WANTED: S.W.F., LOVES KEEF
by Shauna Lyon NewYorker Nov.13. 2006
The persistence of the Rolling Stones, like that of diphtheria or kudzu, is a riddle of nature. As a band, they are easy to mock: a collection of wealthy gents adding to their fortunes each year by replaying their tunes of sexual dissatisfaction and satanic dread. The Stones are not so much a band as a corporate juggernaut like Citibank or Microsoft, and an enduring medical miracle: Can your grandfather even climb a tree, much less fall out of one, bash his head, survive, and still remember the changes on “Sister Morphine”?
As a matter of fiduciary responsibility, the Stones almost always play vast venues like Giants Stadium––a date at the Garden is considered très intime––and the Baby Boomer fan comes to the event with three beers, two or more indulgent children, and the keys to the minivan; the Boomer then watches Mick and Keef on huge screens as the real Mick and Keef scuttle around on the stage. Martin Scorsese, who is working on a documentary feature about the Stones, wanted a much smaller venue—something less Leni Riefenstahl, more Ingmar Bergman––and so the band agreed to play a couple of nights at the twenty-eight-hundred-seat Beacon Theatre, the Art Deco gem on the Upper West Side.
The theatre’s orchestra section was made even smaller because Scorsese had set up seventeen large movie cameras; there were also three runways built to thrust out into the crowd, the better for Mick to do his prancing thing. Perhaps the most important equipment required, however, was a suitable-looking audience. Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation had taken up a block of tickets for one of the concerts, but it would certainly not do, for Scorsese’s purposes, to have John Podesta playing air guitar in the front row.
And so the movie people had advertised for, and summoned, a flock of camera-ready fans through Shidoobee, a Stones Internet message board. In order to be considered, Shidoobees, as the fans call themselves, had to submit a photo and then wait to be called. If they were selected, they would be paid seventy-five dollars to attend the concert. The producers were evidently underwhelmed by the sexiness of the group on the first night, and so they took special pains for the second show, issuing a set of revised instructions to all would-be seat fillers:
You should be dressed trendy, sexy, hip. Do not come looking sloppy or disheveled. Women really glam it up, but not trashy. You can wear Rolling Stones shirts or other band shirts but please do not wear the following: no fan club shirts, no logos (Nike, Coca-Cola), nothing too over the top and outrageous (wigs, crazy hats, etc.) and do not wear white. . . .
You will not be allowed to purchase alcohol. Again, you are not just attending a concert, you are working.
most important note: You guys will be in the very front of the stage and will be the only people on camera for the documentary. We really need high energy. Dance, sing along, cheer on the band. They need your energy to play a really amazing show.
On the first night, a forty-four-year-old Shidoobee from Levittown named Debi Gula arrived at P.S. 87, where the extras had been asked to convene, wearing a black leather vest covered with Stones buttons and decorated, on the back, with an elaborately sequinned lips logo. “Since ’81, I’ve missed one tour,” she said. “The farthest back I’ve been was sixteenth row, in Hartford.”
Once inside the theatre, the hopeful extras stood in line in the aisle of the orchestra, waiting to be told where to go. An assistant picked through the queue: young ones, small ones, cute ones. A pregnant fan narrowly escaped being turned away.
“What are they looking for?” one woman asked nervously.
After a spry set from the legendary Buddy Guy, various assistants started rearranging the crowd in order to create just the right blend of sex, youth, and spontaneity. Gula and another woman were positioned at the foot of stage left, Keith’s side. Several grizzled Shidoobees who had been in the front row were moved to the rear, replaced by newly arrived statuesque young blondes in tight jeans and boots.
In the pause before the Stones came on, a few more women were brought in. A roving crew member murmured into a walkie-talkie, “I don’t have any more babes.” Albert Maysles, the surviving director of the 1970 Stones documentary, “Gimme Shelter,” stood at the front of the stage, smiling beatifically, using a handheld video camera to pan the crowd. Scorsese was nowhere to be seen. Within a few minutes, Jagger was preening and singing duets with Jack White and Christina Aguilera. In contrast to the highly managed vibe of the rest of the evening, the performance itself was stripped-down and raw. Some of the statuesque seventy-five-dollar women looked bored, some walked out. But when the band played “Satisfaction,” for an encore, many of the remaining pretty girls bounced up and down and even sang along.
Debi Gula made the cut for both nights, and she noticed the transformation from one to the next. “Diehard fans got screwed out of this,” she said. “Honestly, it sucks.” But when she was asked how she enjoyed the show, her eyes sparkled. “Did you see Keith give me the pelvic thrust? Some people think he’s God, others think it’s time to go to the bathroom when he’s on. You never get up when Keith sings.”

NOT FADE AWAY“Shine a Light.”
by Anthony Lane NewYorker April 14.2008
In the seventeenth chapter of “The Voyage of the Beagle,” Charles Darwin turned to the mating habits of the giant Galápagos tortoise. “When the male and female are together, the male utters a hoarse roar or bellowing, which, it is said, can be heard at the distance of more than 100 yards,” he wrote. This is also the most accurate description that we possess of the duet performed by Mick Jagger and Christina Aguilera in “Shine a Light,” Martin Scorsese’s documentary on the Rolling Stones. All four members of the band are now in their sixties, and the film offers a few wry nods to the passage of time; there is, for instance, an old clip of the young Jagger, Byron-beauteous, saying that the band plans on staying together for another year, at least. And just look at him now: talk about the survival of the fittest. As for Keith Richards, he’s more like a tortoise than ever, unworldly-wise, dipping his graven face to browse fondly over his strings.
The film records a pair of concerts that the band delivered, over two nights, at the Beacon Theatre in New York in 2006. For the first twenty minutes, we follow the anxious buildup, with shots of Scorsese asking, in kindly exasperation, whether he might possibly have a sneak preview of the playlist for the night. Someone finally hands him a crumpled copy, with about nine seconds to spare. The sight of a director making preparations for the movie we are currently watching could easily give off a whiff of self-indulgence, yet these scenes come across as the most interesting of all, with their hint of a clash between the neat, persnickety approach of the filmmaker and the time-weathered whimsy of the act that he is striving to capture, not to mention the restricted shooting space around the stage. “It would be great to have a camera that moves,” a plaintive Scorsese says, which is like Rembrandt asking if he could have a little bit of brown.
On the other hand, these pre-concert sequences hold out a promise that the film refuses to keep. We see Bill and Hillary Clinton, who were present with friends and family for one of the shows, rolling up beforehand to meet and greet: an effusive occasion, as Hillary’s mother is enfolded by Keith Richards with a gusto that you or I would reserve for a warmly remembered lover. (“Hey, Clinton, I’m bushed,” he says to the camera, giggling like an eight-year-old.) The former President, who is hosting the performance as a benefit for his foundation, recalls a previous Stones event, when the cause was climate change. The Stones, he says, “know as much about this stuff as we do.” This would surely be news to Keith, for whom climate change is what happens when you open the fridge door. But once the music is under way the Clintons vanish from sight; we are constantly shown the kempt young women who line the outthrust runway at the front of the stage, the better to gaze crotchward at the advancing Mick, but there is not a single shot of the Clintons in mid-gig, shaking their respective booties, and thus we will never know what expression Hillary chose to wear when Jagger invited Buddy Guy to join him in a rendition of the old Muddy Waters number “Champagne and Reefer.”
That song, one of eighteen played live in the film, is an undoubted highlight, not only because the performers give every sign of having confirmed the lyrics with extensive background research but because, when Guy plays guitar, he holds still. What a relief. For most of the time, “Shine a Light” is a fizzing and frantic work—all champagne and no reefer, you might say—and one longs for the merest whisper of a lull. Scorsese employed a small army of first-rank cinematographers, headed by Robert Richardson, and including Robert Elswit, fresh from his Oscar success for “There Will Be Blood,” and Andrew Lesnie, the director of photography on the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and thus tailor-made for the Stones, who in their tireless devotion to fellowship and pleasure have come to resemble elongated hobbits. As usual, the most phlegmatic is Charlie Watts, dandyish and self-contained, puffing his cheeks for the camera at the end of a song, as if to indicate, “Well, thank God that’s over.” It is a rare hint, in a movie giddy with self-persuasion, of someone not too elderly but simply too grown up to play the game.
There is a niggle here, as we skim from Stone to Stone. To equip yourself with multiple cameras might seem like hiring a batch of instrumentalists for a rock group or a chamber orchestra, but musically you can mesh and layer your sounds together, whereas all that Scorsese can do—what he may have felt obliged to do, with so much talent under his command—is chop and change. At a guess, I would say that the average length of a shot in “Shine a Light” is around four seconds, with Scorsese and his editor, David Tedeschi, flipping between the cameramen as they grab a slice of closeup. One of them manages to focus on Keith, in the depths of a song, as he discards a cigarette not by stubbing it out, like a regular mortal, but by spitting it out, in a spray of bright sparks. Whoever caught this, it’s a gorgeous, one-in-a-million shot. Still, I was left wondering: the closeup is, by definition, the most in-your-face approach to the impact of rock, but does it honestly suit the Stones, and, in particular, the singular figure of their front man, writhing like an electric eel in black pants? Thanks to the camera angles of “Shine a Light,” I can tell you exactly how many fillings Jagger has on the upper right side of his back teeth, but not until we see him in full length does he cohere and convince. Only then do we understand his gender-crunching brio—the rutting, ballsy yowl of the voice paired with that oddly feminine hip twist and shimmer of the shoes. It takes nerve, being an alley cat on the catwalk.
My unease, under the glare of “Shine a Light,” had nothing to do with my lifelong indifference to the Rolling Stones. I was no great fan of Talking Heads, either, until I saw “Stop Making Sense,” Jonathan Demme’s concert picture of 1984, which felt altogether calmer and less pummelling than Scorsese’s effort. The hipness of its wit suffused both design and mood, and when David Byrne delivered “Once in a Lifetime” Demme framed him from halfway up and did him the honor of keeping our gaze steady throughout, trusting not in any fancy moves but in the near-desperate surge of the song itself. That same trust was there in “The Last Waltz” (1978), Scorsese’s wistful record of The Band as they bowed out of existence, with the ramshackle aid of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and other deities, but it has gone missing from “Shine a Light,” and its absence provokes a nagging question: Can you, or should you, forge a movie from a cluster of hot images, and nothing else? I watched this film at an imax cinema, and, believe me, there are better things for a throbbing head than a fifty-foot-high enlargement of Ronnie Wood. At times, the cutting shifts from the hasty to the impatient to the borderline epileptic, and, while never doubting Scorsese’s ardor for the Stones, I got the distinct impression of a style in search of a subject.
The same thing happened with “The Aviator” and “The Departed,” films that felt driven by their own fluency and facility but by no more pressing desires. What Scorsese adores in the Italian cinema that flared up at the end of the Second World War and burned through the next twenty years, and what he himself sought to rekindle in his early New York movies and in “Raging Bull” (1980), was a sense of tales crying out to be told, and of directors being forced into new and incendiary ways of telling. I would trade the whole of “Shine a Light” for the pre-credit sequence in “Mean Streets” (1973), when Harvey Keitel’s head hits the pillow and the Ronettes burst and clatter onto the soundtrack with “Be My Baby.” At that moment, it is true, we get three fast cuts of Keitel’s night-darkened face, but they come after a long, uninterrupted forty-second take of his wanderings around the bedroom, and so the sudden visual quickening matches the thrill of the sound; we seem to hear a beat in Keitel’s head, like a pulse in his temple, and it answers to the rhythms of need and jumpiness that will power the rest of the movie. And that, in turn, shows us the hole at the heart of “Shine a Light”: it is a film without a need. You could argue that the Stones feel a bizarre compulsion to carry on touring, for fear, perhaps, of how their lives would stall without these invigorating jolts; but that is their problem, not Scorsese’s, and the worst thing that could happen is that he might wind up like Mick, Charlie, Ronnie, and Keith—doing his stuff just because he can. “It’s good to see you again,” Richards says to the throng, adding, “It’s good to see anybody.” The line gets a laugh, but I hope it sounds a melancholy warning note to Martin Scorsese. At sixty-five, he has so much more to impart than that, in his grapplings with the world, and maybe for his next project he should head back to the mean streets of his youth and do what the Rolling Stones have never dared to do and, on the evidence of “Shine a Light,” never will: make art out of growing old.