Like many of the tireless visitors to this wonderous website, I've long been fascinated by the legend that has surrounded the never released and seldom shown documentary of the Stones 1972 tour of North America, the infamous @#$%& Blues, the work of photographer, print maker and occassional film maker, Robert Frank previously famed for a particularly testing documentary on madness titled "Me and My Brother" and his photgraphy on the Stones then just released "Exile on Main Street".

The film was largely shot on 16 mm and was very much a work in progress with an ongoing series of edits, many with M.J. himself in attendance. And here lies the rub because, eternal procrasinator that Jagger is, although he found the film had an extraordinary resonance, ultimately it was just too controversial a piece to be allowed to spill out into public consciousness and so it was consigned to the same weird limbo wherein so much of the Stones golden age is presently archived, never to be seen until the band and most of their devoted audience are too old or too dead to give a flying eff about it.

It does however get screened on occassion at arty type cinemas once every ten years, with apparently Mr Frank himself in attendance, last time in the U.K. was some two years ago at The Tate Modern where the tickets for this event sold out within a matter of days and were subsequently sold on Ebay at the usual hyper-inflated mark-up.

So all that is available to collectors resides in the murky (as the hotel bedrooms that so characterise C.S. Blues) world of bootleg DVDs. I first encountered this film on video some sixteen years ago and it was bad, it got quite a lot better with a much cleaner release that still suffered from distorted sound and an overall blue bias to the monochrome scenes.

So I'd watch it occassionally, but only very occassionally as it was a depressing enough film without having to work to see and hear what the endless parade of rock casualties had to utter over the distinct whirr of the 16 mm movie cameras the film was shot on.

However come a new century and the era of DVD led to a huge overhaul and reassessment of the Stones impressive but largely unreleased back catalogue of film and TV appearances.

And high on the list of those lost treasures to be released to DVD was "C.S. Blues". The first factory pressed DVD was a South American affair with minimal presentation but sourced from a relatively clean version of the video with the blue bias, which was pretty good but still no great shakes, this was followed by the same sourced video appearing in the same quality, but with the 1972 Montreaux Rehearsals and some nice menus thrown in, on the Old Bastards label. This was unarguably the best version out there despite the WOW label releasing their version sourced directly from The Watchtower "definitive version", which wasn't, as despite the richer chromatics the film suffered horribly from a horizontal ghosting effect which rendered the whole film pretty much unwatchable after a few viewings.

Then a couple of years ago came the 4REELS definitive version. 4REELS which certainly should receive an order of merit for the graphics and presentation which goes into their releases had a very impressive first release with their "Ladies and Gentlemen' concert film of the Stones from that very self same U.S. tour of 1972. The DVD sourced from an albeit somewhat faded print was the best ever release of yet another film that was otherwise consigned to the vaults. Their follow up Stones release of the 1971 Marquee show was a huge disappointment to a lot of collectors as it was actually not nearly as good as DVDs already in circulation and even included a black bar to hide the time coder!

The weirdly titled "Big @#$%& Blues" was therefore subject to a lot of speculation and the anticipation that this release would make all other releases redundant in terms of quality.

Sadly the release utilising DVD9 technology failed to measure up to the hype - although and this needs to be stressed the quality of the extras was awesome - the problem was that the meat of the matter C.S. Blues - wasn't.

What the punter and those viewers that weren't in the state of denial that many reviewers at the time seemed to suffer from, quickly realised was that in terms of quality the film was the worst of all three releases. Colours were desaturated, contrast muddied, and light tones flared to the point that a lot of detail apparent in other releases was no longer there.

What almost all reviewers failed to point out was the rather interesting fact that not only was this film sourced from a new print, but that this version included several scenes which were missing from earlier releases - some of a distinctly controversial (only because of the people involved my dear and not the activities themselves - this being THE film notorious for all kinds of drug indulgence and coital activities blah de blah).

They also failed to notice that the 4REELS versions ends very abruptly as the band are walking off stage at the end of "Street Fighting Man". Thereby losing the lovely slow-mo outro with Keef reciting the words to "Brown Sugar" and the Jagger leaping up and down and the film fading out on his upreached arm, finger pointing directly to the heavens. Instead the 4REELS version cut to the most degraded list of credits ever, obviously sourced from a low grade video harboured by some "collector" who hadn't bothered upgrading his archive since somewhere in the pre Jurassic era.

So that's the way things seemed until a week ago when i finally received a very inauspicious DVDR from a collector of esoteric flicks somewhere over the rainbow. What had intrigued me about this guy's profile was that he wasn't a Stones collector per-se and so not subject to the collective hubris that afflicts so many members of this devout but at times singularly unreliable in terms of quality analysis bunch of folk. The fact that he therefore described the quality of the film as awesome and gave it just about the highest quality rating really made me feel that it was worth a punt.

So I made the trade and lo and behold arrives the unprepossesing - no fancy graphics - no frills DVDr.

As soon as I placed it in my DVD player the difference was evident, No weird colour shifts to blue. Sharper image, clearer sound and really rich colours, the concert footage in particular is amazing. The film itself is intriguingly the same one as sourced by 4REELS with some weird little bits that just don't seem to relate at all like the momentary appearance of a lupine like youth with a harmonica jammed in his clenched jaw in the "Midnight Rambler" sequence. On this DVD you can see that the video that this has been sourced from still has the reel markers - there are two of them after the opening - so we are talking three reels in total are evident and this version has not only got all the ever so slightly controversial (i.e. there's no way an audience the The Tate would get to see these) extras but it's also complete and obviously in a quality that puts the 4REELS version in the shade along with all others.

What is also evident at last is a lot of the dialogue hitherto lost under the whirr of the light leaky 16 mm camera and the degraded video sourcing. You can actually hear pretty much of of what is going on for better or worse. What is also evident is a certain degree of quality fluctuation in the film and video transfer, some scenes still seem a bit grainy and there is occassional evidence of digital in addition to the video and celluloid artifacts, but this version is still the best ever by a long shot.

Unfortunately as this site is subject to scrutiny by other interested parties I can't say anything about how you can locate this gem , but it is out there and best of luck locating it.

Definitely worth the effort.



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 2006-05-01 14:52 by mikey.

Thanks a lot! Did not know this. Very good news
Anyone for a trade?

You can hop on the vine over here.

[www.thetradersden.org]

Bingo Wrote:
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> You can hop on the vine over here.


Thanks!

I suppose I ought to point out that this vine is the 4REELS version and not the copy I'm referring to here.

But if you're still having difficulties e-mail me direct (i.e. not on this site) and I'll see if I can help.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2006-05-01 14:53 by mikey.