Shine a Light

One of the strangest movies you will see this year is the new Martin Scorcese film, a 2 hour concert documentary of a 2006 Rolling Stones concert. It is by now cliché to remark upon the bizarre and unmotivated "timing" of this movie: I contend, against this cliché, that it has been equally inopportune to film a Rolling Stones concert since around 1974. Was there ever a time in the past 30 years when the Rolling Stones would have been GOOD live? When their hits wouldn't have descended into endless boogie; when there wouldn't have been too many back-up singers and horns?; when the songs you knew would have felt obligatory and the new songs unwelcome? I contend: no. So, if this movie had been made at any point in my lifetime, I can't imagine it being significantly different. Even their much remarked-upon age seems irrelevant, in this way: the last time that I "updated" my mental image of the Rolling Stones was probably 1998-- and those ten years have made no more of a difference upon them than they have on the mummies in the British Museum. 

The Rolling Stones could play every song off their first twelve albums and early singles--probably 8 hours of music--as well as their scattered hits from the 70s and 80s, and have filled over four such documentaries with nary a bad song. Instead, they take the innovative path of playing numerous unfamiliar and unpleasant songs from little-known records such as Undercover. There are three songs off Some Girls, three off Exile on Main St., two off Let it Bleed, and one each off of Beggar's Banquet and Sticky Fingers. This is a strange image of the band's legacy: no "Ruby Tuesday," "Under My Thumb," "Paint it Black," "Gimme Shelter," or "Street Fighting Man"? Or more to the point, none of the mega-hits "Beast of Burden," "I Know It's Only Rock and Roll," or "Miss You"? That is to say, I found the set list unbearably pretentious and miscalculated. The only explanation I can find is, it would be impossible to play every hit--so why try? The solution that Bob Dylan has found--to constantly reinvent his most popular songs in new styles--does not suit the Stones, who have been playing in the Exile on Main St. bombastic made-for-the-Super-Bowl-halftime-show style for over 30 years. 

As a movie, it ain't much. The IMAX theater I saw it in made it almost unbearably huge and hard-to-follow. The cuts are dizzying, and the sound is shapeless. Because Ron Wood and Keith Richards barely play the guitar riffs, most of the band's sound is anchored, not by (as one might assume) some invisible third guitar player, but by the ringer bass player and an omnipresent keyboardist. The result is chaos: constant soloing and songs stretched out usually for an extra minute of pure enthusiasm. The much-needed interludes of interviews and "flashbacks" help with pacing a great deal, but one has all the more respect for these elderly men when you realize how tired one gets just *watching* them. 

The most interesting thing to say about this film is, I believe: why did this group of musicians commit to this path so long ago and not deviate from it? There is something so utterly tasteless about the arena-rock of post-1960s Stones, that has somehow become the ultimate formula for the world's most successful rock band. The key, I think, is in the presence of Hillary and Bill Clinton in the film: the Stones are the ultimate in bloated comfort, like Bill Clinton's oratory, and in an impossible-to-locate efficiency, like Hillary's nebulous fashion. Bill Clinton is a famously popular and rousing speaker--and yet his speeches are utterly forgettable and notoriously long. That barely any guitar RIFFS can be heard by this band that virtually invented the guitar riff, is paramount. And oddest of all is that none of the dozen performers onstage finds this odd, that everyone in the audience appears to be having the time of their life-- that is, that this problem (the shapelessness of the music) is not felt by anyone else as such. And since the Rolling Stones as well as invented the kind of rock music we have today, why did it end up *here* of all imaginable scenarios?