it’s only rock ’n’ roll: the rolling stones in film - artforum.com / ... http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201209&id=36146 dleopard59 log out ADVERTISE BACK ISSUES CONTACT US SUBSCRIBE follow us search ARTGUIDE IN PRINT 500 WORDS PREVIEWS BOOKFORUM 中文版 DIARY PICKS NEWS VIDEO FILM SLANT A & E IN PRINT NOVEMBER 2012 IT’S ONLY ROCK ’N’ ROLL: THE ROLLING STONES IN FILM SUBSCRIBE recent issues May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 Robert Frank, January 2013 Cocksucker Blues, 1972, 16 mm, color and black- December 2012 and-white, sound, 93 November 2012 minutes. Mick Jagger. Archive to 1962 Photo: Photofest. As the “world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band” celebrates its golden jubilee this year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York pays tribute with a heady cinematic survey: “THE ROLLING STONES: 50 YEARS OF FILM” (NOVEMBER 15–DECEMBER 2). But 2012 marks another anniversary as well. Forty years ago, the Stones embarked on a legendary tour to promote their new album, Exile on Main St., and they engaged two very different filmmakers—Robert Frank and Rollin Binzer—to document the affair on celluloid, producing wildly divergent results: Cocksucker Blues and Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones, respectively. Film historian DAVID E. JAMES traces the events that would ultimately transform the band’s extraordinary engagement with the medium—and with the very public on which not only their stardom but their cultural significance depended. WITH THE BEATLES’ FINAL PERFORMANCE on the roof of the Apple Records building at the beginning of 1969, documented in Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s film Let It Be (1970), the Rolling Stones’ claim to being the greatest rock band in the world was now uncontested. And for the next several years they would dominate rock ’n’ roll, itself the dominant cultural phenomenon of the era. Like other star musicians—Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra in earlier periods, Elvis Presley and the Beatles closer to their own—they crossed over to cinema as their fame grew. But the Stones were unique in attracting the attention of some of the most important avant-garde filmmakers of their time: Peter Whitehead, who made the band’s first major film, Charlie Is My Darling (1965)—a restored and expanded version of which is being released this month—and Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1967), was followed by Jean-Luc Godard (One Plus One [Sympathy for the Devil] [1968]), Kenneth Anger (Invocation of My Demon Brother [1969]), Albert and David Maysles (Gimme Shelter [1970]), Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg (Performance [1970]), and Robert Frank (Cocksucker Blues [1972]). (The Rolling Stones would, of course, remain intermittently involved in making films for decades to come, enlisting the services of Hal Ashby and Martin Scorsese, among others.) Most of these films were concert documentaries, rock ’n’ roll equivalents of the classic backstage musical, but their various forms of experimentalism challenged the direct-cinema tradition of music documentary that had developed from D. A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back (1967) through his Monterey Pop (1968) and Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970). That tradition collapsed—along with our mythic identification of the Stones with diabolical outlaws and the black underclass—in the making of Gimme Shelter, a film famously documenting the last week of the band’s enormously successful 1969 US tour and the free concert given after it, on December 6 of that year, at Altamont Speedway near San Francisco. There, in the last month of the ’60s, local Hells Angels who had been casually recruited to protect the stage terrorized people in the audience and some of the musicians, then stabbed to death a young African-American man who had pulled a gun and allegedly pointed it at the band as they were performing. Days later, the Berkeley Tribe, the most popular underground paper in the Bay Area, announced: “Stones Concert Ends It: America Now Up for Grabs.” Receiving codirector credit with the Maysleses for editing the film, Charlotte Zwerin abandoned the principles of observational, noninterventionist filmmaking, persuading the brothers to invite the Stones, months later, to watch the footage from Altamont, when for the first time they would witness the killing, in slow motion. With astonishing intimacy, the filmmakers thus captured Mick Jagger’s and Charlie Watts’s unguarded reactions to a tragedy in which they had been unwilling participants (and of which, perhaps, they were the unwitting authors). Zwerin then intercut this indelible material with the Maysleses’ footage of the 1 of 3 5/5/13 9:14 PM it’s only rock ’n’ roll: the rolling stones in film - artforum.com / ... http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201209&id=36146 Stones’ tour, producing a modernist, fragmented, and achronological montage-structured film—one that figured Altamont as the apotheosis of the tour, and the killing, in turn, as the ultimate meaning of Altamont. Especially as it was contrasted with Woodstock, released eight months earlier and celebrating what was purportedly the utopian culmination of the era, Gimme Shelter furnished innumerable bromides about the dystopian ending of the ’60s. The Stones’ next tour of the United States (and Canada), in support of their double album Exile on Main St., was also documented on celluloid—this time in two films, very different from Gimme Shelter and from each other: Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues and Rollin Binzer’s Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones (1974). links In spring 1972, most of the Stones were in Los Angeles putting the finishing touches on Exile. Jagger, who had recently discovered Frank’s photographic collection The Americans (1958), invited the Swiss-born artist to shoot the album cover. But by the end of the ’50s, Frank had turned from still photography to film, collaborating, for example, with Alfred Leslie on the seminal underground film Pull My Daisy (1959), an ostensibly spontaneous and improvised short featuring Allen Ginsberg, Larry Rivers, Alice Neel, and other Beat generation icons. For the front of the gatefold cover, the album’s graphic designer, John Van Hamersveld, used a detail of Frank’s photograph Tattoo Parlor, 8th Avenue, New York City, 1958, and for the obverse and inside spread, as well as for the two record sleeves, he made collages of single frames and filmstrips blown up from the eight-minute film Frank shot of the band, S-8 Stones Footage from Exile on Main St. (1972), together with several photographs from The Americans. continued » page 1 2 3 4 5 2 of 3 5/5/13 9:14 PM it’s only rock ’n’ roll: the rolling stones in film - artforum.com / ... http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201209&id=36146&pagenum=1 dleopard59 log out ADVERTISE BACK ISSUES CONTACT US SUBSCRIBE follow us search ARTGUIDE IN PRINT 500 WORDS PREVIEWS BOOKFORUM 中文版 DIARY PICKS NEWS VIDEO FILM SLANT A & E IN PRINT NOVEMBER 2012 IT’S ONLY ROCK ’N’ ROLL: THE ROLLING STONES IN FILM SUBSCRIBE Peter Whitehead, Charlie recent issues Is My Darling, 1965, 16 mm, black-and-white, May 2013 sound, 35 minutes. Brian April 2013 Jones, Charlie Watts, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and March 2013 Bill Wyman. Production February 2013 still. Photo: Irish Photo January 2013 Archive. December 2012 November 2012 Frank had filmed the Stones walking along Los Angeles’s Main Street, a working-class business district Archive to 1962 close to Skid Row, and they posed for him in the lush garden of Jagger’s rented Bel Air mansion. The jerky, handheld, low-resolution, and supposedly unedited footage is in fact intercut with shots of an African- American man strumming a toy guitar on the Bowery in New York and fleeting images of Jagger’s baby. Back on Main Street, the band are seen strolling unhindered on downtown sidewalks, passing signage for movie theaters, shoeshines, coffee shops, and pawnshops. Then, after posed group shots and individual close-ups in the garden, the scene shifts back to the Bowery, where another African-American man is seen dancing with great animation and bravura among cars in the street as he tries to earn tips for wiping windshields. This raw footage ends as abruptly as it began. The work’s informality reflects Frank’s underground aesthetic, and though the film is brief and enigmatic, it suggests that Frank associated the Stones with the alienated, sometimes minority, outsiders of The Americans. The locations and the in-camera montage link the band with the poor and with destitute black street artists. But the Stones are exiles on Main Street, forced into tax exile from England in part by the mismanagement of their considerable income. Visiting Skid Row with their long hair and exotic clothing, they are slumming tourists from another world and another social stratum. Similar tensions between entitlement and sleaze likewise inhabit Frank’s other film about the Stones. By 1972, the band’s always tenuous association with progressive social movements had seeped away in Keith Richards’s heroin addiction and Jagger’s ascent to high society. But, despite Altamont, the Stones had no intention of abandoning their place at the eye of a scofflaw crossfire cultural hurricane and always closed their set with the incendiary “Street Fighting Man.” Beginning with the first concert in Vancouver, the two-month, thirty-city tour was marked by riots, injuries, and arrests in half a dozen cities. Events backstage were often similarly violent and debauched. In response to the still-angry Hells Angels’ threats on Jagger’s life, Richards packed a revolver throughout, while the sex and drugs in the tour’s extended parties, including a three-day stay at the Chicago Playboy Mansion, reached epic levels. Cocksucker Blues follows what had become the standard structure of the rock ’n’ roll backstage-musical film, alternating between the spectacle of onstage performance and the narrative of the offstage scenes that link them.