What is the general view on the Stones appearances in the Don Kirsher's Rock Concert Series. I really love the Stones performance in 1973 when promoting Goats Head Soup. There are two versions of the performance of Angie one with Mick sitting down wearind a white jacket and trouses and another with Mick wearing a straw hat. It seems odd seeing Mick Taylor miming a piano part on this song.
Siver Train is another great performance - i love Mick's clothing and make up in this period and also his movements.
His movements also come to the fore most effectively on Dancing With Mr D - I think the misty atmosphere suits the feel of the song perfectly.
I can't say i like the performances the following year so much to promote the It's Only Rock And Roll album. The title tracks promo is great fun (dressed as sailers)but i do feel that performance plus Ain't Too Proud To Beg and Till The Next Goodbye shows the Stones relinquising their role as serious musical artists and promote the attitude the Stones now make music purely for fun.

Re: DK's 'rock concert' (frequently videos or pre-recorded w/live vocals, no?) - is the inflateable sailor/soapsuds version of IORR the 'other' mix or is it the album mix - & anybody know if the other mix is closer to the original Wood/Jagger version, or just a later alternate (may be on 'Video Rewind', but I dont have that anymore)
re '73, are they not newly prepared vocals on lp mixes? I cant recall, but generally my peers & I were not (its been 30 years) that impressed with the performance, but in those innocent times lip-synching (videos, tv) seemed very retro & unacceptable. Especially since there were shows with live performances airing regularly. The stones never seemed to put much effort into the lip-synch/ vids until perhaps the VL era...they seemed to know everybody else would be aware of the artifice, so camped it up (MJ) or looked bored.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2004-12-25 18:37 by john r.

If I'm not mistaken, and i haven't seen these
shows in awhile, they were all lip-synched,
sortof an early version of the rock video
thing. Fun in a camp sort of way, possibly
an ALT take/ edit/ mix, made for mono t.v.
sound, nothing really remarkable.

Stick with the Ladies and Gentlemen concert
bootleg for good vintage live Stones
from this period.

I seem to remember one of the 'Angie' vocals was live. It showed how much the studio version was cleaned up. It's a hard song to sing at the best of times.

"The wonder of Jimi Hendrix was that he could stand up at all he was so pumped full of drugs." Patsy, Patsy Stone

Showing my age here a little bit, but, I was already a huge Stones fan when these videos first appeared on Don Kirshner. You have to remember that in 1973 there was no MTV or anything of that sort so you didn't get to see your rock idols on tv very often. Consequently, I remember my friends and I were REALLY excited to see that the Stones were gonna be on. We knew they were faking it but somehow it was still very cool just to see them. Personally, I thought the Angie videos were very cool for the time.

Roger

Not long after the release of Goat's Head Soup these Stones performaces were shown down here in Australia at theatre houses before the movie.

Yep...I can still remember the surprise and then the sheer delight I copped when I went to see some movie and these clips were shown first.

Like a 3 missiles from outta nowhere...whack.. Whack... WHACK!!!


ROCKMAN

On US TV, did the Stones ever play on Midnight Special, or just Don Kirschner, in the mid- or early-70s?

Mick's vocals were most definitely live. I would love to have seen Heartbreaker performed as well. It was a single release in the US but i am sure the Stones never made a promo film to go with it. I do love the influence of glam rock on Mick's appearance and i believe in 1973 the Stones were perfect visually as well as musically. Unfortunately It's Only Rock And Roll tipped the balance somewhat and although the music and promos were fun there is definitely a feeling of parody - as though the Stones were no longer taking themselves seriously any more.Strangely as the descended into parody Mick's vocals became increasingly camp.

john r Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Re: DK's 'rock concert' (frequently videos or
> pre-recorded w/live vocals, no?) - is the
> inflateable sailor/soapsuds version of IORR the
> 'other' mix or is it the album mix


Definitely not the album mix - the lead guitar is quite different.

karl



'Don’t forget, if you’re on your bike, wear white'

Thanks Karl - as I thought. I do wonder about it being just an alternate contemprary with the IORR version, or having Wood on guitar as well. What I recall about these 1973 - 74 videos: there were other programs on in the US that featured live footage (one on ABC Fri/Sat nights, cant recall title), on PBS, Dick Cavett, the Midnight Special, & Don K. I recall sept '73 when (I assume DK) featured the Allmans live footage one week (the # 1 "Brothers & Sisters" had just come out), & the RS GHS videos the next (was 'Silver Train' or 'Dancing w/ Mr D' the other?). By '73 lip-synching, so common thru the mid 60s, seemed insulting & corny, & like I said the Stones didnt put much into these, but then we knew they might never tour again (Keith might die, or they surely could break up soon). Creem magazine reported the rumor that Ron Wood was being considered to replace Keith (18 months prior to Mick T's split) should K's frequent busts create visa prohibitions for a US tour. And new bands like the NY Dolls & Mott (who were hardly new, but were very big w/critics) seemed to be more 'relevent'...Led Zep & Jethro Tull were getting a lot of the 'kids'...I'm trying to recall the rock n roll cultural 'moment'....

1973-78 is kind of an interesting period. I was 15-20 yrs old, so I feel a little bit qualified to speak about it. Whereas most of the people older than me (60s crowd) had a mostly homogenous musical taste, my generation kind of split into groups. You had 1) hard rock-metal types that went for Sabbath, Zeppelin, Deep Purple etc. 2) the glam-glitter-punk types: Dolls, Bowie, Stooges, Mott, T-Rex 3) the peace-love-sensitive hippie leftovers: Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, The Eagles, Jackson Browne, and 4) the clueless: disco or Boston

I was in the glam-glitter group. Whereas me and my friends basically dismissed most of the 60s music (and attitudes), the Stones always stayed on our "playlist". Even when we moved on to punk, we played the sh*t out of Some Girls and Tatoo You. I guess that says something about their music.

The other Friday night TV show was "In Concert". It was quite good, and provided me with a lot of exposure to bands you couldn't otherwise hear in those pre-MTV, pre-Internet days. Ever catch the Sensational Alex Harvey Band?

karl

'Don’t forget, if you’re on your bike, wear white'

I'm slightly younger than Karl, but your point about rock & roll becoming more fragmented & factionalized is an important one (as did the whole 'counterculture' as the war wound down)-top 40 radio in the 60s might have played Beatles, Stones, motown, stax, pop hits, Sly Stone, Deep Purple, Yardbirds, James Brown, - & FM 1970 (WBCN)would as I recall veer from Coltrane to the Stones to Woody Guthrie or doo-wop or Hendrix, a few short years later people were more split along genrational/racial/stylistic (singer-songwriter, hard rock, etc) lines. I recall Pete Townshend in interviews going thru contortions about how the Who might or might not stay relevant & Stones certainly were having something of an identity crisis of their own, post GHS.

KSIE: Good description of the cross section for the 70's scene.
I remember crossing back and forth between what is now called metal,
but also being into glitter/ glam, while the Holy Trinity of rock
was still the Beatles, Stones and Who. Punk was later in, but
despite criticisms at the time never stopped me from being
heavily into our boys who have outlasted most of them
anyway! ;-)

Basically just alwys loved good rock and roll music of which
there were ample cases in all but the final category
you mention.

Categories/ labels are a convenient way of organizing bands
are often uselful but can be misleading and change over time
in their content and references. Still your list
sounds pretty good to me.

At 13 I went thru a prog-rock phase (at the time ignorant of classical & jazz), thinking if the music had complicated time changes, was difficult to play, & lyrics I couldnt understand (Yes' Close to the Edge, Jethro Tull's Passion Play) it must be great. Blues-derived music suddenly sounded really retro to me during the glitter/glam phase (Roxy, Bowie). Of course when one gets a bit older ones identity is less tied into a specific genre, & the more different types & eras of music one explores - I too never stopped loving the Stones.

It is more to do with musical eras than one individual style of music. My tastes are quite broad but i must say the early eighties (begining of MTV - leading towards the vital importance of the pop video , computerised music and slick production values) killed off popular music in a creative sense.
There is very little of substance these days - it's all hype.

I remember viewing the Stones performances on the Don Kirshner show in 1973 and 1974. Those broadcasts certainly were events at my house. But I don't recall the Stones ever appearing on the Midnight Special or ABC's In Concert. The King Biscuit Flower Hour was another program from the same era, but that was radio only, I believe.

Angie, Silver Train and Dancing with Mr. D were the songs performed in 1973, and in 1974 I believe that they did It's Only Rock 'n' Roll, Ain't Too Proud to Beg and Till the Next Goodbye. Each song had a quite different "look." I don't recall any audience being present, and it was strictly a performance.

You can access many musical programs of this era (and any other period) at the Museum of TV & Radio, which is located in New York City and Los Angeles.

Paul Serchia

I've asked about the Midnight Special because some time in the 70s I bought a "Midnight Special Songbook" that had JJF and HTW in it. I had thought the songbook included these songs because the Stones played them on the show. I guess it is silly of me to make inferences from Wolfman Jack's publications.

I'm sure any appearences by the rs on Midnight Special were either footage (as portions of Ladies & Gentlemen were aired when Bill W was a guest on Chip Monck's rock talk show) or videos. Since there had been quite a bit of live music (or live footage) during late 60s/70s, I was quite surprised when MTV took off in the early 80s - it was like going back to the mid 60s or earlier.

[www.tvtome.com]

Here, you'll find listings of all of the Midnight Special broadcasts.

Paul Serchia

I didn't look through all the MS shows, but here's an interesting performance:

--Rod Stewart and Keith Richards - "Sweet Little Rock and Roller" and "Twisting the Night Away" b: 25-Apr-1975


They also list Mick appearing in 1974 with videos of Happy, Tumbling Dice and Midnight Rambler. From Ladies & Gents, I presume.

Great link Pserchia!

karl

I have a bit of nostalgia for those days, when then cutting-edge artists got a chance to actually be seen in front of a national audience. One of my favorites was the appearance on Don Kirshner by the New York Dolls. Don didn't know what to think of them. In his introduction, he said "Do they have talent? You be the judge".

As for the soap-suds IORR video, I just thought that was funny as hell. I didn't see it as self-parody, in that they deliberately came across as a good-time band, ala the Faces. The title of the song says it all.

Yeah, I saw the live stuff from L & G on there way back when.

"No Anchovies, Please"

Good description of the times KSIE and assessment of the categories of music fans at the time. I was about 20 in 1973 and it was indeed a treat to see the Stones on a tv show because these appearances were few and far between. I totally disagree with Edward 's statement that the Stones " relinguished" their roles as a serious musical act as a result of doing these video appearances on tv shows like Don Kirhsners!! Nothing could be farther from the truth, IMO. The Stones were always taken very seriously by their core of fans, which by the way has always been a huge fan base! I think shows like this actually helped them to broaden that fan base! They were shown to viewers that may have never seen the Stones because they were not concert-goers. The Stones were certainly not trying to weaken their image in any way or to make themselves appear " popish" just because they were not performing live. No one performed LIVE on those shows, that I can recall. It was the beginning of the video generation, pre- MTV. The rolling of the eyes attitude was Mick and the Stones' way of saying " we'll play the game," because to do otherwise would have not been wise.

Roger457 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Showing my age here a little bit, but, I was
> already a huge Stones fan when these videos first
> appeared on Don Kirshner. You have to remember
> that in 1973 there was no MTV or anything of that
> sort so you didn't get to see your rock idols on
> tv very often. Consequently, I remember my
> friends and I were REALLY excited to see that the
> Stones were gonna be on. We knew they were faking
> it but somehow it was still very cool just to see
> them. Personally, I thought the Angie videos were
> very cool for the time.
>
> Roger


I was a huge fan at the time too and was so excited to see those clips at the time!

Didn't they do "Angie" on Ed Sullivan in 1973? Foggy memory and I wasn't a fan(atic) then.

"No Anchovies, Please"



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2007-10-05 17:49 by Elmo Lewis.

1973 was Alice Cooper's B$B year breaking all the Stones 72 touring records. Mick's glam and Bowie's Ziggy were following Coop's glam trend and trying to be more outrageous. A very interesting period of rock history. Also the year Moonie passed out at the Cow Palace and was replaced. The party years!!!

Smokey Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> On US TV, did the Stones ever play on Midnight
> Special, or just Don Kirschner, in the mid- or
> early-70s?

Midnight Special '74 had RTJ & ADTL from L&G, but it was just the movie. It was quite a big deal at the time because up until then the only '72 live footage was Dick Cavett and this was before VCRs.

no strings on ANGIE

Ed Sullivan (the TV variety show) ended its run in June 1971.

Ed Sullivan (the human) ended his run in 1974.