Paleo Retiree writes:
I’ve often marveled at how great the Stones were from ’68 to ’74.
Mick Taylor, the Stones’ angel-faced lead guitarist, was all of 23 years old at the time of that performance.
Another find (visuals courtesy of Robert Frank):
The tackiness, the bleakness and the exuberance of it!
Related
- An inadequate little tribute I wrote to Jimmy Miller, the man who produced some of the Stones’ best records.
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
Nice visuals on Rocks Off, one of my fave tracks from the first Stones’ album I ever bought. I think I missed out on the “exuberance” part of the creepy pop art adults were making at the time. From an 11 year old perspective, the whole mess was a little scary. The early 70s seemed like the hangover after a party I wasn’t invited to … which makes the 60s a party I peeked at from the upstairs landing, dressed in my footie pajamas (this is not just metaphorically but literally true). Looked like fun down there.
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“Rocks Off” is one of my favorite tracks by them too. When I saw them in ’96 during the Voodoo Lounge Tour I was lucky enough to hear them play it live.
Speaking of, I recently got Robert Frank’s “The Americans” as a birthday gift. It was on the strength of that book that The Stones chose him to do the cover for Exile. It’s a great book, highly recommended.
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LOVE Robert Frank. Hard to beat him and his photographs for depressiveness and dismalness.
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“The early 70s seemed like the hangover after a party I wasn’t invited to …” That’s a great image. I’m somewhat older than you but still younger than the real ’60s people, and when I arrived in college in ’72 the place felt like the aftermath of a riot. Didn’t stop us from having our own kind of good time, but it felt like it was happening in the shadow of something larger.
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I’ve never warmed to the “Ladies and Gentlemen…” film. I think it’s because there’s not much audience sound in the mix, and the shots are all close-ups or a few feet from the stage at most. It’s almost like they are on a sound stage and not playing at a concert. The MSG footage in “Gimmie Shelter” feels more like a concert experience. “Dead Flowers” is the best track from that film, though.
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There’s a lot of film of the Stones that seems to me to fail completely to get across what they could be like.
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What’s up with Mick and Keith and the Church of Satan? Does the awfulness of Mick’s moog sountrack downgrade the Stones music of the period. I mean, it certainly drops their batting average.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzO8uZCdODU
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Hard as it is to put up with Jagger’s sound in that clip, the Kenneth Anger imagery has a lot of potent wickedness, creepiness and decadence to it, don’t you find? And that was finally part of what made the Stones so great for a few years: a rich and exultant sense of evil. Let’s go up (or maybe down) in flames together, baby.
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iirc, beelezebub was played by bobby beausoleil, who helped Charlie Masons murder Gary Hinman. This stuff wasn’t actually funny.
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Love both of these! In fact, although I was a toddler/kindergartner at the time, 1970s pre-disco rock n roll is my favorite — Stones, Dead, Little Feat, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Allman Brothers, etc. I love the blues/hillbilly influences, tight arrangements/instrumentation, good balance between orderly choruses and extended jam sequences, and just the general overall don’t-give-a-shit attitude that suffuses the best of it. And yet this was not overproduced/studio-only/have-to-lip-synch-it-live music, either; the best bands really knew what they were doing.
Seems to me what rock music should be all about . . . .
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That “don’t give a shit” attitude is a big part of the appeal of a lot of the music of that era, isn’t it? You can almost sense Jagger and Richards saying “Fuck it, let’s take this sucker and roll with it as far and fast as we can.”
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Couldn’t agree more about how great the Stones were with Mick Taylor. All their best stuff was from the Taylor years. As live albums go, I don’t know that I’ve heard a better one than Ya Yas. Definitely the Love in Vain solo on Ya Yas was their best version of the song. Many think that their ’72 tour was their best ever. I think the two ’72 Philly shows of Gimme Shelter were the best live versions of that song. Thanks for the post. Always good to revisit great old bands.
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Ya Yas is one seriously great record, agreed.
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