbians in drag".  (Jumpin' Jack Flash, it's a guess, guess, guess...). So I'd say I'm in some good company, people with inventive brains that fill in the gaps when the lead singer is hard to understand.

Anyway, this concert film proved that the Stones' drummer is almost always just a bit behind the rest of the band, so really, I don't see why they need him at all.  Many of the Stones songs start with guitar anyway, like "Paint It Black" or "Start Me Up", then the drums come in later.  The beat is kept perfectly by both Mick's singing and Keith's guitar, of course they've been playing these same songs for decades, so they all know how fast they should go.  They have re-worked a few over the years, and I assume this is done because playing the songs EXACTLY the same way as on the record for 40 or 50 years would probably drive THEM bonkers, so they've got to change it up a little so they stay interested in their own music.

Nice to see Darryl Jones appearing on camera, though he's still not listed as an official member of the Stones, just a "current touring member" but jeez, he's been with the band since 1993, why not make him an official member of the band?  Bill Wyman's just not coming back, and what are they going to do, not have a bassist?  I hope he gets paid well for touring because anyone outside the "Core Four" of Jagger, Richards, Wood and Watts just isn't getting the recognition they deserve.  What, you have to be a white guy in your 70's to be an official member of the club?  That seems both ageist and racist.  I love that this guy's name and band rhyme - Darryl Jones of the Rolling Stones.  Come on, Mick and Keith, put a ring on it already.

There were two songs in the Havana concert I didn't know, "Out of Control" and "You Got the Silver".  The first I guess is from the 1998 album "Bridges to Babylon" (snore) and the other one is from "Let It Bleed", it was the first Stones song Keith Richards sang lead on.  I guess you've got to let Keith sing one in every concert, because Jagger needs a short break, he's 75 years old!  I know the temptation is to end the concert with the encore section of "You Can't Always Get What You Want" and "I Can't Get No Satisfaction", but if it were up to me, I'd play "Satisfaction" first and then end with "You Can't Always Get What You Want", because then it seems more like a question-response based on the two titles, and plus then you don't have to worry about clearing the gospel chorus off the stage to do the closing number.  Just saying.

Also starring Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Ronnie Wood, Darryl Jones, Chuck Leavell, Bernard Fowler, Matt Clifford, Tim Ries, Karl Denson, Sasha Allen (all carrying over from "Olé, Olé, Olé!")

RATING: 5 out of 10 costume changes