Grievous

Why has Gram Parsons' makeshift memorial in Joshua Tree National Park been removed, and why don't park service personnel acknowledge that it's been done?

As a member of the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers and a solo artist, the Florida-born Parsons mixed rock and country music, setting the stage for the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt in the '70s and the alt.-country movement in the '80 and '90s (Wilco, the Jayhawks, Uncle Tupelo, Ryan Adams, those guys). He distracted Keith Richards in France when the Rolling Stones were trying to finish "Exile On Main St." and helped launch the career of his talented backup singer, Emmylou Harris. His recording of one of his greatest songs, "Return of the Grievous Angel," is available here; hers is on a 1982 live album, "Last Date," that iTunes hasn't made available yet. You can hear and see her performing the song in July 2008 here.

After he died of a drug overdose in 1973 at the age of 26, an overzealous friend stole his body and set fire to it in Parsons' beloved Joshua Tree. Fans have been making the pilgrimage to Cap Rock every since, carving and painting crosses, poems, and other tributes. I visited in April and took the photos at right.

When I returned on Tuesday to what I was pretty sure was the spot, everything had been sandblasted away. While my photo below doesn't show it, the red cross and the legend "God Bless GP" are gone.

Thinking I just might have gone to the the wrong place, I dropped by park headquarters in Twentynine Palms to check. Two guys behind the counter, one a uniformed park ranger, insisted that the memorial was intact. The one in street clothes said he'd been there in the last two weeks and even drew me a map. Just to be sure, I returned this afternoon. I'd been right the first time. The crosses and inscriptions were gone.

The devotion of Parsons' fans notwithstanding, I can understand the feds being loath to appear to be celebrating drug overdoses and illegal cremations. Nor should people be permitted to deface publicly-owned natural wonders. As a nostalgic babyboomer, I could see making an exception in this case; I can also understand closing it down. What I can't understand is why my two friends at park HQ didn't just cop to it.

"Happy," The Rolling Stones

From "Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones." It's Keith's song, but the camera can't keep its eye off Mick Jagger.

Stones 2.0

So you're the greatest rock and roll band in the world, you've been making hit records for nine years, and you're planning a set list for a 48-show U.S. tour to promote your new album. An even mix of old and new, right?

Not if you're the Rolling Stones. In 1972, they didn't play anything more than three years old except Chuck Berry's "Bye Bye Johnny" and, on a few occasions, an encore medley with opening act Stevie Wonder that included "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." Besides that, every song was from "Let It Bleed," "Sticky Fingers," and "Exile on Main St.," the epochal new record.

The result of this audaciousness was one of the most legendary tours in rock and roll history (I'm talking about the music, not the activities chronicled in the never-officially-released documentary with the name unfit for a family blog) and the greatest concert movie I've ever seen, "Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones." It was released in a few theaters in 1974, when I saw it twice, being a fanatic. Now, alleluia, it's finally out on DVD, so everyone can see Mick Jagger whipping the stage during "Midnight Rambler" the same year Richard Nixon was whipping George McGovern.

These were the dangerous guys Elvis warned Nixon about during their famous Oval Office meeting, no question. They were also my coming-of-age Stones. My friend Andy relates more to the 1960s iteration. It's more or less all about the the second-chair guitarist to Keith Richards' concertmaster: Band co-founder Brian Jones in the early and mid-1960s, Mick Taylor (shown here) from 1969-74, and Ron Wood ever since.

Wood's always played a lot like Richards. In a song called "Had Me A Real Good Time," which came out in 1971 when he was playing with Rod Stewart and the Faces, he even quotes Richards' riff from "Honky Tonk Women." It's a separated-at-birth kind of thing. In the latter-day Stones movie "Shine A Light," they grin at each other through their cigarette smoke like goofy teenagers. Their collaboration makes the band sound looser and more homogeneous.

The mid-career, Mick Taylor Stones, the ones on the new DVD from the 1972 tour, were astonishingly tight. Taylor, then 23, added a touch of uptown gloss, playing smooth, lyrical solos against Richards' rhythm pistons. The live album "Get Yer Ya-Yas Out" from the 1969 U.S. tour, the year Taylor joined the band, has the same sophisticated, propulsive energy.

But while blues professor Taylor stared down at the fretboard of his Les Paul, Jagger and Richards never looked at him. I'm not sure what that means. It's thought that when he quit two years later, it was because he didn't get along with Richards, who recently said that he's sorry Taylor left. Maybe Keith had just watched this movie again. Every number's sizzling hot, from "Brown Sugar" to "Street Fighting Man." But the Stones have always had a quiet side, too. Jagger-Richards were alt.-country pioneers with "Dead Flowers" and "Sweet Virginia," and in these performances their harmonies are dead-on.

Jagger (wearing three different spangled jumpsuits, since the movie was filmed during three Texas shows) really catches fire about halfway through on "All Down The Line" as the Stones go full bore with their two-piece horn section, Taylor's slide guitar, Richards' Kenworth-gear chord changes, and the Watts-Wyman battery. Not surprisingly, Jagger seemed to take his work a little more seriously back then, his apogee as a composer and performer. The Stones are always good, but in 1972, they were immense.

The Book Of The Blues

At the New York Public Library, Keith Richards revealed that he'd considered becoming a librarian and then demonstrated his skills as a musical archivist:

With a rueful shake of the head, he recalled explaining to John Lennon why the Beatles "could rock but not roll.” On blues, he said that "the power of American music has been one of the most underrated forces to come out of this country," offering Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan as favourites. He recalled meeting Mr Jagger for the first time and their mutual shock at the intensity of their shared interest in the blues. The two swapped records and developed obsessions with Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker and Elmore James. Mr Richards also remembered later encountering some of the bluesmen he'd idolised as a child. "Meeting heroes can be a tricky business," he said. "But their humility struck me. They had a way of taking a person into their heart."

Solomon Keith

Discussing his new autobiography, Life, on the Oct. 25 "Fresh Air," the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards tells host Terry Gross that he created most of the dense, overloaded guitar sounds on "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Street Fighting Man" (he says all the guitar sounds, but that can't be true) by playing an acoustic guitar through a cassette player. When the veteran broadcaster (to whom most guests speak with due respectfulness) asks which song he wants her to play to illustrate the technique, he replies:

I love 'em both, honey. Don't ask me to cut the babies in half.

Perfect Bands: "Yer Blues" (1968)

John Lennon singing his song from "The Beatles" with Eric Clapton on lead guitar, Keith Richards on bass, and Mitch Mitchell on drums. The performance is from the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus in London in December 1968.

Scorseses' Amazing Stones

This post was originally published at The New Nixon on April 8, 2008.

They say the Democrats take African-Americans for granted. They also get rock and roll. The high water mark of GOP musical hipness was Lee Atwater and Delbert McClinton at Bush 41’s January 1989 Inaugural — also attended, as I recall, by the Rolling Stones’ Ron Wood. But for Wood, Jagger, Richards, and Watts in their astonishingly good concert film “Shine A Light,” it’s all about the Clintons. Martin Scorsese filmed two shows in late 2006 at New York’s Beacon Theater. They were fundraisers for the Clinton foundation, so an immaculately coiffed Sen. Clinton got to bring her mom to meet the band, and 42 kicked off the show. Not fair!

Before they and he die, every great rock and roll band should get Scorsese to film them. No one who doesn’t love music could make such succulent movies about it, beginning with “The Last Waltz” in the late 1970s. “Shine A Light” tilts to my middle-period Stones, as opposed to the mid-1960s “Between the Buttons” and “Aftermath” favored by one of the friends my wife and I went with. Seven of the songs were from either 1972’s “Exile on Main Street” or 1978’s “Some Girls,” including the title song of the latter, Jagger’s personal romantic history, which he discerningly edited, thank goodness. Who wants to go to an NC-17 concert movie?

Many years ago I read in a review of “Exile” that “Tumbling Dice” proved why Keith Richards was indispensable. And so he is — so they all are. Helping keep them on center stage is their, and especially Mick Jagger’s, cheerful self-confidence. After torturing Scorsese for days over the set list, which he just wanted so he could set up his shots properly and make the aging rockers look good, Jagger has a minion present it to him a moment before they roar into “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” with relentless power. They sound like they’re 18, not 60.

The fans closest to the stage actually were 18. Most were singing the lyrics, so maybe they weren’t total ringers. Still, I’ll bet either Scorsese or Jagger decided to make sure the audience didn’t look like an AARP convention. The Stones had up-to-the-minute guests, too, including Christina Aguilera for a hot “Live With Me” and, on “Loving Cup,” the White Stripes’ Jack White, who was born exactly nine months after the Stones album “It’s Only Rock and Roll” was released (coincidence? Ask his parents). Singing with Jagger, Aguilera and White look awed. The Stones and bluesman Buddy Guy are a mutual admiration society on “Champagne & Reefer.” You want to talk about politically incorrect? Richards talks to the audience through billowing cigarette smoke. Is that still allowed? You want to try to tell him otherwise?

Interplay between Scorsese and an aide disclosed some concern about a back-lit Jagger also catching fire as he entered from the lobby for “Sympathy For The Devil,” in which Jagger, in one of his best lyrics, beats President Reagan to identifying the evil empire by nearly 20 years:

I stuck around St. Petersburg

When I saw it was a time for a change

Killed the czar and his ministers

Anastasia screamed in vain

Another great city’s agony was a subtext of “Shine A Light.” The second song in the movie, “Shattered,” about bankruptcy-era New York City, seemed an odd choice, as beautifully performed as it was. For a shot of Ron Wood, Scorsese boosts the guitarist’s audio track so you can hear every note as his fingers dance up the fretboard. Still, it’s not my favorite song. But I remembered it at the end, when the camera seems to swoop out the door of the Beacon Theater and pull dizzyingly back to a spot about 1000 feet above Governors Island, looking uptown at a city alive with light. You still want to cry, seeing those towers gone. Then your eye is drawn from the dark place on the screen to the full moon — which, just then, morphs into the Stones’ trademark red lips and tongue. Shine a light indeed. Keep rocking, guys. But would you play McCain’s big gig next January?