Roaming around Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Dish, I came across a link to this very good article about @#$%& Blues. The author uses the current tour as a jumping off point for his review.

[www.slate.com]

I'm stealing some of the best quotes from The Dish:

Most troubling of all are the unfamous players, the roadies and groupies and hangers-on who seem plucked from the pages of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and are now lost to history, or to worse. We meet a fan bemoaning the injustice that her LSD usage has caused her young daughter to be taken into protective custody; after all, mom protests, “she was born on acid!” We see a man and woman shooting heroin, filmed with bored detachment, the only sound the whir of a hand-held camera. Upon completion the woman looks up and asks, unnervingly and entirely validly, “Why did you want to film that?”

The film’s most disturbing scene, and the one that most lives down to its reputation, takes place on the Stones’ touring plane.

We see explicit and zipless sex. We see clothed roadies wrestling with naked women in a manner that seems dubiously consensual, as band members play tambourines and maracas in leering encouragement. At one point Keith Richards emphatically gestures at Frank to stop filming; he doesn’t. By the time the scene finally ends we feel drained, nauseated, ashamed of ourselves and everyone else in this world.

These are emotions not typically associated with rock films, and if only for this reason @#$%& Blues is an important work. But it’s also a riveting portrayal of beauty in decay, and @#$%& Blues’ most redemptive moments come in its musical performances. Frank has no use for the sumptuous stage sequences of later concert films like Scorsese’s The Last Waltz or Demme’s Stop Making Sense; the performance footage in @#$%& Blues is frenetic, explosive, and almost random in composition. “Brown Sugar” is captured by a hand-held camera so hyperactive it seems to mimic Jagger’s dance moves; “All Down the Line” is shot almost entirely from behind the drum kit, Charlie Watts’ splashing hi-hat in the foreground, hypnotically obscuring, then becoming, the main event. In a particularly stunning scene Stevie Wonder joins the band onstage for a medley of “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” as the camera scrambles about, bottling a moment more intoxicating than every substance backstage combined.

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It’s perhaps fitting that the film’s best sequence begins in a hotel room, where Mick and Keith are hanging out and the latter puts on a hot-off-the-presses acetate of the Stones’ latest single, “Happy.” The pair sit on the bed, smoking cigarettes, listening intently as one of the best rockand-roll songs ever recorded wafts from their stereo. Then, at the top of the song’s first chorus, Frank suddenly cuts to the Stones performing the song live onstage in front of thousands, gods in the flesh. Finally, toward the song’s end, Frank cuts back to the hotel room, where Mick and Keith are lost in listening, singing along, young men in love with their art, their jobs, and in some still-meaningful way, each other. The record fades and stops; Keith looks up, and complains about the mix.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2013-07-14 17:00 by latebloomer.

Thanks for posting. Great review on Slate.

If you ever have a chance to see this film in its original form (not a bootleg), it's essential viewing for any Stones fan. Even if you've seen it already on video. Viewing it on a copy of a bootleg video is annoying and makes it nearly impossible to watch.

And even in its pristene form, it is hard to watch CS Blues. I saw it a couple of years ago at the Brooklyn Museum. Depressing and fascinating film.

This movie is something else

They had a showing at the National Gallery in DC not too long ago, I intended to go, but didn't make it over there. I have seen much of it on youtube, but couldn't make it through the whole thing.

The slate article did make me think that I should give it a try again, if only for the concert footage.

I own a copy & have no desire really to watch it again. The music stuff (Stevie Wonder jam, etc.) is fantastic but there's not enough of it.

I think to appreciate CS Blues you need to watch it several times. One time is hardly enough. Once you understand that there really is no plot you come to appreciate it for what it is, a portrait of the Rolling Stones in America in 1972. I also think it really helps to have been around at that time. I was and half of the enjoyment of CS blues for me is just seeing the images of life in America in 1972.

Yes, it is a hard movie to like, and it takes a lot of effort to get to that point. But if you do get there you will probably regard CS Blues as a very special film.

It's a strange movie, I saw first way back in the late 70s and at the time thought what a load of rubbish. Then again in the 90's and several times since, each time I watch it something new comes to mind, whether its thoughts about the genral degradation of women, or the hoplessness of addiction, or the chaos which surrounded the tour. It becomes more meaningful each time I see it in terms of social history and interesting in terms of the Jagger/Richards relationship.

It's a great archive of that time, fashion, morals, music, but if you are looking for something which is structured and shows the Stones in a good light then this film is not reccomended. I agree with the above comments about seeing it in its true form rather than poor quality bootlegs if you can.