ITS ONLY ROCK N' ROLL

In 1830 French Romanticism truly bloomed with Victor Hugo’s Hernani and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, both works that fully embraced Diderot’s mandate: the Symphonie Fantastique, with its programatic autobiographical backdrop and dense intertwining of the spheres of composer and composition, would, in a performance that Berlioz himself conducted, have been the zenith of the problem Diderot saw: Berlioz the conductor was simultaneously the author, the character, and the performer in his musical works.

Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull

”How accurate is the mythology surrounding the recording of Exile On Main Street?
The wild nights, the orgies, the drug taking! I remember it well. Every bit of it!
I mean, it was a lot of fun – but there were a few bumps. It was a bumpy period, historically. There was a war going on, the Nixon thing was happening. Tax was through the roof. It was very difficult. The end of the ’60s felt very strained.
But despite all the excesses, it was quite a creative period. When you’re quite young, you can get away with that.” ( Mick Jagger )

The Rolling Stones, Vicor Hugo, Hector Berlioz and his opium induced visions. The romantic roots of rock n’ roll, the agony, suffering, pain, tragedy, passion, anger, agony, and wallowing in the pathos of self-pity  were well established by the time Berlioz realized  Symphone Fantastique. It is as if Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were part of this thread of Bohemians; who somewhat  of predated Freud regarding his obssesive preoccupation with love and death ( Eros and Thanatos ), but imbued it as well with a more subtle and refracted premise; Berlioz wove the Shakespearian / Virgilian concept into the universal perception as evinced in “Romeo et Juliette ” and ” Les Troyans ”

www.legendsrevealed.com She was going to play Kelly’s sister in the film, but soon after she arrived in July of 1969, it was clear to her that her relationship with Jagger was deterioating, so the day after the landed in Australia, Faithfull landed in the hospital from an overdose of sleeping pills. She was in a coma for a time, and when she awoke, she supposedly told Jagger, “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away.”

The Rolling Stones new movie ”Stones in Exile” based on the recording of the ”Exile on main Street Album” is a rock version of Berlioz’s ”Symphonie Decsriptive de Faust”; fantasy and illusion of being a rock star living in the south of France, women, drug use, as well as the insecurities, passions, desires, faux-glamour. The needle and the damage done being almost accessory to a larger theme.

Blurred visions of  unhappy love affairs are not as drastic as it may seem at first glance.Like Berlioz the underlying themes, both literary, mythological and historical, are just mirror image reflections of the ego of Jagger and Richards; the Glimmer Twins. While the flamboyant Berlioz may be regarded as the prototype of the narcissistic, neurotic artist, the Jagger/Richards aesthetic is merely an elaboration on this theme of psychoanalysis imposing itself as the central motif in performance art. “He ( Berlioz )…possesses the puzzling ability of moulding a specific material into a faithful image of the creatures of his imagination, and then he is able to attach to this representation of his unconscious phantasies so much pleasurable gratification that, for a time at least, it is able to outweigh and release the suppressions” ( Freud )

Keith Richards & Anita Pallenberg

Like Berlioz, the art of the Stones is not entirely a musical one. Its an aural art that is auditif complementary; which is why judgement upon the aesthetic value tends to be divided. The musical logic lies outside a conventional system of values and the band,s musical phrases are rarely shaped from any conscious or pure design. As in any extra-musical concept, subjectivity is bound to be extreme since on ”Exile on Main Street” most formal considerations are slackened, discarded and then recycled at the behest and whim of a poetic ideal. The tonal embodiments are based on some definite conceptions that circumvent analysis and critical appraisal in strictly musical and technical terms. At Cannes, people have been focusing on the darkness of the drug use , the end of the hippie era, the political context rather than a music peculiarly rich in enigma.

And that enigma is rooted in romanticism. Roots music and the blues; a continual martyrdom in which one’s beautiful musical dreams are dispelled by grim and hopeless reality and fresh disappointment all too easily numbed by narcotics. A boredom soon turned to wanderlust, where more conventional music technique is overridden by free-form and free-thinking attitudes soaked with doses of occasional indulgence. Exile on Main Street is great art as it reconciles inherent friction and tension with deflections and reflections on natural flows of music. There is antithesis and synthesis of the abstract elements. Exile reads somewhat like a review of Berlioz’s Harold in Italy:

text">Mick Jagger chats with The Who drummer Keith Moon (1947-1978, left) and songwriter/guitarist Pete Townshend (centre), during the filming of The Rolling Stones' Rock'n'Roll Circus at Internel Studios in Stonebridge Park, Wembley.

”Or, in Harold Schonberg’s more flattering assessment, all Berlioz’s work is a mixture of flaws and genius; moments of inspiration alternate with banalities, overwriting, self-conscious posing, weak melodies and awkward transitions, yet all such blemishes wither before his prodigious power, originality and ardent Romanticism. …Berlioz’s other undisputed realm of mastery is rhythm. Théophile Gautier likens his rhythmic sophistication to that of poet Victor Hugo, who disdained the simple lines of classical art and used devices to vary the monotony of poetic phrasing. Indeed, Harold has an, edgy, natural feel that defies bar lines and strict timing with syncopation, dropped beats and unexpected accents. Once we know the piece, following the score can be both frustrating and exhilarating, as we can feel a great tension as Berlioz forced his free-wheeling conception into the rigid conventions of notation.”

www.sleevage.com ''It’s nice to see the design execution carried over to the back cover. Instead of blandly listing the song titles and running order, they are spread out amongst clippings of old 1950’s bra advertisments. The washed out colours used on both the front and back remind me of old magazines and books found wasting away in book exchanges. Considering the 70’s was the decade of the glammed Disco era, with even The Stones themselves taking a bloody good swing at it with ‘Miss You’, it was refreshing to see Peter Corriston didn’t follow the same trend and opted to take his inspiration from a few decades past.''

”Sir Mick Jagger says the drug use captured in the nearly four decade old footage of the Rolling Stones, that features in a new documentary, was quite normal those days. The rockers have attracted severe criticism for footage in the new film, “Stones In Exile”, which shows the Rolling Stones’ indulging themselves on drugs while recording their 1972 album Exile on Main Street. One scene depicts the eight-year-old son of a backing musician telling the filmmakers that his job is to roll marijuana joints for people who want to smoke. However, Jagger has come out in defence of the act.

“You don’t see anything that bad (in the documentary), do you? Lots of children running around rolling joints. And, you know, people making music. It’s pretty much what I imagine most people think being in a rock band is all about. But yes… excess was the order of the day. But you get excesses now in consumption of other things like consumer goods,” the Daily Star quoted him, as telling the Sunday Telegraph. (ANI)”

''The featured females celebrities Lucille Ball, Farrah Fawcett, Raquel Welch, and the estates of Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe took offence to their images being given a slight drag queen make over and threatened legal action. If the macho boys from The Stones could have a laugh at their own dragged up images, surely a few forgotten actresses (aside from Farrah Fawcett who was riding high on the Charlie’s Angels wave) could have let it slide and left the cover as it was originally intended.''

Another documentary exists, however, that does go into the untold story of those Villa months: Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues. This film — famed for its graphic images of heroin shooting and X-rated nude shots — was suppressed by Mick Jagger, and cannot be seen.As is typical of the genre, it can be highly biased, but it does with much justification tarnish the Stones ”brand” by casting the troupe as misogynist and both as victims and perpetuators of a masculinity in crisis. Interestingly, the promotional film is actually based on the archival material of Cocksucker Blues, which the director, Stephen Kijack, found stored in a mysteriously located vault in London. From Charlie Finch:

”How could it have been different with all the opiates seeping through the 1972 noggins of those in the auditoriums, the film and the film’s audience? The casual causality of hard drugs is what makes Frank’s film so scandalous and still unreleasable. The late Marshall Chess, Frank’s producer and the heir to Chess Records, waves syringes like shotguns and generally proves that your brain on drugs is that of a moron. A beautiful hippie girl, with elegant golden bush and assorted amulets, mainlines some douge (heroin) in an Indiana hotel room as we experience her nudie rush simultaneously.

Hector Berlioz.

Keith Richards gets to play pool with some Black guys in the South, throw a television out a motel window and, with Jagger, dismiss their support act, the mighty Tina Turner, as “the chick.” Frank is not afraid to highlight the double-edged goblet of worship and condescension that some the British Stones lord over their (and I use this word with all the bitter irony it carries) Negro influences.

Through it all a different kind of avatar dominates like a leopard in the jungle, the newly married Bianca, whose androgynous suit, gay entourage, love of room service and general indifference to the rock and drugs caravan advertise her as a disco-ball prophetess. Half a decade in advance, she has the look of 54 down perfectly. Frank brilliantly zooms in her as the greatest and sanest creative force in the film and all Bianca does is NOT smile.

I would rather get my cultural bones from this great Robert Frank movie than view all the redundant and thematically pointless and essentially lifeless Kandinskys and O’Keeffe’s on view in New York at the moment. Cocksucker Blues is as shocking as Rite of Spring or Sister Ray or Death and Disasters or The Wild One. It is what America was and has been trying to wash away with the politically correct, handwringing nannyisms of the same generation whose search for the dumbest, most searing highs turned Robert Frank’s movie camera on. The gulf between the suck and the suckers has never been so wide.” ( Charlie Finch, www.artnet.com)

Robert frank. Cocksucker Blues

Berlioz began the notion that the physical gesture of conducting was inexorably wedded to the social concerns with gender ambiguity; that the bodily aspect of conducting was seen not only artistically but also medically;bodily gesture was seen as a blossoming aesthetic with a clear association between music and the body.In Paris between the last decade of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth centuries, Throughout these fifty or so years there was incredible interest in the aesthetics and pathology of the body, of gesture, of movement, and in a philosophical search for a universal `biological’ language. In artistic spheres this became manifest in the search for the embodiment and physicality of genius, an exploration of the relationships between abstract inspiration and a very physical, often uncontrollable, bodily reaction and Berlioz was wholly caught up in this rhetoric.

Diderot was one of the first to realize this and collapse  the distinction between performance and composition. That Berlioz both performed and composed  highlighted  the complex web of issues surrounding performing one’s own works. Where is the line between composition and performance? Is performance a part of the `work’, or are the two separable acts? If not, what are the implications of someone else performing Berlioz’s compositions? It is further symptomatic of the aesthetic and philosophical challenge already explored by Diderot: must one be moved oneself in order to move others? If composition is the creative, moving, act, then must performance also be, or rather, should the players be moved by the composer’s music and/or his `performance’ on the podium?

Jagger and Bianca. Cocksucker Blues

On 10 September 1837 Berlioz published an article in Revue et Gazette musicale in which he debated what Reeve has described as the `musical effect’: intensely graphical accounts of moving responses to music, leading to moments of convulsive ecstasy and sublimation; moments which are found resonating throughout Berlioz’s music as well as his literature. When Berlioz wrote of this `musical effect’ he, like contemporary French scholars, traced his responses to music back to the fabled ones of classical antiquity, citing how his responses were no more unusual or unnatural than those before. Critically though, Berlioz failed to include the fears and outright warnings that Plato in his Republic made about the powers of music: how music is debilitating to men and therefore dangerous to the state; how the subjugation and `ravishment’ that Berlioz exalts were, for Plato, passive, feminine, depraved and reprehensible. For Plato, art in performance was the most dangerous of all – performers were infectious carriers of an unstoppable chain of emotions that bypassed rational control and directly effected the heart.

This view was pervasive for Berlioz too, when the point was brought home to him by his own father, whom, violently against Berlioz abandoning his medical training in favour of a career in the Theatre and marrying an actress, wrote that `the state of enthusiasm’ – the classical term for both the effect and the trace like (opium induced) state that artistic creation required – `destroys all the qualities of the heart and makes the men possessed by it weak, immoral, selfish, and contemptible.’

”Exile on Main St is so emphatically stamped with Keith Richards’s rock’n'roll signature that it could just as easily have been called “Torn and Frayed” after one of the two gloriously ragged songs that he wrote the lyrics for. The title alone sums up his gypsy demeanour, his elegantly wasted look. Or they could simply have called it “Happy”, after another track that was actually recorded in a single take when Richards woke up one morning – or evening – and gathered up the only other people who were awake, saxophonist Bobby Keys and producer Jimmy Miller, who was drafted in to play drums in place of the absent Watts. The whole record was, says Keys, a good ol’ boy from Texas, “about as unrehearsed as a hiccup”.

Diderot:“In the space of a few hours I had been through a host of situations which the longest life can scarcely provide in its whole course. I had heard the genuine language of the passions; I had seen the secret springs of self-interest and self-love operating in a hundred different ways: I had become privy to a multitude of incidents and I felt I had gained in experience.”

Perhaps because he was not the controlling presence on Exile on Main St, which has often been voted the greatest rock’n'roll record ever by music critics, it is not necessarily one of Mick Jagger’s favourite Rolling Stones albums. He once described it as sounding “lousy” with “no concerted effort of intention”, adding “at the time, Jimmy Miller was not functioning properly. I had to finish the whole record myself, because otherwise there were just these drunks and junkies.”

Jagger may have been miffed that his vocals are sometimes swallowed up in the soupy mix but he sings with real passion throughout and seems galvanised by the raw rock’n'roll the group are making. If anyone should need a reminder that no one before or since has sounded as louche and limber, so raggedly majestic, they should watch the Stones playing “Loving Cup” live on their subsequent American tour. Footage of that performance is a highlight of the documentary, produced by the Oscar -winning film-maker John Battsek, which will be premiered at the Cannes film festival before screening on the BBC later in May.” ( Sean O’Hagen, Guardian )

”Heroin brought with it the usual problems of supply and demand, and the usual retinue of shady characters and criminals, both local and from nearby Marseille. Villa Nellcôte was such an open house that, one day in September, burglars walked out of the front gate with nine of Richards’s guitars, Bobby Keys’s saxophone and Bill Wyman’s bass in broad daylight while the occupants were watching television in the living room. “That’s how loose and stupid it was out there,” says Wyman. The crime was reputedly carried out by dealers from Marseille who were owed money by Richards. The nocturnal goings-on at Nellcôte were also starting to attract the attention of the local populace and the increasingly suspicious police force. “The music was so loud, really, really loud,” Pallenberg remembers. “Sometimes I went to Villefranche during the day and you could hear the music there. And it went on all night.”