(c) Ira Robbins
25 November 2012
Whatever function that building on the shores of Lake Erie serves, the real museum of rock and roll is on the road (again), its colorful cast of preserved fossils parading in luxurious purgatory, providing an endlessly regenerated audience with souvenirs, simulations – and, occasionally, real stimulation.
Oldies tours used to confine (or at least concentrate) themselves to a particular season: one outdoor attraction in the anything-goes entertainment quest that grips Americans when the sun is strong. Come summer, musical nostalgia would orbit around for its annual visit just as reliably as sitcom reruns and baseball. And, sure, why the heck not – harmless fun for children of all ages, favorite characters come to life, just like in Disneyworld.
But in one of those occasional wrinkles the established universe chucks up to keep things confusing, that boundary has been breached and possibly erased forever. Fall 2012 is lousy with rock’s undead: touring, autobiographizing, making documentaries, releasing albums, mounting comebacks. Ian Hunter once called rock and roll a “loser’s game,” but the Mott master, who was in his early 30s at the time, omitted the more routine observation that it’s also a young people’s game. Points for prescience, mate: at 73, with a new album in the shops, he has dates booked through next March.
Aerosmith, who also added a new album to the ether this year, set off on the Global Warming tour with Cheap Trick in June and have been at it (minus a pair of months off between legs, haha) ever since. They reached Madison Square Garden last week, tired but proud Peter Pans, and mounted the same unabashed ode to teenage lust they’ve been carting around since the New York Dolls’ booking agency took on their management and fatefully let Steven Tyler displace David Johansen as America’s heir to a certain lippy British singer. Tyler had less pep in his step than at the New Jersey show I saw in July, and the backing vocals provided by a sideman (stage rear) were mixed too high for full bad boy respectability, but none of it matters to the band’s paunchy populace: they played the hits, Joe Perry struck his guitar hero poses (although the romantic drama was undercut a bit by the blowers that occasionally raised his long hair into an unflattering flying carpet) and Joey Kramer did the obligatory gratuitous drum solo.
(I would gladly spend the next few grafs detailing how much better Cheap Trick was, how that band’s ironic pleasure in – as opposed to po-faced embrace of -- rock’s hackneyed clichés allows grown-ups to enjoy silliness without feeling silly, but having spent a good part of the summer doing paid work for the Rick Nielsen museum exhibit in Rockford, I’m out of the ethical running here. That said, trusting friends may be hapy to hear that Daxx Nielsen has really nailed the role, drumming and singing like a fourth wheel, not a hired hand.)
Although Beatles nostalgia is way overdue for retirement, both Cheap Trick and Aerosmith proffered songs from Abbey Road at the show. The openers did “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight,” that early warning signal of just how sappy McCartney’s solo career would become, while the headliners hauled Sean Ono Lennon out to strum and sing on his father’s “Come Together,” the song which – in 1978 -- gave Aerosmith an excuse to take part in the cinematic debacle that was Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Trick’s dedication to the Fab Four is well-established (helpfully balanced by a Move jones, which means ELO is the fulcrum of their obsessions), but Aerosmith were otherwise Stones loyalists. And not just for the generous proportions of Tyler’s mouth: in the ‘70s, Aerosmith’s self-styling as a hard-driving super-sexualized quintet with a rock-serious guitarist and a flamboyant frontman-singer was hardly a coincidence. There was no mistaking the American wanna-bes with their British models in those days (and there still isn’t), but now that the members of both bands are all in their 60s, the distance between Richmond and Boston no longer seems as far.
Like many American Brit-rock bluesboys of their era, Aerosmith brought home some of the Yardbirds’ overseas borrowings in their early repertoire. (That connection, and I use the word advisedly, led to one unfortunate night in 1982, when Tyler, who was in very bad shape at the time, joined Trick onstage at the Ritz in New York for “I’m a Man” and couldn’t recall enough of the “I spell M…” lyrics to get by.) Aerosmith don’t do “Train Kept a-Rollin’” in concert these days, but they did trot out Rufus Thomas’ “Walkin’ the Dog,” another Stones-honoring byway of their youth, and gave it a good ride.
The forefathers who are enshrined in Cleveland created, borrowed, stole or adapted – take your pick -- a template of monumental flexibility and durability, but they did not do it in order to change the world. Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Eddie Cochran -- they were all entertainers looking to make a buck and get some kicks. What they added was uncommon curiosity, imagination and courage. Their willingness to push beyond, to try things and let their freak flags fly in the face of uncertain results is what imbued pop music with rock’s guiding principle, a dedication to progress and exploration that was never intrinsic to more traditional forms. So where does that leave today’s senior rockers, who haven’t had a new idea in decades?
It’s wonderful when superstars still remember the music that inspired them, and better still if the heirs of those inspirations are rewarded for it. But how does the gesture resonate in the upper tier? For a small band, covers offer a shortcut to identity, a hipness pass, an educational benefit, an augmentation of achievement. For a veteran band, it all blurs together as covers no longer stand apart from homegrown material.
Invoking pioneers a half-century later is no longer as simple as a tip of the hat to an icon, or the recognition that an old song won’t ever let you down. (Not to mention the potential for songs going on permanent loan: Ray Davies once told me that Van Halen’s recording of “You Really Got Me” led people to imagine that the Kinks were the ones doing the cover; except for the royalties, it’s got to hurt when people think you’re borrowing your own creation.) From Beale Street to London, rock’s heritage has been transformed into a marketing tool, divorced from its messy birth and profound cultural value to engender positive feelings that can be conferred on a cold can of beer. When today’s superstars pay homage to rock’s formative figures, they’re doing less than acknowledging a debt. If anything, they’re linking themselves, the present and their audience to a past that has passed from history to myth. What rock had to do to emerge from the ooze without malice of forethought or dreams of corporate sponsorship is no longer real to people. Argent claimed divine sourcing for the transubstantiation of roots music into electric thrills, but culture scientists can still make a strong case that Darwinian evolution (not to mention genius, payola, racism, drugs, sex and Leo Fender) played a major role.
No one embodies the transportation of rock music from its roots to its culmination better than the Rolling Stones, who are on offer in both amberized black and white and full-color this fall: a handful of shows in the US and UK, a greatest hits albums with a couple of see-we-can-still-do-it new tracks, a little-seen tour film from 1965 and an HBO documentary that draws from it as well as other artifacts of the band’s well-covered existence.
In Charlie Is My Darling, a remarkable short film shot over a 1965 weekend in Ireland, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are fresh-faced (if deeply reflective) kids thrilled to be singing and playing the borrowed songs they love while making up some of their own whenever the moment strikes. “Fun” isn’t a word that usually attaches to “the world’s greatest rock and roll band,” but for the duration of this small window into their world, they’re having a blast, and enjoying every minute of it. But there’s more to consider here than the repartee and recreation of the Stones and their hip young manager, Andrew Loog Oldham (who spoke with great enthusiasm and insight about those times at a 92 Street Y screening a few months back).
Complicating and (to his enormous detriment) ultimately redefining the purity of the blues band Brian Jones originally put together are such externalities as the violent enthusiasm of fans, who overrun stages and send their beloved band scampering for safety, commercial pressures and competitiveness with contemporaries. In one memorable scene, Keith and Mick have a go at some Beatles songs; the sarcasm would be more amusing had they not already touched up Lennon-McCartney for “I Wanna Be Your Man,” which slotted in between Chuck Berry’s “Come On” and Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” as the not-yet-songwriting band’s second UK chart single. For his part, Brian – who has no hand in the Glimmer Twins’ nascent creativity here -- expresses dissatisfaction, ambivalence and uncertainty. The band is just hitting it big, and he’s already on his way out. Later in the film, as Brian’s deterioration has rendered him both incapable and irrelevant, Jagger speaks poignantly about having to find something for him to do on the rare occasions when he showed up to work.
Fan violence is also the signal takeaway from Crossfire Hurricane, two hours of high points and low lights structured like a Wikipedia entry. In 1969, when I saw the Stones for the first time, the energy at Madison Square Garden was intense and contagious, but I don’t recall anyone getting hurt. It wasn’t until Gimme Shelter hit theaters the following year that Stones shows gained a rep for being dangerous (a concern summed up succinctly by Jerry Garcia: “Ooh, bummer”), and by that point they really weren’t, at least so long as Hell’s Angels weren’t doing security. No, that scary stretch was over – but Crossfire Hurricane brings it back in bracing images of show and after show that ended in pitched battles between fans and authority figures of one sort or another. According to the film, it was a nightly occurrence for several years in the early ‘60s – not unprecedented in rock annals (Blackboard Jungle, which used Bill Haley’s not-exactly-incendiary version of “Rock Around the Clock” as its theme song in 1955, caused widespread cinema destruction in England), but probably as significant to how the Stones saw themselves and their effect as any malevolent image Oldham might have dreamed up for them. Jimmy Page’s Aleister Crowley fandom hinted at a dark side that never really emerged in Led Zeppelin’s songs; conversely, the Stones’ musical investment in misogyny, fatalism and devilry of all sorts didn’t necessarily reflect their offstage lives. Jagger has undoubtedly taken advantage of countless women in his life, but the exasperated and exhausted “Please Go Home” has a greater ring of personal authenticity to me than the vindictive “Stupid Girl” or “Under My Thumb.”
Although a squandered opportunity that is scarcely more revealing than its recycled sources, Crossfire Hurricane is at least willing to blow through a bit of the Stones’ bad road, using scenes of nudity and drug-taking borrowed from Robert Frank’s long-suppressed but tame Cocksucker Blues film. Another bogeyman reduced to shadows, not shocking or surprising in the least, but surely just the tip of their iceberg.
Keith has never been shy about owning his legend and facing the facts: I’ve interviewed him twice and was deeply impressed by his willingness to answer any question, including the ones that would have another artist’s publicist on the phone the following morning insisting that all of it was off the record. By copping to all of it, Keith has never had to lie or deny anything: there’s nothing about this onetime outlaw you can write that he hasn’t already acknowledged (or bragged about). Jagger is more circumspect and self-conscious, yet here he is candid and possibly even honest about drugs as well as the decline, departure and death of Brian Jones. Good on you, Mick. Time wounds all heels.
The young singer here has a soft, feminine face that has to be pushed to convey the manly passions of borrowings like “Time Is on My Side” and “Pain in My Heart.” Nowadays, he wields a grotesque mask, more a vandalized portrait than a weathered visage. Many rockers have – no doubt reluctantly -- embraced their age as something inevitable and ultimately reasonable, but Jagger at 69 remains in full denial, at least so far as his public image goes. It’s hard to see the real him anywhere in the leathery portrait of Dorian J. that he has become. He’s apparently had the dignity not to give the doctors a go at his face, but the alternative is no less freakish and depressing than Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery disasters. (For his part, Keith never made much of his youth and shed it naturally, without resistance, growing old like some of his idols did. At 68, he certainly ain’t pretty: he looks like his old man.)
Throughout Crossfire Hurricane (but especially at Altamont, when a dog saunters across the stage with far more aplomb and gracefulness than the nonplused singer can muster), Jagger’s stage moves (and btw, fuck you Maroon 5) only grow in their ridiculousness. (Rufus T. once asked “Can your monkey do the dog?” I still have no idea what that means, but it’s a better bet than “Can your grandfather do the chicken?”) Why he still feels compelled to keep at it, any of it, is bewildering. It can’t be the money or the adulation; he can get that in a hundred ways without half as much effort. And that old saw about there being nothing else an old rocker would know how, or care, to do outside a life of live music – that might apply to Keith, but it’s never seemed like the entirety of Mr. London School of Economics’ existence. Hell, he’s never been able to shake the air of condescension he brings to his dirty work, so mustn’t there be something else he values?
For whatever their reasons, what remains of the Rolling Stones will go out tonight in London to begin their 50th anniversary survivors’ lap, joined (in an unprecedented gesture of sentimentality) by Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor, the only two Stones to depart the group without dying. My bet is that tomorrow’s reviews will be ecstatic, will headlines that marvel at their endurance and employ clichés about satisfaction. But let me offer one of my own: The Rolling Stones: Time Is Not on Their Side.
