Entertainment For Lively Minds
Strike a light, that *is* bad
I've now tried twice to watch Scorsese's Rolling Stones film Strike A Light and both times I've got as far as the performance of "Jumping Jack Flash" about ten minutes in, only to run screaming from the room.
Keith is out of time, Ron is out of tune and Charlie is apparently out of the office until tomorrow. The "Yes, I know I'm not Bill Wyman but if I stand here in the wings maybe nobody'll notice" bass player is all but inaudible. Jagger looks like a Botoxed gargoyle being casually Tasered. (He also sounds like Freddie Starr guesting on 3-2-1, but he has since about 1976, so no surprises there.) But worse, far worse, than all that are the waves of arrogant "Hi, we're legends, us" self-satisfaction that come rolling off that stage like an avalanche of dry ice. How can these people have the gall to be so preposterously pleased with themselves while creating a noise so shoddy and feeble it makes the Johnny Thunders Band sound like the Count Basie Orchestra?
Has anyone managed to get through the whole thing? Should I persist - it is Marty, after all - or is that opening a declaration of intentions for the rest of the film?
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Archie
Your second paragraph sums up the Rolling Stones for me. The film therefore reflects this. I have assumed that the film has to be unwatchable for this fact alone. Their main value appears to me to be that they make Bono look less of a cock.
Terrible
Keith Richards' playing these days sounds to me like the audio from one of those "shredding" videos on YouTube.
Cut them some slack Archie,
...they're quite new to this.
I watched it in the cinema
And I realised that I didn't know five or six of the songs - and I've got every Stones album up to and including Goats Head Soup.
I wanted to like it, I really did - I saw The Stones at Twickenham a couple of years ago and it was a great night, but I fell asleep during Shine A Light. Twice.
Surely shome mishtake?
Their influence is undeniable here though amongst contemporary artists of yesterday and the future, yes.
That is the single most...
... hilarious thing I've ever seen. Apparently these chaps have 'done' AC/DC and old Clappers as well. Top find!
Isn’t most live rock music that bad?
I’ve long presumed that most live rock music - the sort of music with loud guitars and stuff - was just a terrible din: badly played and sung versions of carefully constructed records. This is why I never go to live concerts. I think it might be because the big group in my formative years was The Jam. I used to enjoy their concerts as events/ tribal gatherings etc. but the music was pretty terrible. “Catching them live” seems to be a big deal with a lot of music fans, not least on here, but I’m happy just to listen to the records. Perhaps I’m missing out?
You're probably missing out.
This is not Hyde Park with a couple of amps,a Wem P.A and 10000 butterflies.
Technical set up is available for the smallest of professional bands to monitor individual instruments/sounds with a soundman to glue it together in the live mix. Great leaps and bounds have been made in stage sound/house sound through the 90s and beyond. The Stones seem completely unaware of this if the video is anything to go by.
No, it's needn't be
Here, for example, is a band who've been at it for a while, too, and they could sometimes be accused of falling into the same laurel-resting as the Stones, but musically they're still bolted down as tight as the day they were born.
There are a few bum notes in this, yes, but- unlike Keith and Ron's - they're proper, gen-u-yne, real-deal rock 'n' roll bum notes.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
are still sounding pretty good for my money.
"He also sounds like Freddie Starr"
"Let's ask Dusty bin if you were right"
second opinion
I agree with Archie - not good, but ...
can I say in their defence that live in the arena it sounds fantastic, and that Jagger always moved that way.
Maybe it's in the DVD mix - sometimes too much separation is a very bad thing; but that's the way it is when you are professionally louche.
Those close ups are terribly unforgiving though.
Shite a Light
I agree, I wanted the movie to be great, and thought it was awful. They seem completely exposed without the stadium environment. Mick doesn't know where to go and what to do on a small stage.
Mentioning Freddie Starr - about 3 years ago I looked around his villa in Spain when it was for sale. He has his own CD's in the kitchen by the stereo...........
God will strike me dead for this, but…
… Ronnie Wood's pedal steel playing on this is just terrible.
(I know it's not his main instrument, but he hasn't improved any since they did Far Away Eyes 30 years ago)
This should be a permanent thread
"Why aren't the Rolling Stones any good any more?"
I thought we got quite near the answer a while back when some people (me included) said it was to do with the departure of Mick Taylor. Ever since then they've thrown rock and roll shapes but haven't consistently made a rock and roll sound. I think Keith probably thinks it sounds OK and nobody's got the nerve to tell him it doesn't.
And Steven C. I don't think Jagger did always move that way. He started moving that way when they started playing arenas with giant stages. Therefore what he does nowadays is not so much dance as just march around like someone trying to catch a bus.
I saw them twenty years ago when they did one of those "back to the clubs" nights at the 100 Club. They were poor because they simply couldn't adjust the scale of what they usually do. They don't play any more, they just make personal appearances. And, to be fair, most of the audience seem quite happy with that.
Fair point David
and I'm nothing if not open to reasoned argument (even though elsehwere you did suggest I perhaps looked like Hugh Lloyd). And my favourite Stones period is indeed the Mick Taylor years. Even the 'classic' 60s singles rarely get an outing round my house.
As a live act though, I think that the point at which they changed and became an all-singing, all-dancing (or all-marching for a bus, if you will), show-business tribute act was with the departure of Bill Wyman. He was such a low key presence on stage that I never really appreciated how integral he was to the live sound until both after he had left, and I saw his Rhythm Kings in action last year, since when I am a fully paid up subscriber to your 'the Stones rock but no longer roll' theory.
Having said that as all-singing, all-marching for a bus, show-business tribute acts go, they're one of the best.
Thing is...
Although I wasn't kidding myself that the decline of the Stones was anything other than a 35-year headlong plummet, I had at least hoped that a noted - or at least formerly noted - filmmaker would manage to present them on screen in a way that might suspend our disbelief. After all, for a man capable of turning an annoying, whiny, runty bloke from New Jersey into something Very Scary Indeed in Goodfellas, how hard can it be to create a similarly effective artifice and turn today's Rolling Stones into a proper rock 'n' roll band? A quick drop of snazzy editing from the Mighty Thelma here, the odd smidgin of audio jiggery-pokery at the Power Plant there, and you're in business, I would have thought. But no.
And that's not all! The whole film-within-a-film schtick at the beginning (and, presumably, throughout) is a disastrous choice, since all it achieves is to position the viewer at an even greater remove from the live-show experience. Most odd.
The only conclusion I can draw isn't a very comforting one at all. It's the self-styled Great Filmmaker* deciding to make a film about himself making a film about the self-styled Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band in the World playing the songs that provided the Great Filmmaker with some of his most memorable image-and-music marriages. The ultimate endogamous daisy chain. (It's just a shame he couldn't have re-used those original recordings here.)
______
(* I first suspected the game was up when I saw he was billed above the title for Casino - an honour previously bestowed only upon Russ Meyer.)
SETLIST! OK! FIRST SONG!
That did make me chuckle. I know any film has to include at the very least an element of 'mild peril', but I've never seen such tension ascribed to strapping on guitars and stuff and playing some music.
Check out "Song Remains the Same"
JPJ in kitchen, opening letter. "Tour dates? But that's tomorrow!"
Actually, don't check it out. It's crap.
Sorry to be pedantic, but it's actually...
"Tour dates? But that's tomorrow-tomorrow-tomorrow!"
They have a good excuse
Rockers do not generally age well, especially singists. Other examples (sadly) I have seen are Greg Lake, Ian Anderson, Tony McPhee, etc.
But what is Uncle Thom's excuse up there? Bloody awful melody mauler.
I can't tell if you have your irony hat on...
...so I feel I must point out it's a dubbed spoof in the style of StSanders, who seemed to start the genre.
Shine A Light..
Is one of the worst things ever; and I include Jeremy Clarkson, raw onions, standing on nails, Geri Halliwell and Sky News in that assessment. It was that bad I literally couldn't believe what I was seeing - let alone hearing - and found myself fast-forwarding through most of it.
A mate recently commented to me that he wished John Lennon was still around, as he would still be doing amazing things. I pointed him in the direction of this film, told him to watch it, and then to ask himself how he'd feel about seeing The Beatles in that state.
Shine A Light
Should have been a 'No Direction Home' documentary about the Stones - now that would have been worth watching
the solution to the small venue/prancing idiot dilemma
is, of course, to slap a guitar on Jagger and tell him to stand still and play the ruddy thing. Oh, and Richards, less of your posing, just concentrate, will you. Siddown if you need to...
Or ... bring on a real blues legend
That's a different group from the one above
Innit? I would actually pay to see this band perform. I could hear what they were singing about, no prancing about and they can play their instruments. Would not pay too much mind...
as the title says
it's from the album Stripped, from 1995. Trust me, you've spent a tenner on worse. A fine, almost note perfect, almost unplugged album.
Shining Light
I actually thought Shine A Light was one of the best live DVDS I have seen for a long while. I'm no expert on The Stones, but I loved the rough and ready nature of some of the songs, this is how rock and rock should be. I liked the whole DVD so much, I hope someone will buy it for my Christmas, so I won't have to hire it out again. Bloody brilliant, the Buddy Guy number is my favourite.