It's on HBO right now. Film-maker had unprecedented access to old film, recordings and interviews- lots of it never before seen. Pretty good so far.

Damn. I get showtime and SkinnyMax, but not HBO.

On a related note, this has been stuck in my head since someone drove by blaring it the other day:

This thing is kicking ass. If you don't have HBO get it however that works...Netflix or whatever...

Yes.... watching it right now.
I bet the boys in Oasis are cringing and wishing this never happened. Same with the Beatles fans.

Jagger is a huge twink though. HUGE.
Keith is the baddest motherucker on the planet.

I'll find it. I only got cable back to watch the Giants beat New England. Again. Didn't miss having it, as most of what's good is available on the net, eventually.

I am enjoying the ability to stream cable onto my laptop now, though.

it's good. really good.
the altamont bit was shocking not for the violence but for highlighting just how ugly the people of the 60s were.

Yeah the ugliness of Altomont has been well-documented, but this shit tonight came from the Stones cameras and showed scenes I'd never seen.

I loved it. I learned a few things, to wit: Mick Taylor quit the band to spare his family from smack, they all felt the fun came back with the addition of Ronnie Wood, and that Keith believes Midnight Rambler to be the worlds first Blues Opera and that only he and Jagger could have written it. And he is probably right.

I already knew Keith Richards was the baddest motherfucker to walk the earth next to Johnny Cash so nothing new learned there.

What about the Drummer? Charlie Watts isn't the greatest drummer of all time, but he is, hands down, the coolest drummer of all time.

Mick Taylor said Charlie Watts always played just a half-step behind Keith Richards, and that he always played just a half-step ahead of Keith, and that's what gave them the "wobbling" sound that made it sound like it might fall apart at any time. I believe this. It's easy to hear on the Mick Taylor bluesy recordings.

And far and away, Charlie Watts is the coolest drummer ever.

If Mick Jagger died prior to Dancin in the Streets, I'd probably have a higher opinion of the Rolling Stones. As it is, I respect their work, pre 80's, but don't get it when people think of them as the greatest band ever.

Here is an activity for y'all. Beatles, Stones, Who, Zeppelin, put these British imports in order. I just did alphabetical.

Midnight Rambler is a great song. Toss up between that and Paint It Black for my favorite Stones song. I gotta get a new copy of Hot Rocks 1964-1971.

I like playing Brown Sugar in redneck bars.

Those are all my thoughts on the Rolling Stones. Carry on.

By remarkable coincidence, you've done it chronologically as well.

I'll list em as faves:

Zeppelin
Beatles
Stones
Who

I really wanna like The Who more that the Stones, but I just can't make the case right now.

If I'da put a little more thought into it, I'da thowed Pink Floyd in for a wild card.

[OneLinerLarry] I'm into the 'Stones - Fred and Wilma[/OneLinerLarry]

Agreed, with an honorable mention to Bun E. Carlos.

So, In about 81 or so I was working at The Fox theater in Atlanta with a few of my buddies from Ga Tech. We were runners, door openers, pass checkers, elevator operators, etc. Menial work, but you got to work backstage and meet the performers and stuff.
At one point in the night I found myself standing next to Jagger backstage and he engaged me in conversation. I thought I had a great question to ask him so I puffed up my chest and proceeded to ask about his working with Werner Herzog. I had read that Jagger was to be in Fitzcarraldo and figured he would have a good story for me. His face turned hard and he muttered that he had to cancel out of the movie and then he walked away. I blew it.
My buddy Brain K was doing runner duties and was standing in the wings at the close of the show. As the Stones took their bows, the entourage began to move quickly towards the loading dock doors. Brian got swept up in the mass of people and ended up being shoved into a limo with Charlie Watts and a few others. So here's ugly ass 18 yr old Brian K with his zit face and huge Jew-fro sitting in the limo as they get a police escort from the dock door to Hartsfield airport, running every light. Right onto the tarmac and right up to their plane.
When he finally got back to the venue about an hour later we all gave him shit that he had blown the band. He didn't care, he had a bottle from the car and a hell of a story.

I'm really torn on who gets the top spot between the Stones and Zeppelin. The Who in third and the Beatles bringing up the rear are easy choices though Keith Moon was pretty damn cool too.

Zeppelin, Stones, Who...the Beatles are farther down the list.

The mop tops do get a lot of respect because their run was less than a decade, but the body of work was so varied. They were basically a time capsule for the 60s. From the poppy early stuff to the psychadelic. Super influential, but just not my cup of tea.

It's easy to forget, after seeing the video for Dancing in the Streets vid, that the Stones were the most dangerous band in the world. Without even trying. For me, I love the slow songs. Wild Horses and Angie are tops for me.

I've posted this before in a music thread, but Keith was talking about how fucked up Brian Jones was there at the end. He said something to the effect that he'd just sit around the studio in a haze all day if he showed up at all. Then one day, unrehearsed and out of nowhere he laid this guitar track down on "No Expectations". Said it was the last contribution he made to the band. Damn it's a fine one.

I rank the Beatles so high, because of the variety of songs.

If you wanna go fantasy land, I'd gut the living members of the other 3 bands in order to get in a time machine and see Zeppelin live in the mid 70's.

total studio band though and big ups to washisface.. george martin is it?.

The only genres I can think of really benefitting from being played in front of an audience in terms of sound is bass-heavy stuff like Hip-Hop, Drum'n Bass and Dubstep, where a subbass rearranging dinner is part of the idea behind the music.

An atmosphere of a hopefully pleased live crowd seems to be the shit selling tickets, because most live sound systems are pretty bad.


A guy on Salon.com wasn't so impressed.

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“Crossfire Hurricane”: Stones doc doesn’t give much satisfaction

The legendary bad boys celebrate 50 years together with a doc that withholds the juiciest parts of their story

By Roger Catlin


Hail, hail the Rolling Stones, for making it to the half-century mark, relatively intact.

Pioneering a career that has lasted as long as it has, filling arenas 50 years in, with shows that still have edge and swagger, is a remarkable achievement. Maybe more of an achievement than breaking through in the early days, remaking American blues, forcing themselves to write their own material, and creating a mystique that became almost bigger than the band, though not big enough to ward off the epic bad vibe that was Altamont.

It is those early days and the first 25 years of the band that are the sole focus of the new golden anniversary film they threw themselves, “Crossfire Hurricane,” making its debut on HBO Thursday night.

The surviving members of the band, listed as producers, all willingly contribute to the story with their own commentary. But because it’s also so much under their control, nobody is allowed to see what they look like today, as if that would undercut the whole thing. A number of great films have already been made about the Stones, so it’s no surprise that a lot of that footage makes its way to the meat of this one as well, particularly the Maysles brothers’ “Gimme Shelter,” maybe the best rock movie ever. That doc managed not only to capture the excitement of the band’s 1969 tour, which helped define what arena rock tours would be forever more, but also documented the band as they recorded some of their best songs in Muscle Shoals, Ala., and confronted the devastating violence of Altamont, where no tailfeather shaking of lead singer Mick Jagger could undo the deadly malaise that set in, something bad enough to put an end to the Woodstock era — the same year it started.

There’s something ironic about the fact that the Stones would be there when it happened, playing “Sympathy for the Devil.” From the beginning they were marketed as bad boys, a kind of anti-Beatles — their managers knew they would go far.

Most of the unfamiliar footage of “Crossfire Hurricane” occurs here as the band just is beginning, answering angelically each interviewer’s question instead of slogging them off entirely, as they would do the rest of their career, or playing to young crowds so charged up that every single show for two years was busted up by the sheer frenzy of the fans — an amazing thing to watch.

The major themes of the Stones are seen mostly through the footage of films we know, from the decline of Brian Jones in Godard’s “Sympathy for the Devil” to clips from their “Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus,” Robert Frank’s “Cocksucker Blues” and the just-released “Charlie Is My Darling: Ireland 1965.”

Brett Morgen, who stylishly depicted the work and life of producer Robert Evans in “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” is kept on a tight leash. And while there is always another clip or song of interest, there’s a lot lost in the middle.

The death of Brian Jones is covered, as is the addition of new guitarist Mick Taylor, who may have helped lead the band to a golden age. But there’s more about Taylor’s departure than that of Bill Wyman, the founding bassist who was there from the beginning and has been gone for nearly 20 years. But that’s mostly because the band treats the past 25 years as a kind of “happily ever after” that isn’t covered at all.

It’s plain to see that they did Slim Harpo and American blues, but nobody talks much about music in the film. Indeed, the band’s secret is mentioned only briefly by Wyman: with drummer Charlie Watts playing a fraction of a second behind Keith Richards and Wyman playing just ahead. Richards observes that “Midnight Rambler” is the perfect Jagger-Richards example – nobody else could have written that song “or would have thought to turn an opera out of the blues.”

The one running narrative of the Stones – the tension between Mick and Keith — is never mentioned. But even more amazing is that, for all he’s been credited with the band in other biographies, neither is the late keyboardist Ian Stewart. And then there are contradictions in early interviews when Jagger says he’s not acting, compared to others not much later saying that it’s all an act.

Those clips of early blues covers are really good, as is one backstage scene after they started writing their own songs, coming up with “Sitting on a Fence” and “Tell Me.” They were caught up in the 1960s uprisings as much as anybody was, but were never leaders in it (“What can a poor boy do, but sing in a rock n’ roll band?” he lamented). But drugs were part of their world, and the press and police were set to make examples of them, most tellingly with London’s notorious News of the World tipping off police that they should make drug arrests at Keith Richards’ house after a Sunday’s tripping.

“I’m not interested in your petty morals,” Richards told his judge and he got a one-year sentence; both he and Jagger were out after a day in jail. As the ’70s went on, there was a fundamental dysfunction to the Stones that had nothing to do with the disarray and chaos of recording and backstage antics.

Nobody seems to know why Mick Taylor left the band, even now, though he tells the filmmaker he needed to get away from the drugs. And as much of a drag as that seemed to the band, largely in hindsight, having the very simpatico Ron Wood join the band is seen as the culmination of the story that has since been perceived as virtually unchanged. And that was 1975.

Keith’s Toronto bust in 1977 is seen as his own turning point, ending the addiction to save the band, if not himself. “If there’s one thing more important than smack, that’s the band,” the disembodied Richards says today. “I was quite relieved he cleaned up some,” Jagger says. That kind of selflessness has kept the band rolling this much longer, but in “Crossfire Hurricane” it’s just about the end of the film.

If the Stones themselves can’t find anything to say about the band’s last quarter-century, should their surviving fans also treat them only as a still-traveling nostalgia object?

“Crossfire Hurricane” premieres Thursday at 9 p.m. on HBO.

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You seem heavy into the sound, that shit is over my head. I am more into the feel and when I would be looking to purchase an album by a band, I'd almost always go with the live albums.

Live albums can be interesting, but generally the sound isn't up to the standard of a studio production and some seem to be adding a lot of cheering from the crowd, which doesn't really give me much listening to it at home.

Studio sound is highly artificial and most vocal and instrumental performances were probably never played as they appear on an album, rather edited together seemlessly enough so that professionals might recognise their structure here and there and most consumers won't question it at all.

Sound and feel are inseperable, I guess.

And so many live albums aren't really live. I think it was Rudy Schenker (jondra) that did all the guitar tracks in the studio on Tokyo Tapes.

Brian Jones was a trainwreck. Mental illness and rock star monkeyshines do look similar.

live albums and being able to play your music live are two different things...
right?.

and who posted the tl;dr frank figs style scroll bomb of some fuckwits comment section diatribe?. that's a dumb-as-fuck dumbfuck move.

Thing about Jones is, while he was great musician, he wasn't a composer of any stripe. Rock star monkeyshines are a lot easier to get away with when you're putting yourself into it. This is part of the reason why Keith Richards is still alive and Jones isn't.

Yes, yes, yes; it's a conspiracy to make parents of victims of excessive marketing shell out for shit'n trinkets. It only happens in this arena and nowhere else. Right.

The article gives background info, links die just like whores. Touchy.

I gotta go with this. I also gotta go with this:

watching this for a second time right now and you really have to give the hells angels props for being able to hold it down like they did at altamont. They were vastly outnumbered, yes?.

I don't disagree with what that reviewer posted said, but I disagree with their conclusion that it was necessary to cover it all in this documentary. Why should they? The Stones made a difference in the 60's, 70's and early 80's. They covered that. Since then they've been a business that's produced a few good products. But the products they produced early were earth shattering.

I'm sorry, but these motherfucking heathens went right to the ledge, then pulled themselves back just enough to survive and thrive. The same can't be said for any of the other bands.

a documentary isn't necessarily aimed at the hardened fan. I'm not reading all that shit but I assume its written by some butthurt fanboi that knows more than what was presented.

Perfect synopsis, Lou. The reviewer was just touting his own credentials.

The documentary did an excellent job of showing how the Stones changed things regarding what constituted a rock show and "negro music".

Edit: hearing, I think it was Bill Wyman, (probably Wyman since he was the kid-toucher) describing seeing rivers of urine running down the aisles as the girls wet themselves at the early shows...I don't think the Beatles or Zeppelin fans of the day ever lost it like that.

Only if the LSD was good.

I've been playing a heavy rotation of live Dead CDs lately and it got me figuring. I have around 100 live albums alone in my music collection (official releases and bootlegs). Most live albums do have an overdub or two (or in the case of Waiting for Columbus 50 or so) but there some that are completely live with no overdubs. My favorite album of all time, It's Too Late to Stop Now by Van Morrison is one of these. So is Dire Straits Alchemy album.

By the way Bornyo, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page laugh at your idea that teenage girls weren't losing control of their bladders at Zeppelin shows. For proof listen to the lyrics of Sick Again. Between that song, Stray Cat Blues, and Cypress Avenue to name just a few I have to think that the age of consent in Great Britian in the late 60s was about 12.

Man, you left out Cream and Robin Trower. Cretin.

Didn't Cream only have like 2 albums? Clapton was too much of a mess to stick around anywhere long.

4. Trower only had a couple albums as well. I was just trying to think of British bands that fucking rocked. Jethro Tull? We could go on forever. But yeah, in terms of body of work, it's hard to fuck with the Stones, Zepellin, Floyd, beatles, and the Who.

Yeah, I didn't add Floyd, because I was going for more game changers, influential types. Floyd changed the game, but I don't know of endless bands/performers they influenced. I'm a big Kinks fan, but they don't fit. Animals either.

Tull was the best show I ever saw. First one where the audience remained seated and clapped politely at the end of each song. Changed my life.

The Floyd's influence is huge. From Robyn Hitchcock through Flaming Lips and on to shit like Radiohead and Coldplay.

Although not really a band like the big four mentioned above, I would have to add David Bowie as one on the most influencial of the 60s-70s British rockers. The Spiders From Mars/ Hunky Dory/ Low period Bowie essentially laid the groundwork for 90s alternative rock. Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Pixies, Soundgarden, Jane's Addiction, etc are direct descendents of Ronson/Bowie.

And if you want to hear the album that inspired the Black Crowes and Kings of Leon and all that stuff, listen to Jeff Beck "Truth". One of the best rock albums ever!

good call fb. I never made that connection before and those are all bands I like. nice.

I always saw them as more influenced by the Sex Pistols...or just punk in general. I can easily see Bowie in the production values of them vs. the quick and dirty studio work of mid- 70s punk.

I think Pink Floyd was instrumental in artists going beyond their own boundaries. Full length concept albums, sampling, backmasking, expanding the definition of "radio friendly".

Artistically, I think every musician/ writer is influenceed in some way by everything they listened to, if even in a negative way.

Watching Tommy on vh1classic. That deaf, dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball.

Which is why most, if not all attempts to rank and pigeon-hole are never wholly satisfying, or accurate.

I love me some obscure, ancient Floyd, but is it a "game changer?" Nah. Same with Tull and several other bands mentioned already.

The Beatles maybe get credit beyond their ability by dint of being first. Well, somebody had to be first.

I am no huge Beatles fan, but they did churn out a TON of good songs for the relatively short run they had. What was it 64-71? 7 years? Then each of them had success on their own.

I do love tweaking Beatles fanatics by calling them the original boy band.

I'll tell you another seminal 70s band: Motorhead. Directly inspired ALL thrash metal and speed metal. Anthrax, Metalica, Megadeath, and Slayer all freely praise Motorhead as the start of it all.


And of course: T Rex and Thin Lizzy are game changers as well, although I would say they share one spot and are kind of linked.

You also have to count E.L.O. who created a sub-genre that includes Queen and leads to shit like Muse in todays world.

Add in Elton John, just because his 71-76 catalog is just some of the best shit to ever come out of Blighty.

pretty sure sabbath played a part too.

One of the best damned shows I've ever seen, though it was '99 at Irving Plaza.

I saw Motorhead at the Tower Theater in Philly in 1993 or 94. Sabbath headlined, Tony Martin? as lead singer. Geezer was there and rocking it, that is what counts. Anyway, I never heard of Motorhead before that, but became an instant fan.

For Sabbath, anyway.

When I saw Motorhead, Dropkick Murphys opened and it was the first I ever heard of 'em. Still the only good thing to come out of Boston in years.

Check out this documentary on Lemmy. Great stuff, I saw it on Palladia one day. IMDB link to "Lemmy" 2010