It occurs to me that if you followed a particular band from it's very beginning, a film documentary concerning their career will generally reveal very little you didn't already know. That was the case here, at least for this viewer, who's been a Rolling Stones fan right from the get-go. Released in 2012, I was surprised actually that this look at The Stones basically took you from the beginning of their career to just about the middle to late Seventies, so it's not the thorough piece I was expecting.
There were however a few tidbits I hadn't been aware of. How is it that in a little over fifty years since the Stones began playing, this is the very first mention I ever heard that the crazed young teenage girls who first came out to see the band play actually wet themselves in their hysteria? It must be true, Mick said it himself. Actually, Jagger had another comment along those lines. He stated that it was primarily in England that girls reacted hysterically to the band, while in the rest of the world it was boys. I thought that was an interesting observation on his part.
Among the topics covered in the film - manager Andrew Oldham's shaping of the band as the anti-Beatles with a significantly darker image, the early drug busts that threatened to break up the band, Brian Jones's death, the Altamont disaster, and Keith getting arrested and deciding that the band and the music were more important than his personal relationship with heroin.
In all, one will catch snippets of about two dozen songs in the Stones repertoire, with some time spent on Mick and Keith's collaborative writing and how some of their songs came together. But again, most of the footage that goes with those songs emanate from the late Sixties and early Seventies, so it's somewhat shocking to make the forty year time jump when a clip of the band singing 'All Down the Line' is used to close out the picture. It's from the 2008 Scorsese film "Shine a Light", documenting the Stones two day performance at the Beacon Theater in 2006. You wonder how the lot of them are still standing much less performing.
And yet they still perform. I've never seen them live myself, and the chances of ever doing so grows slimmer with each passing day since most of their concerts are sold out within minutes. But one can always hope.
There were however a few tidbits I hadn't been aware of. How is it that in a little over fifty years since the Stones began playing, this is the very first mention I ever heard that the crazed young teenage girls who first came out to see the band play actually wet themselves in their hysteria? It must be true, Mick said it himself. Actually, Jagger had another comment along those lines. He stated that it was primarily in England that girls reacted hysterically to the band, while in the rest of the world it was boys. I thought that was an interesting observation on his part.
Among the topics covered in the film - manager Andrew Oldham's shaping of the band as the anti-Beatles with a significantly darker image, the early drug busts that threatened to break up the band, Brian Jones's death, the Altamont disaster, and Keith getting arrested and deciding that the band and the music were more important than his personal relationship with heroin.
In all, one will catch snippets of about two dozen songs in the Stones repertoire, with some time spent on Mick and Keith's collaborative writing and how some of their songs came together. But again, most of the footage that goes with those songs emanate from the late Sixties and early Seventies, so it's somewhat shocking to make the forty year time jump when a clip of the band singing 'All Down the Line' is used to close out the picture. It's from the 2008 Scorsese film "Shine a Light", documenting the Stones two day performance at the Beacon Theater in 2006. You wonder how the lot of them are still standing much less performing.
And yet they still perform. I've never seen them live myself, and the chances of ever doing so grows slimmer with each passing day since most of their concerts are sold out within minutes. But one can always hope.