You and What Army

DVD REVIEW: Some Girls Live in Texas 1978

 

    The last great peak and subsequent artistic decline of a great rock & roll band — maybe the greatest rock & roll band — was signified by one t-shirt.
    Said t-shirt was on display on a roastingly hot July night in 1978 when the Rolling Stones played Ft. Worth's Will Rogers Memorial Center on their tour to promote the newly released Some Girls.  The show, nicely filmed on grainy 16mm stock and vividly recorded, is just out on DVD as Some Girls Live in Texas 1978 (Eagle Rock Entertainment).
    The Stones had been on the ropes lately: not only was Keith Richards facing a heavy prison sentence for possessing some 22 grams of heroin, but the band was coming off three consecutive mediocre albums, as well as a damaging scandal over a viciously sexist ad for their previous record, Black and Blue.
    And then there was the matter of punk rock.   The Stones were all too aware of punk and how it directly refuted the luxuriant torpor of their mid-'70s work.  The Stones had been integral players in rock's evolution — through the British Invasion, blues revivalism, baroque pop, psychedelia, pastoral rock and '70s excess — right up until punk.  This was the first musical movement that the Stones were simply too old to have been a part of.   Which must have been pretty tough to take, especially for the vain and trendy Jagger.   All they could do was don punk's vestments, like Hannibal Lecter wearing the skin of his murder victims.
    And so at this concert, we witness the unseemly spectacle of Mick Jagger parading around in a t-shirt with the word DESTROY atop a swastika.  (Back then, even provincial squares would have picked up on the shirt's punk rock style; today, Jagger would be accused of being a Nazi sympathizer.)   The thing is, Michael Philip Jagger was born during World War II; the swastika had a much different significance to his generation than to the punks, precisely why the latter used it to twit their elders, thereby setting themselves apart from them.  It's one thing for Sid Vicious to sport a swastika, but when Mick Jagger does it, it's a calculating and somewhat desperate pose.  For the Rolling Stones, the writing wasn't just on the wall, it was on Mick Jagger's chest.
    Jagger's bandmates are beginning to modify their look too, metamorphosing from the debauched cocaine gypsy look of earlier in the decade and into what would become the postmodern Kennedy-era mode of the '80s, which signified a period the Stones had actually lived through and utterly demolished.   So now, in their mid 30s, the Stones were starting to lose their cultural currency.
    They shot back with Some Girls, which incorporated modern brevity and a punky kick up the BPMs, while dispensing with the horns, synths and backing singers that had draped all over the previous few albums like an ostrich boa.
    It was their last great album, and the start of rock's agonizingly slow generational changing of the guard.  Even the Rolling Stones bowed to its power, but it would be 13 long years until punk broke.
    In a 20-minute 2011 interview included on the DVD, Jagger says punk had more of an effect on the band's playing than its writing, which accounts for the Ft. Worth show's sped-up takes on just about every song in the set — and they've streamlined everything, eliminating the extended guitar soloing of yore, as well as minimizing the number of musicians on stage.
    The minimalism ran deep on this tour.  The Stones played a great variety of venues on that tour, from theatres to arenas to stadiums, partly to keep things interesting, partly to echo the intimacy of punk shows.   This show was a convention center gig — 3,000 capacity, a tiny room for such a huge band.
    Ron Wood indulgently changes guitars for virtually every song, but that's about the most decadent aspect of the show's production values.   Unlike the previous tour, there are no gigantic inflatable phalluses or Chinese dragons spewing confetti from humongous unfolding lotus flower stages — like Some Girls itself, it's a stripped-down presentation.  On the 1975 tour they were often on stage for two and a half hours, which is either indulgent or generous, depending on how you look at it; perhaps as a reaction to punk concision, perhaps owing to drug-induced malaise, this show is well under an hour and half.
    And after years of coasting on their back catalogue, the Stones were determined to coast no longer: despite the fact that fans had had barely five weeks to absorb the new material, the band plays seven songs in a row from the new album, sandwiched by several deep cuts from previous albums, two Chuck Berry covers and only three bona fide hits.  They begin with a four-song career recap (Berry's "Let It Rock," "All Down the Line," "Honky Tonk Women" and "Star, Star"), and then dive into most of Some Girls.  It's hard to imagine they had ever before played seven songs in a row from their most recent album.  They almost certainly haven't dared to do it since.
    At the time, Jagger in particular was hitting downtown Manhattan clubs, picking up on not just punk but disco and rap (as it was then commonly called), and the way the hippest New York bands synthesized it all.  And it shows up in the new music they were playing.  True, they were still clinging to old warhorse covers like "Love in Vain" and "Let It Rock" but they were also absorbing the most important underground musical trends of the late '70s.  And now they were somewhat boldly bringing them to the hinterlands.
    It was a wildly uneven tour — a Houston newspaper critic wrote of a show only two days later: “It was a dismal experience — to be endured, not enjoyed.”   But perhaps because the cameras were rolling this night, the band bore down and cranked out a kick-ass rock show.
    There's life in the old boys yet.   They might have seemed silly asserting bad boy status while being millionaire jet-setters but the prospect of Richards serving very lengthy jail time must have been as hardcore as it gets for the entire band, and it shows in a truly bad-ass performance.
    The Stones had been playing together for 16 years by this point, and were 20 shows into the tour, so they were warmed up.  Like the Led Zeppelin concert footage that finally got issued some years ago, Some Girls Live in Texas 1978 shows a world-class rock group in action, the better to understand its mechanics, its sonic architecture. Richards, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman form a V-8 rhythm section, the close-shorn Watts kicking ass like a pissed-off monk.
    The ring and middle fingers of bassist Bill Wyman's fretting hand are taped together — he'd broken a knuckle in a stage fall days earlier — and even still, he's laying down some incredible lines, with a loopy, loping tone that directly recalls bassists for the likes of Slim Harpo or Howlin' Wolf.  As much as anyone in the Stones, Bill Wyman was keeping it real.   He is perhaps the most underrated bassist in rock history.
    The stage arrangement is actually kind of bizarre: with no less than five fridge-sized amplifier cabinets, Wyman occupies the entire right half of the stage, and everyone else — Richards, Wood, the two keyboardists and, for the most part, Jagger — inhabit the other half.  And so Wyman, virtually stock-still except for his hands, is out there all by himself, mostly in the dark.   No one in the band even seems to look at him as he stares straight out in the crowd, presumably scouting for chicks. It really is peculiar, and the band was probably so dysfunctional that they didn't think twice about it.
    Ron Wood also gets a fair amount of onstage stick.  He is (and always will be) the new boy in the band, and Jagger constantly reminds him of that fact.  At one point, Jagger takes Wood's cigarette and crushes it out on the floor; at various points in the show, he whips Wood with a towel, spanks him on the ass, pretends to slap his face and fondles his crotch while the poor man is trying to play a solo — just in case Wood still didn't understand the band's pecking order.  Jagger doesn't dare attempt anything of the kind with the forbidding Richards.
    Wood and Richards' guitars are helpfully panned hard left and right in the stereo mix, respectively, the better to hear their interplay, what Richards called "weaving": constantly and seamlessly passing lead and rhythm parts between the two guitarists.
    Wood's predecessor Mick Taylor played flowing, lyrical narratives; Wood merely plays series of tough-sounding notes in the same key as the song.  So where Taylor's solos were spotlights for his stunning talent, Wood's solos are merely placeholders, an occasion for Jagger to take a breather before singing another verse.  Wood's solo on "Love in Vain" is little more than a tribute to the one Taylor played on Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out.   The move away from epic showcase soloing suited the band's new, more compact approach anyway: Some Girls Live in Texas 1978 catches the band in transition, between the '70s blues-rock Stones and the '80s "Start Me Up" Stones with their day-glo spandex and corporate sponsorships.  It also shifted the focus even more squarely on Jagger and Richards.
    The Stones had always adapted to changing trends while stubbornly — or helplessly — maintaining their bluesy essence.   The only extended workout at the Ft. Worth show is the eight-and-a-half-minute discoid chug of "Miss You."  It boasts no less than three separate guitar solo sections, but that's authentically disco — it's a live extended mix.   They hit an incantatory stride on the tune, and afterwards Watts whoops it up on the drums in celebration.  (Charlie's good tonight, ain't he?)   Just about everything gets played at a much faster tempo than on record.  Towards the end of the show, Jagger sarcastically announces that "If the band is lacking energy, it's because they spent all last night fuckin'… We do our best," a comment laced with several layers of irony.
    One of the great things about that rendition of "Miss You" is that Jagger sings the lyrics like they're really about missing someone, as opposed to some affected Mick Jagger pose of missing someone.   Maybe it's just because he knows he's being filmed, but particularly on the new material Jagger really seems to mean what he's singing, instead of merely making lubricious sound-shapes with those giblet lips.  Or maybe it's because Some Girls is one of their most autobiographical albums — "We're talking heroin with the president," Jagger yowls in "Respectable," and there are plenty of other self-referential songs, like "Beast of Burden" (apparently a metaphor for Mick and Keith's working relationship in the wake of the latter's drug addiction), "Shattered," and Keith's "Before They Make Me Run" (which they don't play here, unfortunately).
    And when Jagger isn't singing, he erupts into particularly energetic dancing.  Sometimes one is struck anew by Jagger's absolutely freakish stage manner, a language all his own that he willed everyone else to understand.  It's completely unself-conscious and yet totally self-aware at the same time.  The only time Jagger really looks awkward is when he picks up a guitar for several songs and plays one, maybe two (nearly inaudible) chords at most, and for the rest of the song the guitar is an albatross around his neck; he simply doesn't know what to do with this foreign object.
    It's nearly an hour into the show before they ease up on the throttle with the throwaway country pastiche "Faraway Eyes." It really is shaky, with the band almost clumsily feeling their way through the song; Jagger even gets fed up with his keyboard and moves to another midway through the tune, and throws a wobbly cue for guest violinist Doug Kershaw to start his solo.   Jagger then continues to sing a song that is dreadfully condescending to southerners — to a roomful of them.
    After "Love in Vain," they begin to lift the show out of the doldrums and into a stratospheric final sprint: "Tumbling Dice," "Happy," "Sweet Little Sixteen" (interesting that they play Chuck Berry tunes at such crucial places in the set), "Brown Sugar" and then "Jumping Jack Flash" with an extended coda, Richards ordering up another round of the closing riff as if he just can't bear to leave the stage.
    In the '60s and early '70s, the Rolling Stones vividly embodied things about their generation, and even the culture at large.  "They weren't just a musical group," the New York Times' Robert Palmer once wrote, "they were news."   On this tour, they proved that all over again.  The Stones may have cynically co-opted punk rock, but in doing so they embodied something momentous: the passing of the rock & roll torch.   To their everlasting credit, as demonstrated on nearly every minute of this film, they did it with consummate flair.

 

A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS: YOU ARE NOT WHAT YOU OWN

 

    I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas every year throughout my childhood.  It was an actual event — this was before there were VCRs, much less DVDs or TiVo, and you had to wait an entire year before you could see it again.  My family didn't celebrate Christmas and yet this Yuletide classic made a huge, lifelong impact on me.  It's quite a subversive little piece of work.
    The set-up is when Charlie Brown goes to his familiar brick wall and confides to Linus that he's "depressed" because he can't relate to the holiday spirit.   He's alienated by the "commercialism" — a five-syllable concept I needed my parents to explain — of Christmas.  That was a heady idea for an eight-year-old.  In today's parlance, it occupied my mind.
    Everyone around Charlie Brown has been sucked in by commercialism.  For Christmas, Lucy wants "real estate"; Charlie Brown's little sister Sally wants cash — "in 10s and 20s."   Even Snoopy decks out his doghouse with several gaudy box-fulls of decorations and wins first prize — "money, money, money," grumbles Charlie Brown — in the neighborhood's lights-and-display contest.  Charlie Brown's alienation is so profound, he seeks psychiatric help (from Lucy, who, naturally, is more excited about collecting her five-cent fee than she is about helping her patient).  His therapy is to direct the school Christmas play, a non-commercial statement of the holiday's true meaning.
    (The show is larded with sarcasm, yet another intellectual conceit I was just starting to get my head around.  Linus knocks his little fist on a fake Christmas tree with a hollow metallic clang and remarks, his adorable little lisp bearing all the bitterness it can muster, "This really brings Christmas close to a person.")
    Commercialism, it turns out, is everywhere and has devalued everything: Lucy even complains to the piano-playing Schroeder that no musician is great unless they've been on a bubblegum card.
    Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz felt this commercialism thing deeply, and his objection pervades the show in many, sometimes not-so-obvious ways.  The purposely slow pace, simple artwork, deadpan humor and long silences all defy modern glitz and velocity.  In Schultz's biography, producer Lee Mendelson recalled the cartoonist adamantly refusing to allow a laugh track, then de rigeur for network television comedy — Schulz, Mendelson said, wanted to "let the people at home enjoy the show at their own speed, in their own way."  Which is entirely, ingeniously in keeping with the show's message.
    Mendelson objected to Linus' speech from the Gospel of Luke, feeling it would narrow the audience for the show.  Schulz insisted, and it became a classic moment in television history — and not necessarily because it directly preached Christian doctrine.  That speech affected me deeply, and still does.  It showed me — very, very early in life — that consumerism can infiltrate personal relationships, and even your own heart and soul, but that you can refuse and resist even the most powerful forces.  All you have to do is think for yourself.  It changed me forever.
    It's ironic, then, that the reason why the show-closing "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" fades out before the final line is that originally an announcer broke in to proclaim that this enduring ode to anti-commercialism was "Brought to you by the people in your town who bottle Coca-Cola!"  As Charlie Brown would say…  AAUGH!

MARK SANDMAN: CURE FOR PAIN DOC

    You may never have heard of Morphine.   They were an anomaly in the alt-rock era: a band that didn't have a guitar.  They played what the band dubbed "low-rock": noirish, jazzy-bluesy music made with a minimalistic amalgam of two-string slide bass, baritone sax and drums, topped by the neo-Beat stylings of singer Mark Sandman.  Morphine had a large cult following and toured the world constantly, but never really cracked the big-time. So maybe Sandman, charismatic as he was, seems like an unlikely subject of a documentary. But then rock documentaries are changing.
    Early in the rock era, only the very biggest bands, like the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, were extensively documented.   Film stock was expensive, the cameras were too bulky for many situations, and there simply weren't many venues for what they'd shoot anyway — not too many places were keen on airing a 90-minute profile of Herman's Hermits.
    But now there's an ample supply of documentaries because there's an ample supply of raw material.  The period covered by rock docs has entered the late '80s and early '90s, when inexpensive, portable technology enabled even the most obscure bands to document virtually every moment of their existence.  MTV and other music media also provide a deep pool of archival footage.  Along with affordable high-quality video cameras and consumer-friendly digital video editing software, this has revolutionized the rock doc.
    So now we have the technology.  The question is, what to do with it? Most docs take the easy route and tell a band's story in chronological order.  But that's not always the most illuminating way of doing it.  Which is where the upcoming rock doc Cure for Pain: The Mark Sandman Story comes in.
    Made by filmmakers Robert G. Bralver, Jeff Broadway and David Ferino, Cure for Pain is cobbled together from pan-and-scanned photos and postcards, low-fi interview footage blown up so large that it looks like it was shot on a surveillance camera, music videos, pages from Sandman's mother's published memoir, home movies, TV news clips, and concert footage, as well as newly shot interviews with contemporaries such as Les Claypool, Josh Homme, Mike Watt, and Ben Harper, as well as various bandmates, critics and family members.
    That's all standard stuff, but Cure for Pain isn't constructed as the usual beginning-to-end tale.  First, there's the rise of Sandman's career, starting with some basic family background material.  Sandman wandered the globe for six or seven years, from Alaska to Belize, then returned to Boston to found the band Treat Her Right.  Then there's Morphine's ascent which, after a digression about their unusual instrumentation, culminates in "people going crazy and selling out shows," as their manager so timelessly puts it.
    But then after 34 minutes the film loops back around to Sandman's early life again.  And that's when things get interesting.  Turns out that his two younger brothers both died very young, Roger from natural causes, Jon from an unexplained fall from a window.  Sandman was particularly distraught about Jon's death; his mother says "He really broke down.  A lot.  I ached for him."  On top of it all,  Sandman was alienated from his parents, who didn't understand their misfit son's career choice.  It's like seeing a play from the audience and then seeing it again from backstage, behind the scenes, and it elevates Cure for Pain from a mere editing job and into something meaningful.
    As Sandman's longtime girlfriend Sabine Hrechdakian (full disclosure: she is a friend of mine and gave me a DVD screener of the film) says: his brothers' death thrust into relief the fact that "you're alive, what are you going to do?"  Sandman funneled his grief, as well as a lust for life, into a torrent of music; as his mother says, he was determined "to be somebody special."  Suddenly, the enigmatic Sandman snaps into focus.  He was famously evasive in interviews — and now we realize he was protecting himself.  His songs become more autobiographical than they first seem.  His three-man band, as several interviewees suggest, was a kind of surrogate for his relationship with his two departed brothers — bandmate Dana Colley even played sax, just like Sandman's late brother Jon.  And now the title of the film (and the band's name) makes all the sense in the world.
    With his striking Easter Island statue looks, Sandman radiated old-school cool, coming off like a laconic Jewish Bogart. As the Mighty Mighty Bosstones' Dicky Barrett notes, "There was real magic to the guy."  The movie actually helps to convey that ineffable quality.  In fact, Cure for Pain begins to limn the very basis of cool — as Sandman's parents note, he flouted conventions and yet needed "unconditional love and acceptance."  That's pretty much it in a nutshell.
    It's tempting to say that it all leads up to Sandman's fatal heart attack on stage at a festival show in the remote Italian hill town of Palestrina on a hot July night in 1999; the incident comprises the final twenty minutes of the film.  But his death doesn't seem to be the culmination of anything — it just... happened.  The film makes no mention of the reason for Sandman's heart attack.  We are given no clue, kind of a glaring omission for a documentary about a person's life.  And yet that might actually be better, since now we're just left with the bare fact of his passing, and that leads to one of the key points of the movie.
    "It forced people to look at each other and celebrate the fact that we had each other," says Morphine drummer Billy Conway, "and we had a family and a community, and we had each other to get through losing him."  So beyond what it has to say about Sandman, Cure for Pain also makes a point that perhaps not everyone realizes: around just about every band, there is a family, a circle of friends, lovers, crew members and biological relatives bound tightly together.  The bigger the band, the more closely the wagons circle.   Sometimes people join the family by accident.  The hard rocking Queens of the Stone Age could not be more unlike Morphine but fate decreed that they should be the next band onstage after Sandman died.   The description of the instant bond between QOTSA and the surviving members of Morphine is incredibly moving.  The testimony of the festival's still youthful organizers, sweet, soulful people, might bring you to tears.
    Plenty of documentaries succeed in telling a story.  But very few succeed at portraying a character.  But more than just a portrait of one particular musician, Cure for Pain imparts the larger realities of musical life and the bittersweet nature of love and loss.
    Cure for Pain will hit the festival circuit soon.

ODDSAC: ANIMAL COLLECTIVE GETS WIGGY WITH IT

    Some great artistic achievements are based on failure — the failure, for instance, of a distorted guitar to sound like a saxophone, of the written word to replicate the stream of consciousness, of any creation to come out exactly the way it was envisioned.  It takes an astute artist to revel in the fruits of failure.  Maybe that's what Animal Collective's "visual album" ODDSAC is about.  After all, they're a "collective" — compromising individual creative intent is baked right into their concept, and it's worked out beautifully for them.
     In their own way, many vignettes in the 54-minute film, now out on DVD, depict failure: A woman vainly tries to stop evil black ooze from seeping out of a wall; a wholesome family marshmallow roast turns into a cataclysmic horror-show; a vampire gets caught in the daylight and dies an agonizing death; an irascible wraith can't keep some women from gleefully throwing food and paint at each other.  In each case, failure is spectacular.
     It's ironic then, that ODDSAC has been accused of failing at something it doesn't try to do: make sense.
     ODDSAC was directed by Danny Perez, who made the videos for Animal Collective's "Who Could Win a Rabbit?" and "Summertime Clothes" as well doing live concert projections for Black Dice and Animal Collective's Panda Bear.  It's an aptly named film, a grab-bag of imagery that variously recalls '80s B horror movies, video art you'd see at the Whitney Biennial, and a hot-rodded version of iTunes Visualizer.  The imagery ranges from the elemental (a bogeyman stalking a family in the woods at night) to the idiosyncratic (the drummer bashing in the middle of a surrealistically rocky dry riverbed).  Various aspects recall early '80s videos by the Residents (a band whom Animal Collective recalls in several ways), Kenneth Anger films like Invocation of My Demon Brother, Matthew Barney's Cremaster series, Elias Merhige's Begotten, and The Blair Witch Project.  It also works purely as a light show.
     That last reference — the light show — might be the most germane of all.  Seeing as most people seem to listen to their music while they're walking around or driving or dancing or partying, maybe these days an album-length movie is what it takes to make folks just sit on the couch and listen to music.  (Vinyl performs a similar function, since it also forces people to listen at home and pay attention.)  ODDSAC is like the eternal stoner pastime of listening to music while watching TV with the sound off, except this time the musicians and a director, not fate, are guiding and synchronizing the imagery.  The film's longest set piece, the vampire stalking the family in the forest, does have a linear narrative, but it's so familiar to anyone who watches movies that the story disappears and becomes more of an ambient piece.  The thing is so enigmatic that it practically begs to have things read into it — like being a meditation on failure.  Even the title ODDSAC seems like an acronym that needs to be filled in.
     It seems unlikely that ODDSAC was ever intended to have a coherent overall narrative or to be something that, as one write-up put it, is something that one has to "decipher" — it's just something cool to watch while you're listening to the music, and something cool to listen to while you watch the visuals, no more and no less.
     Basically, this is psychedelia — every frame of the live action imagery is digitally tweaked in supersaturated gummi bear colors for an otherworldly psychoactive effect. Then there are several hyperspeed montages, particularly an overwhelming sequence that recaps virtually the entire film in a blizzard of almost subliminal micro-cuts.  Here, color isn't cheery, it's aggressive, a swarming onslaught of photons assaulting the retina like killer bees.  There's also virtually no diegetic sound anywhere in the film, and that's as it should be — words have no place in the psychedelic experience.
     But it's psychedelia rendered in the digital idiom, not the blobby analogue effects of yore.  A case in point is the completely abstract six-and-a-half-minute sequence near the middle of the film, a pointillistic Rorschach test that, even more than the rest of ODDSAC, seems laser-aimed at tender minds impaired by contraband.  The digital aspect is key.  In terms of democratizing a genre, digital film technology is right behind digital sound technology.  Hi-def DV cameras are getting cheaper every day and there's all kinds of user-friendly editing and post-production software out there; some of it is even free.  Even at the time, people realized how visionary The Blair Witch Project was — it was obviously the future, because we'd already seen how DIY music recording had exploded.  Like Animal Collective's music itself, ODDSAC demonstrates what can be done when people with good ideas have access to powerful creative tools.
     Even if you stop suspending your disbelief and look at the film as people performing in front of a camera, ODDSAC still reads as, well, odd, and even a bit unsettling.  After all, this is footage of a bunch of almost certainly stoned people smeared with garish, sparkling liquids or wearing funny clothes and wigs, doing very weird and sometimes dangerous things in the woods.  Animal Collective's Deakin (Josh Dibb) really is thrashing around in a swamp while colored smoke and lurid geysers of glop spurt out of his head; the band's Avey Tare (Dave Portner) really is walking blindfolded while a handful of black-clad figures whirl flaming pots of kerosene around him.  Perez seems to acknowledge this way of looking at the film — at one point in the climactic Dionysian food fight he draws the camera back from the action to reveal that it's actually taking place on a brightly lit, three-walled set apparently in the middle of the woods.  To his credit, it only heightens the dark strangeness of the scene.
     There are only six proper songs here; the film's prettiest number accompanies a sublime passage of a ponytailed vampire, like something out of a Marilyn Manson video, slowly canoeing down a digitally manipulated moonlit river.  Aside from those few songs, the rest is interstitial noise.  Check out the soundtrack that accompanies the ineffable imagery of a man who is little more than a faceless head of hair atop a bulbous blue suit, kneeling by a stream and cleaning amniotic gook from gigantic eggs — it's basically the sound of running water and some weird whimpering.  So you probably don't want to listen to ODDSAC with the picture off; as advertised, the visuals and the sound really are inseparable.
    The more abstract the visuals, the more abstract the music and the soundtrack often becomes as noisy and collagistic as what's on screen, very unlike the band's recent, more tuneful music.  These more discordant passages – and they form a large proportion of the film — and the dark, even horrific live action scenes, represent a flipside to Animal Collective's often idyllic latter-day sound.  You may never hear their music the same way again, which is perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the movie.
     And so, to quote Complete Double Rainbow guy, what does it mean?  Nothing.  The whole idea is to turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.  Then again, since there is some narrative in ODDSAC, it actually fails at not meaning anything.  Naturally, it does so fairly spectacularly.

MILES DAVIS: LIVE IN COPENHAGEN 1969 DVD

    Miles Davis often gets compared to Pablo Picasso because, like the Spanish master, he went through several distinct, iconoclastic artistic periods and never looked back.  That's why Davis' concert on November 4, 1969, at the Tivoli Koncertsal in Copenhagen might come as a surprise.  Three months earlier, the five men onstage had been among the musicians who recorded the landmark Bitches Brew.  It was Davis' new direction, absorbing contemporaries like Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix, and prominently featuring a bass clarinet and electric guitar, as well as straight-ahead rock-influenced beats that punctuated a palpable sense of space.  You'll hear none of that during this concert.
     The band includes Wayne Shorter, a holdover from Davis' previous quintet, on sax; electric keyboardist Chick Corea; stand-up bassist Dave Holland; and drummer Jack DeJohnette.  Each of them soon to be giants of jazz fusion, they're called Davis' "lost quintet" because they never made any studio recordings as a fivesome.  That's why, as flawed as the performance might be, this is a priceless and vivid document. It's just so perplexing that the show sounds nothing like what's on Bitches Brew, despite the fact that the DVD is included with Bitches Brew: The 40th Anniversary Collector's Edition, out September 14th.
     The difference from Davis' recent recorded work is all about the groove.  In A Silent Way had been released to a rapturous reception a couple of months before and Davis had established his bold new thing, and yet the starkness and steady, straight-eighth-note rhythms of that album, not to mention those of Bitches Brew, just aren't here — DeJohnette plays rollin' 'n' tumblin' jazz drums and Holland plays very free, non-repeating lines; everyone fills every square inch of the sonic canvas.  It's much closer to his previous quintet, albeit wilder and more free, than to the trailblazing music he'd been recording for well over nine months.  In terms of a stylistic backslide, it would be like Dylan playing an all-acoustic set while touring Highway 61 Revisited.  Or Picasso painting something all in blue after Les Demoiselles D'Avignon.
     Did Davis think the audience wasn't ready for the new approach?  He's hardly known for such artistic compromise.  Or maybe that's just where the band felt most comfortable, so he let them run with it?
     At the Tivoli, the band seems to be so raring to go that they begin playing before the theatre's phantasmagorical curtain even opens; Corea plays a figure on the Rhodes keyboard and right on cue from a deft drum flourish, the curtains swing open to reveal the band and Davis himself, who is resplendent in a psychedelic outfit: a multicolored vest, deep blue scarf and a hot pink shirt with a collar wide enough to fly a 747.  They kick into "Directions," their standard opener at the time.
    Davis and Shorter announce the theme once through, then it's off to the races as another difference from Bitches Brew appears.  Davis' studio recordings from this period through 1975 were edited by Teo Macero, who deliberately featured Davis' soloing.   That doesn't happen here — instead the band goes through the batting order each time: Davis, Shorter, Corea.  "Directions" sets a precedent for the rest of the night: The rhythm section hangs relatively tight while Davis solos, but as soon as he's done, it's like when a teacher leaves the classroom and the kids run riot.
     Typically, Davis leads off the tune with only the vaguest suggestion of the head melody, like someone dashing off a signature rather than fully writing out the letters, and commences soloing far more dramatically than he ever had before, both less precise and more impassioned.   The whole band plays busily at almost all times, giving the music a continually cluttered feeling completely at odds with everything Davis had been doing for the past fifteen years, and especially Bitches Brew.
     Why doesn't it, for lack of a better word, rock?  For one thing, Bitches Brew guitarist John McLaughlin was unavailable at the time — he was now with former Davis drummer Tony Williams' band Lifetime.  So there's no rock instrumentation in the band with the possible exception of Corea's Fender Rhodes piano, which does without the Dr. Who-like ring modulator effect he would adopt the following year.  The most obvious reason is that DeJohnette almost completely avoids rock beats, but it's also well worth noting that Holland is playing stand-up bass, not electric: the sheer air-moving gut-punch of an electric bass lends a very different force to a band.  It was only after Holland left the following year, replaced by Stevie Wonder's much more groove-oriented electric bassist Michael Henderson, that the characteristic sound of Davis' electric period emerged.
    Instead, this is the extreme abstract fringe of "time, no changes," Davis' approach with the previous quintet, expanded into an entire hour-plus set of continuous music mired in a purgatory between the more standard structures and tonality of the previous quintet and the free jazz that Davis had so determinedly avoided in his search for another way forward.
     You don't even need to watch the DVD to know what was happening — it's right there in the set list. Older numbers like "Agitation" and the Sammy Cahn-Jule Styne standard "I Fall in Love Too Easily," both of which the justly hallowed Shorter/Herbie Hancock/Ron Carter/Tony Williams quintet played two years earlier on a European tour, share the bill with as-yet-unreleased tunes with funky titles like "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" and "Bitches Brew."  They don't play anything from In a Silent Way (although "Directions" had been recorded during those sessions).  It's a strange, in-between time for Davis.
     The previous quintet played tight and fast — their microprocessors were faster than yours and mine — like a sporty Italian convertible.  The music turned on a dime from febrile to spare and meditative, and everything, even the explosions, was impeccably articulated.  It was no coincidence that the band sported tuxes and bow-ties.
     But only two years later, things had changed dramatically.  Davis' band was now less like a finely tuned Alfa Romeo and more like a Camaro with no muffler, especially with the constant roar of the bass and drums.  Where Ron Carter and Tony Williams would often drop out and let the other players go off on interludes, Holland and DeJohnette just set up a relentless rhythmic undertow and the soloists blow over it with little subtlety.  Hello, 1970s!  Even their clothes tell the story: instead of the matching tuxes of only two years before, the band sports bell-bottoms.  For better or worse, the music embodies the times — tumultous and self-indulgent.
     Individually, the musicians are mostly brilliant but the combination just isn't strong at this broken place in Davis' development.  The previous quintet wrung astonishing creativity from established forms; the new quintet was on the way to destroying those forms.  And while destroying stuff might sound pretty cool, it's still something that can be done well or done badly.
     The mercurial Shorter alternates between non-committal doodling and unabashed imitations of Coltrane's "sheets of sound"; it's not his night.  But perhaps the prime offender is Chick Corea.  While Corea's comping is interesting throughout the gig, his solos are a much different story — rather than developing anything thematically or taking the music into a compelling new direction, he simply plays neurotically fidgety little runs, dashing off the same kind of scrabbling solo on virtually every tune.  Midway through Davis' solo on "Bitches Brew" the band hits one of the evening's few solid grooves, but then everyone comes to a grinding halt during Corea's noodley, interminable solo — and it doesn't seem like they were yielding to a jazzy sense of space and dynamics, but that they simply gave up on trying to play with him.
     Things improve after the frenetic "Agitation," when Davis takes it down with a heartbreaking solo turn on "I Fall in Love Too Easily," just Corea chiming in with sparse chords.  Davis' solo is almost shockingly intimate, like a late-night confession, at one point his impeccable tone breaking with emotion; it's in such deep contrast to the preceding pyrotechnics.  Just to drive home the point, it segues into an abridged take on "Sanctuary" from Bitches Brew, featuring Davis and Shorter playing an extended theme in exquisite unison.  Shimmering, weightless, and mounting to a thundering riff-storm, it's one of the highlights of the set.
     The Nawlins strut of the album version of "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" surfaces briefly and highly abstracted — but then, as usual, the rhythm section completely atomizes under Shorter's solo. "Bitches Brew" hits a groove too, but it's a much different piece from the album version's several vividly etched motifs and funky pulse.  Besides lacking John McLaughlin's electric guitar, there's none of that electrifying echo on Davis' trumpet, even though it was certainly possible to do that live in 1969.  The tune's killer one-note bass hook is downright vestigial.
     The band only begins to get it together for the closing number "It's About That Time."  As ever, the groove disintegrates during Shorter's solo.  Corea does his fidgety neurotic schtick once again, but this time, Holland and DeJohnette follow suit, and it sounds kind of great; it's also lapsed completely into free jazz, sounding a bit uncomfortably like one of those "Shreds" videos.  Holland's spectral bowed solo is one of the most riveting moments of the entire set.  Davis comes back in, picking up Holland's vibe brilliantly with a coolly economical solo and you’re reminded of how it should have been for the whole set.  DeJohnette kicks in with the only straight-ahead 2/2 beat of the entire evening until Davis cuts it abruptly short with "The Theme," the little riff he'd been closing his shows with for years.
    To be fair, they were having an off night — other shows on the tour, like the Salle Pleyel show in Paris the night before and the show in Rotterdam several days later, are much better, mostly because Corea isn't doing his best impression of a skittish cat.  It's just bad luck that this was the show that got videotaped.
    And I'm not the only one who thinks Corea stunk up the gig — as they get ready to leave the stage, Davis glowers at his keyboardist, shooting him a look that could kill small mammals.  Corea knows he's in the doghouse and in an awkward move that Rosemary Woods would have admired, deliberately avoids his boss' caustic gaze.  Picasso never had to put up with this kind of thing.

THE BILLY PAUL DOC: AM I DISSEMBLING ENOUGH FOR YOU?

     In December 1972, soul singer Billy Paul scored a #1 pop and r&b hit with a smoldering ode to adultery called "Me and Mrs. Jones."  Although he had a minor hit years later, Paul never returned to the public consciousness.  But why?  The documentary Am I Black Enough for You (2009) has the answer… somewhere.
    Paul had quite a life before "Me and Mrs. Jones": he was a child singer on Philadelphia radio, apparently did a brief stint as a boxer, served in the army alongside Elvis, and sang with John Coltrane, among others.  But the film, by Swedish director Göran Olsson, glosses over all that in favor of one pivotal incident in Paul's career.  After "Me and Mrs. Jones," the tried-and-true thing would have been to release another pop song.  Paul had a half-decent one on his album, but instead the follow-up was a funky slice of Black Power uplift called "Am I Black Enough for You."

We're gonna move on up
One by one
We ain't gonna stop
Until the work is done

    The single flopped.  It sounds like pretty innocuous, even feel-good stuff now, but back in 1972 "White America couldn't understand," explains proto-gangsta rapper Schoolly D, who covered the tune 17 years later.  "'Wait a minute — this man wants to make love. Why is he black now?'"  Paul's career never recovered.
     Much of the film is devoted to unraveling that fateful decision and its consequences.  Paul decries it this day.  Kenny Gamble scoffs, "Billy Paul is a madman," adding that Paul simply never came up with another song as good as "Me and Mrs. Jones."  Olsson fails to point out that Gamble is dissembling — along with his Philadelphia International Records partner Leon Huff, it was precisely Gamble's responsibility to compose and produce the hits for Paul.  Later, Gamble contradicts himself and says "Am I Black Enough for You" "was great and Billy sounded great doing it."
    Gamble digs himself a deeper hole when he says the decision to release the song as a single was based on the consensus of "most of the disk jockeys" and the label's distributor, CBS.  But disk jockeys clearly disliked the song; otherwise it would likely have been a hit.  And CBS' Clive Davis explicitly says he opposed it, which makes abundant sense, knowing his sensibilities.  Paul also says Davis was against it. So Gamble's statement doesn't hold much water.
     Gamble had a penchant for making social statements both on and off his records, and it may have overcome his commercial judgment.  But "Am I Black Enough for You" was hardly an anomaly in Paul's catalogue.  The Roots' redoubtable drummer Questlove calls Paul "one of the criminally unmentioned proprietors of socially conscious post-revolution '60s civil rights music," magnanimously classing him with Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder.  So perhaps the song was artistically honest even if it was commercially misguided.  Or maybe by doing the more socially conscious material, the trained jazz singer Paul was just being, as Gamble calls him in passing, "a very cooperative artist."  The film never chases down any of this.
    And finally, perhaps the real reason Paul's career fell off emerges: he and his wife/manager fell into substance abuse: speed, downers, cocaine and drinking.
    But all this information is scattered, padded out and confused by endless Philadelphia cityscapes and frequent passages of Billy Paul performing live — well, sort of live.  What Olsson actually does is overdub the original studio recordings onto contemporary live footage, which he painstakingly edits so it looks like the musicians are playing the music you're hearing.  Olsson even dubs in audience noise to heighten the illusion.  I bet most people don't even notice.  That is not journalistic truth, and it's inexcusable.  (There's also no vintage performance footage, which is a damn shame; perhaps there was a licensing issue.)
     And when and where were these performances?  We don't know.  An on-screen credit identifies one venue as the Bataclan in Paris, but doesn't indicate when the show took place.  The film depicts several other shows, but none of them are identified at all.  Was Paul popular enough to headline, or was it a package tour?  How does he sound now that he's in his 70s?  We have little idea.
    Olsson routinely leaves out other journalistic basics, like dates and places for key events mentioned in the interviews.  We don't know when Paul's wife became his manager, or the sales or chart numbers for "Am I Black Enough for You," or when Paul started doing drugs, although if you happen to know when Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror" came out you might be able to guess roughly when he went into rehab.  Olsson routinely includes soundbites from interviewees, such as Schoolly D's claim that Paul wanted to release "Am I Black Enough for You" as his first single, that contradict seemingly ironclad truths established earlier.
    And even though "Am I Black Enough for You" is the crux of the story, we don't hear the song until an hour and 12 minutes into the movie.  Once again, it's an overdub of the original track onto a live performance, and it's introduced unceremoniously, without even an on-screen credit, unlike all the other songs in the film.  Very odd, considering this is the big reveal, the song everybody's been talking about all this time, the song the whole movie is about.
    It's almost as if Olsson was so enamored of his subject that he lost all perspective.  At one point, when a weary Paul asks if they can finish up an interview, Olsson replies off-camera, "We're fine.  I love you so much."  In the opening titles, Olsson even credits his subject as "HRH [His Royal Highness] Billy Paul."  HRH?  WTF?       And yet it's almost counterbalanced by how much Olsson gained Paul's trust, eliciting some moving passages and intriguing revelations.  In a very poignant scene, Paul says something about "Am I Black Enough for You" that surprises even Blanche, his wife of 44 years, who is sitting beside him.  "I feel as though I let the song down… when I went into my darkness [his period of drug abuse].  I feel like I abandoned the song," says Paul.
    "And I'm still going to get to the bottom of 'Am I Black Enough,'" he says.  And then he looks meaningfully at Blanche and adds, "We're going to do that."  It's too bad the movie didn't do the same.

THE HURT LOCKER KEEPS IT REAL ENOUGH

     The carping about lack of strict military accuracy in The Hurt Locker is bogus, clueless. Apocalypse Now was riddled with factual errors and it is one of the greatest war films ever made. Patton also has many mistakes, so does The Bridge on the River Kwai. Saving Private Ryan has tons of inaccuracies.  All war films do, and that has little bearing on their artistic quality.  That's because movies can never be completely factually accurate, nor do they need to be.  The point is to convey accurately some other kind of truth: emotional, artistic, social, intellectual.
    It's not fair to blame veterans advocate Paul Rieckhoff for the title of his Newsweek online article assailing The Hurt Locker for its military inaccuracies, but its headline — "When Cinema Verité Isn't" — does repeat his basic error: this simply isn't cinema verité.  It is fiction. 
    I understand Rieckhoff's point that less than 1% of Americans have fought in Iraq, and so most of us have little conception of how members of the armed forces conduct themselves there.  But it is not the responsibility of a filmmaker to micromanage every little detail of her work just to satisfy the exacting public relations concerns of a special interest group.  In The Hurt Locker director Kathyrn Bigelow's case, the responsibility of the filmmaker is solely to make a powerful movie that shows us something about why we make war.
    "The idea that you'd put yourself in so much unnecessary danger is not only irresponsible, it's reckless, and that's really not what our EOD [Explosive Ordinance Disposal] techs do," Rieckhoff complained to NPR.  But at least one military man strongly disagrees with Rieckhoff: Master Sgt. Jeffrey S. Sarver is suing the producers of The Hurt Locker because he believes the main character is based on him.  He even claims to have coined the term "hurt locker."  So much for lack of verisimilitude.
    But Rieckhoff is totally missing the point anyway; The Hurt Locker is a work of fiction designed to achieve a much larger goal than correctly illustrating military chains of command. Or as Jim O'Neil said to NPR, "You know, it's a movie, not a training film."  Jim O'Neil was a Navy bomb disposal expert during the 1991 Persian Gulf War; he now runs the EOD Memorial Foundation.  Even he gets what Rieckhoff cannot. 
    Let's leave the picayune trainspotting about rifle sights and incorrect uniforms to people who have no powers of imagination or sense of poetry — and instead enjoy the best movie of the year for what it is: a brilliant metaphor for America's addiction to war.

GETTING THE HURT LOCKER

     It's been really interesting to see how many people have completely missed the point of The Hurt Locker.   One film-fan friend of mine declared that the film is an "almost jingoistic America first video game-ish action film that promotes hyper-masculine individualism, celebrates stunted male adolescent irresponsibility, stereotypes Iraqi and Muslims and mocks genuine peace keepers."
    Well, yes, exactly.  But neither The Hurt Locker nor its director Kathryn Bigelow advocates those things. In fact, quite the opposite.  You see, the film is metaphorical.
    The key to understanding The Hurt Locker is to pay close attention to the quotation from American (anti-)war journalist Chris Hedges shown at the very beginning of the film: "The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug."  The line is from Hedges' book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which argues that, like some individuals, some entire societies are hooked on war.  That ought to be a big clue about where Bigelow is coming from.
    The Hurt Locker is an extended metaphor about America's addiction to war.  The bomb-defuser guy represents that addiction -- endless, foolish, irresponsible, probably insane but allowed to have its way. Like America itself, he is a war junkie.  The reckless cowboy approach has worked so far, but eventually, it will all blow up in our face.  We will o.d. on war.
    Read what my friend said again: "an almost jingoistic America first video game-ish action film that promotes hyper-masculine individualism, celebrates stunted male adolescent irresponsibility, stereotypes Iraqi and Muslims and mocks genuine peace keepers."  That's precisely how the Bush-Cheney administration approached the invasion of Iraq.
    I thought that was brilliant, but apparently, a whole lot of people, from my friend to Chris "I'm the Second-Craziest Man on Cable News" Matthews to progressive veterans' rights advocate Paul Rieckhoff, completely missed that crucial metaphor, so perhaps that is a shortcoming of the film.  Perhaps this is a problem with using tools like extended metaphor or irony in popular entertainment -- most people won't get it.  I'm reminded of Neil Young's bitter "Keep On Rockin' in the Free World," which was misinterpreted as a jingoistic anthem. 
    But I thought The Hurt Locker was great.  In fact, it was dead-on.

WHAT'S IN A DREAM? ON CARL DREYER'S VAMPYR

     You always know when something seems dream-like, but precisely what makes it that way? I was thinking about this as I watched and soon became a little obsessed with Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1932 film Vampyr. The movie is very dream-like, and not just because all the action takes place in one night.  In a way, all movies are like dreams in that the viewer is borne along on an audio-visual narrative that he or she cannot control.  But what makes Vampyr dream-like and, say, Scarface from the same year not dream-like, isn't just a sense of the fantastical, but subtler aspects such as discontinuity, disembodiment, and distortion.
     The film's protagonist, Allan Gray, wanders into the small French town of Courtempierre, a real place where the film was shot entirely on location, and checks into an inn. As the introductory intertitle puts it, the shiftless Gray had become "a dreamer for whom the line between the real and the supernatural became blurred," thereby setting the tone for the whole film. A few shots later, when a mysterious older man in a smoking jacket drifts into Gray's room, it's unclear to Gray whether it's a dream or not — and Dreyer makes sure that we don't really know whether it is either.
     It emerges that Courtempierre is besieged by a vampire and her minions who goad innocent people into suicide in order to enslave their now eternally damned souls. And so goes the rest of Vampyr, continually blurring dreams and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, life and death; under the circumstances, the name "Gray" begins to make a lot of sense.
     (The original subtitle of the film was Der Traum des Allan Grey — how interesting, in light of a nightmarish film, to note the morphological and possibly etymological connections between the words "dream," "drama" and "trauma.")
    Myths, as Jung famously said, are the dreams of cultures, and Dreyer interweaves myth and dreaming very pointedly at the beginning of the film. An old man stands by a river bank, bearing a large sickle, an iconic symbol of death. The man clangs a bell, summoning a small rowboat, a very definite allusion to Greek mythology, and the way departed souls would summon the boatman Charon to ferry them across the river Styx. But as the film progresses, it becomes apparent that the boat was not taking the man to the underworld, it was taking him away from it. Gray has transgressed into a contemporary Hades that happens to be about 70 miles south of Paris. (In that sense, it anticipates another dream-like black-and-white film, Jean Cocteau's 1949 Orphée.)
    Another allusion to classical myth apparently happened by accident: Gray finds his way to a creepy abandoned mill and happens upon a strange man on the stairs; he asks the man about the sounds of barking dogs and crying children. The question was a reference to a scene that was cut from the film, but interestingly, the growling of the three-headed dog Cerberus and the wailing of innocent children are the first two things that Aeneas hears when he enters the underworld with the Sibyl.
     But what really makes Vampyr dream-like is the way it's photographed. For one thing, there are almost no establishing shots, which is just like the cinematography of dreams. Then there are the film's exteriors, which were shot in the pre-dawn hours to get an ineffable spectral quality and even then, literally shot through a layer of gauze. The general visual timbre is fuzzy, twilit, shrouded in fog that encroaches on and infiltrates the frame.
     Vampyr embraces not only the look of dreams but their logic: Dreyer pointedly includes strange details but doesn't always follow up on them: a locket passed from a dying man's hand, a disfigured blind man babbling at the top of the stairs, shadows of a large dance party playing on a white wall. The transitions sometimes seem arbitrary, just as in a dream. Either that or the film eliminates transitions entirely, leaving details and linkages by the wayside — one moment, Gray is being greeted by the innkeeper and the next he's asleep in bed. The discontinuous time is matched by an equally discontinuous space: as Gray moves through various buildings, angles and physical space don't match up from shot to shot and it's difficult to get an accurate idea of the layout of any structure he's in. The mind strains to make sense of space and narrative, just as in a dream, and thus producing a very similar sensation to dreaming itself.
     The film also has the disembodied quality of dreams: there are shadows or reflections of people, but we don't see any people; we hear children's voices but don't see any children. Sometimes the camera follows Gray's subjective point of view but then suddenly pulls away, looking at him objectively, something that happens so smoothly that you don't notice anything except an odd feeling of displacement. And in the most literal example of disembodiment, Gray walks out of his body – and then, in one of the film's most nightmarish sequences, observes his own corpse in a coffin. The next sequence depicts his point of view as he's carried in the coffin to a cemetery; he looks up at the world going by through a rectangular window, and the view is like a beautiful and yet horrific film within a film.
    Although that old theory about how most dreams are in black-and-white has been disproven, it's hard to imagine Vampyr having the same oneiric power in color.  Not that color was even an option in 1932, but in Dreyer's hands, monochrome is a palimpsest.  If all the colors were filled in, the film would lose mystery and menace.  It would lose the sensation of being once removed from reality, of being like a dream.  Besides, it's fitting that a vampire movie should have all the blood drained out of it.  Same with the sound — Vampyr was shot in three different languages and to make the production easier, there is extremely minimal dialogue.  Just like in a dream.
     The analogy between death and sleep is eternal and elemental. Just as the vampires are aware they're dead and yet can't truly die, Gray is aware that he might be dreaming and yet can't wrest himself from sleep. After he slays the vampire, Gray and his lover cross the river (Styx) and run through a forest and reach a clearing just as the sun's first rays greet the morning — the time when we awake. The dream is over.  Gray has completed a, well, archetypal Jungian journey.  But we don't see him wake up.  He's stuck in the dream.  And maybe so are we.

THE GIMME SHELTER YOU DIDN'T SEE

    Gimme Shelter is generally considered one of the best rock documentaries ever made, and perhaps one of the best documentaries on any topic.  Turns out a lot of interesting footage wound up on the cutting room floor. We now know this because the recent reissue of the Rolling Stones’ iconic live album Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out includes a 27-minute documentary of the same name, cobbled together from Gimme Shelter outtakes.  In one scene in Gimme Shelter, Mick Jagger changes his shirt backstage; what the new film reveals is that Keith Richards and Jimi Hendrix were in the room too, geeking out over Keith’s new see-through guitar.  So there’s an important artistic lesson here: You don’t need to put in all the good stuff.  (And, as freakishly long as this post is, I did cut out some good stuff.)
     As portrayed by the filmmakers (the brothers Albert and David Maysles, and editing director Charlotte Zwerin), Gimme Shelter was about the end of the Stones’ 1969 American tour (and, by accident, the symbolic end of the Sixties).  The Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out documentary is specifically about the late November 1969 Madison Square Garden concerts that were recorded for the album.  As with any Maysles production, nothing arrives on a platter; you have to look actively, and if you do that, you will be rewarded, because Albert has a knack for pointing the camera at the most telling thing in the room.  Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out is a pretty loose patchwork, but it’s edited into something resembling a shape, and it tells a somewhat different, much more light-hearted story than Gimme Shelter.  It’s also got a dandy punchline.
    Even more than Gimme Shelter, the performance footage here emphasizes Jagger flapping about the stage like an ecstatic rooster, outfitted like a hippie superhero; he's vastly more joyous than satanic, exhorting the shaggy audience into ever-higher states of abandon as the band kicks out its ingeniously shambling boogaloo.
    Keith Richards gets a star turn too: at Muscle Shoals Studios after the Garden shows, while they were working on Sticky Fingers, he plays a soulful, George Jonesy number on piano.  (Like an apparition from the past, the Stones’ former pianist and then stalwart roadie Ian Stewart walks behind him as he finishes, and Keith peers back at him, seemingly seeking his approval.)
     Curiously, Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor are almost completely missing from the film; one has to wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that neither of them are in the band anymore.  By contrast, drummer Charlie Watts, who is still in the Stones, gets as much face-time, possibly more, than anybody.
     Charlie’s best (and worst) moment is an abortive photo shoot for the album cover on a foggy, deserted stretch of English motorway in winter, somewhere outside of Birmingham, weeks after the tour ended.  It’s the same shoot that briefly opens Gimme Shelter, but here we get much more of a sense of what actually went on.  Gamely dressed up in medieval garb, Charlie totes guitar cases while astride an adorable donkey as a small photo crew and Mick Jagger look on.  “Get rid of the ‘elmet,” Jagger commands.  Along for the ride is American journalist Stanley Booth, who would go on to write one of the definitive books about the band and a classic of rock journalism, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones.  It begins raining and they beat a hasty retreat to Mick’s exquisite white Bentley.  The scene is bleak, pathetic and funny, like something out of Beckett, but it just wouldn't have worked in Gimme Shelter.
     It’s also revealing to note the songs they perform: “I’m Free,” “Under My Thumb,” and “Satisfaction,” all of which didn’t make the album, probably because those early pop songs didn’t quite fit the new, hip-and-rootsy Stones that Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out very selectively sought to portray.
     Compared to the meticulously choreographed arena productions of today, the informality of the Stones' stage show is shocking – check out Charlie screwing around on the drums in the darkness behind Mick and Keith while they do “Prodigal Son” acoustic-style, or the way Keith abruptly stops playing at the top of the final verse, momentarily flustering Mick.  Then Mick announces “Spider and the Fly” — but then Keith begins playing a different song.  “No,” Jagger announces, “we’re going to do something else,” and they kick into “You Gotta Move.”  This is in front of 20,000 people, one of whom is a smiling Janis Joplin, bopping in a huge furry white hat.  Before the show, Mick Taylor and Keith busily tune their guitars, a mindless task no major rock musician has done in many decades.
     The Maysles signal the end of the concert with an exquisite shot of Mick hurling a basket of rose petals out in the crowd, the traditional ending for “Street Fighting Man,” perfectly bearing out Stanley Booth’s description of this very same moment: “Then he sailed the basket of red rose petals high out over the crowd where they hung for a moment," he wrote for Rolling Stone at the time.  "Then they started slowly to descend, floating on the high ringing howl that was rising from the crowd.”  (Those words blew me away when I was ten years old and still do.)  Then a beautiful accident, as Jagger strides off stage, slo-mo, toward the camera in his Uncle Sam top hat, just as the film in the camera runs out in a hot yellow blaze.  Show over.
    There’s a wonderful postscript, a scene at a helipad on a pier on San Francisco Bay, where the bands would get transported to Altamont Speedway for the fateful show.  The Grateful Dead are there, sweetly cavorting in zonked-out hippie fashion, waiting for an overdue helicopter.  Jagger comes sweeping in, surveys the unruly scene. and says with amused disbelief to no one in particular, “What is going on?”  He gets the lay of the land from a chuckling and ultra-mellow Jerry Garcia, attired in an outtasite lavender wool poncho, and chats warmly with Ian Stewart.  The vibe is playful, benign but it's made poignant by the knowledge of what was about to happen.
     The chopper won’t arrive until 2:00.  "Right, film people, let’s do something!" Jagger proclaims.  "We’ve got ten minutes."  He pulls some hippie chick aside and imperiously directs the cameraman (probably Albert Maysles) to go "Tighter tighter tighter tighter tighter tighter" on her face, adorned with a groovy beaded headband and massive square shades.  He plants a kiss on her forehead and steps away. Then he orders Charlie, poor, long-suffering Charlie, "Do the same thing as I did.  Kiss the young lady, please."
     Watts demurs.  "Love is much more of a deeper thing than that," he replies, with mock hauteur, although he clearly kind of means it too.  "It's not flippant, to be thrown away on celluloid.  No."
    Jagger laughs at his disobedient drummer.  "OK," he says sheepishly, straight to camera, "we cut."
    And then they headed off to Altamont.