BEFORE: Headed back to the theater today, after two weeks off (or was it three?). There's some kind of one-day short film festival scheduled, and so my work schedule is this Saturday an the next two Saturdays, I still get Sunday to sleep in. My other boss is off to Maine for two weeks, but I still have to show up M/W/F and pay some bills and keep up on e-mail and entering film festivals and selling art and then some 2nd quarter accounting work if there's time. Life's a little empty now that I've finished "Star Trek: Discovery", but maybe I can find a new series to catch up on and also log in some comic books. How's your summer going?
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards carry over from "The Beach Boys".
THE PLOT: Examines the musical creativity of Brian Jones, the secret to the Rolling Stones' success, through candid interviews with all of the essential performers and previously unreleased archives.
AFTER: There's something deep-seated in human nature about being part of a tribe, it's your family, your friends, it's your identity, where you came from and where you are right now. Forming a rock band must be a lot like finding your tribe, you've left your parents' house (ideally) and you've shacked up with your mates in a flat and started working on some songs. Now in the old days the success of the whole village depended on the hunting party, and the band's the same way, they've got to go out on tour and find their prey, which would be college age girls or whoever's got money to buy records.
The pack needs an Alpha, because some members may want to go hunting over the hills and others think the animals will be down by the river, and well, somebody's got to be in a position to make a decision. You can't really have two Alphas in the pack, because it will cause chaos, or at least disagreements. WIth this in mind, you can maybe see what happened with the Beatles, they had two Alphas, Lennon and McCartney, and while they could work together for a while, that clock was always ticking. Same thing with Oasis, they had two Alphas in the band, and it worked for a while, but eventually Noel and Liam decided they couldn't even be in the same room together. And now it seems the Beach Boys had Brian Wilson and Mike Love, though they had a unique solution that worked for a time - one would be the Alpha in the studio and the other would be the Alpha on stage. Perhaps that's how they stayed a band longer than most, they stayed out of each other's way, until they didn't.
The only exceptions to this rule might be Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (four Alphas) and the Traveling Wilburys (five Alphas) - but in both cases their members had all been through a lot of bands, they were all tribal elders with a lot of experience, and maybe they'd come to points in their life where they were all more accepting of each other's ideas, and thus a delicate balance was formed, and harmony was achieved - but again, for a limited time.
You can see the pattern repeat itself in the Rolling Stones - Brian Jones was the founder of the group, the default Alpha. However, over time it seemed like Mick Jagger was taking center stage, both literally and metaphorically. And where Brian and Keith had written songs together at the start, Mick and Keith were hanging out more and writing more songs and better songs. Brian was still like the big toe of the foot in terms of the direction of the band, but Mick was the second toe that was starting to grow bigger, and if you've seen that in real life on someone's foot, it's not attractive at all.
The trouble seemed to be that Brian couldn't do anything to change what was happening, he couldn't just get better at songwriting, and he was maybe too nice of a guy to tell Mick to back the eff off. But something was clearly working, Mick singing lead and being more prominent was connecting with the fans, and he had broader appeal, since the women wanted to sleep with him and the men wanted to BE him, and sure, maybe some of the men wanted to sleep with him too, but it was the swinging sixties and that was probably not out of the question. Brian found some solace in a succession of steady girlfriends - serial monogamy, only probably without the monogamy part and also drugs, duh. But it was a different time, everyone was doing that if they could, the triangle of sex, drugs and rock and roll.
Brian was showing up later and later for rehearsal and sometimes not showing up at all, and the breaking point was maybe during "Rock and Roll Circus" where if you zoom in on Brian playing guitar, you'll see that he's only pretending to do so, and his equipment wasn't even plugged in. It also didn't help that the band wanted to go tour the U.S. in 1969, and Brian wasn't only not up for the tour, he wasn't eligible for a work permit because of his drug convictions. This led to a moment of clarity, when the other band members showed up at his house and declared the band was moving forward without him. Now, if only he'd seen fit to name the band "Brian Jones and the Rolling Stones", he might have had more leverage, but I guess he didn't have the ego to name the band after himself. But there's a cautionary tale in there somewhere.
This intervention happened on June 8, 1969 and from the statement Brian Jones released, the public thought he'd left the band voluntarily. By all accounts his friends said he seemed happy, and was talking about forming a new band, but as we all know, that didn't happen, and he was found dead in his swimming pool on July 2. (He'd bought the estate once owned by the author of "Winnie-the-Pooh", A.A. Milne.). The coroner's report said that his liver and heart were greatly enlarged by drug and alcohol abuse, so nobody really knows if this was a spur-of-the-moment suicide or the kind that takes place over years.
The Rolling Stones (depending on your definition) has been together as a band since 1962, that's 62 years across 7 decades. But 60% of the original line-up is now either dead or retired (Bill Wyman) and if you want to claim that Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and whoever they share the stage with on any given night are the Stones, well, that's kind of up to you. They had a black bassist for a long time, and I don't think he ever became an "official" member, is that racist or what? Hey, even the Beach Boys had two African (as in South African) members, Blondie Chaplin and Rikki Fataar, and yeah, they're Beach Boys. Darryl Jones, that's their bassist since 1993, how is he not an official Rolling Stone? Bernard Fowler, Steve Jordan on drums, Karl Denson on saxophone, and yeah, they're all African-American and have been playing with the Stones for years, but they're still regarded as temps, not official band members? Somebody needs to call the NAACP and report this. And Blondie Chaplin was not only a Beach Boy, but he played with the Stones for 10 years (1997 - 2007) and I only learned his name yesterday. WTF?
Also, it's a bit disturbing that so many upstanding British parents were willing to pimp out their daughters to bands like the Rolling Stones. I understand, it was 1964 and the Beatles' record sales were accounting for like 85% of the entire British economy at the time, and it sure looked like the Stones were about to follow in their footsteps. So how did this go, the typical set of English parents were uptight and they wanted their daughters to be sweet, innocent virgins who didn't have sex until they were married, oh, but then if they should meet her boyfriend and he turned out to be a Rolling Stone, sure, she can go out on tour with him, I'm sure things will be absolutely fine, here, we packed a bag for her. Again, WTF?
Random facts learned today - Brian Jones played the saxophone on the very weird Beatles song "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)" and also played drums on the Jimi Hendrix recording of "All Along the Watchtower".
Also starring Pat Andrews, Nick Broomfield, Eric Burdon, David Dalton, Stash Klossowski, Linda Lawrence, Roger Limb, Michael Lindsay-Hogg (last seen in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), Gered Mankowitz, Barry Miles, Dawn Molloy, Melissa North, Jane Ornsby-Gore, Graham Ride, Volker Schlöndorff, Ronnie Schneider, Penelope Tree, Paul Trynka, Bill Wyman (last seen in "Under the Volcano"), Zouzou,
with archive footage of Brian Jones (last seen in "Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase the Blues Away"), Charlie Watts (ditto), Muddy Waters (ditto), Howlin' Wolf (ditto), Bo Diddley (last seen in "The Velvet Underground"), Marianne Faithfull (last seen in "Dune: Part One"), George Harrison (also carrying over from "The Beach Boys"), Jimi Hendrix (ditto), John Lennon (ditto), Paul McCartney (ditto), Ringo Starr (ditto), Lewis Jones, Louisa Jones, Linda Keith, Barry Miles, Andrew Loog Oldham (last seen in "27: Gone Too Soon"), Anita Pallenberg (ditto), Princess Margaret.
RATING: 6 out of 10 girlfriends and baby mamas
No comments:
Post a Comment