This Old River Keeps On Rolling, Though

Great to hear Mick Jagger's full-throated voice again on this great cover of Bob Dylan's "Watching The River Flow." The cut, from an album honoring the late Stones co-founder Ian Stewart, features former Stone Bill Wyman on bass.
Hat tip to the good people at Paste

Blues Brother

For his first-ever appearance on the Grammys, an apt and humble choice by Mick Jagger: The late Solomon Burke's 1964 hit "Everybody Needs Somebody To Love."

"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.

La Voz Linda

Linda Ronstadt, a versatile interpreter of American popular songs both norte and sur, was one of the premier voices of the 1970s and early 1980s. I first saw her perform in a bar with peanut shells on the floor in San Diego, just before she became a superstar with her album "Heart Like A Wheel" in 1974. I waved, but I doubt she remembers.

A "No Depression" blogger, in the course of atoning for things he wishes he hadn't said over several beers, offers a compilation of quotations from and about her, including this 2000 look-back at her roots:

I remember the Byrds were happening and doing folk-rock, and I thought, there you go. So I went to the Troubador. I grew up singing Mexican music, and that's based on indigenous Mexican rhythms. Mexican music also has an overlay of West African music, based on huapango drums, and it's kind of like a 6/8 [time signature], but it really is a very syncopated 6/8. And that's how I attack vocals. Rock `n' roll comes from black music, and I came from Mexican music.

Whether any of us understood that or not, let me just say this: She's the only person in the world you probably want to hear sing "Tumbling Dice" besides Mick Jagger. I remember reading that he stopped by the studio to make sure she had the lyrics down. Her 1977 version features the mighty bass guitar and the backing vocals of Kenny Edwards, who died in August.

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?