http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/05/music/like-all-they-depend-upon-familiar-songs
by Richard Kostelanetz
May 2008
To my critical mind, appreciative of both classical music and its
modernist derivations, rock at its best is limited music but great
theater. That became the theme of my Fillmore East: Recollections of
Rock Theater (1995), which draws mostly upon notes made in the late
1960s at New York City's principal rock venue. Indeed, among the
masterful performers featured there were Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix,
the Who, Sam & Dave, and Tina Turner. By the time the Fillmore East
opened in the East Village in 1968, the Beatles were on the brink of
disbanding, while the Rolling Stones were too expensive. Disliking
the theatrical scale of arena rock, I never witnessed the Stones (or
Springsteen) live.
The most appropriate medium for recording rock concerts therefore
seemed to be not records but film. The masterpiece from my youth was
D. A. Pennebaker's Monterey Pop (1967), which I've seen and enjoyed
many times. I assume that Martin Scorsese, about my age and likewise
a denizen of downtown Manhattan, made a similar deduction about
filming after attending rock concerts. His first documentary, The
Last Waltz (1978), records the final concert of Bob Dylan's onetime
backing group, the Band.
Given the appropriateness of musical performance for film, it is not
surprising that many of the very best documentaries portray singing
groups; some of the best work from veteran documentarians who have
explored other subjects likewise focuses on pop music groups.
Regarding this last claim, consider Eberhard Fechner's Comedian
Harmonists (1976), an intricate collective portrait of six men four
decades later, whose subtitled print I've seen only at Goethe House
here. (The original German DVD can be found on Amazon.) The theme is
that guys who look interchangeable at the beginning of the film
become individuals by its end. Though Fechner later became a
distinguished documentarian, this early effort is commonly thought to
be his best.
The retrospective structure of Comedian Harmonists influenced not
only a flaccid extended documentary about the Mamas & the Papas
broadcast frequently over public television (the title of which I
can't remember), but also a more remarkable film portrait I saw
recenly, also at Goethe House, but thankfully in English, about
several American military veterans who in the early 1960s formed in
Germany a short-lived proto-punk rock group calling themselves the
Monks (and cutting their hair appropriately). Made by Dietmar Post
and Lucia Palacios with support from not American but German
television, Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback (2006) recalls,
likewise through individual interviews decades later, how they came
together and fell apart, and the remarkable performances they did in
between. Kasper Collin's My Name Is Albert Ayler (2005) is yet
another superior recent documentary, this likewise made in Europe
(Sweden), about the greatest American saxophonist of his generation,
whom I remember seeing live, summer of 1966, at the theater that
became the Fillmore East.
Scarcely a moviegoer, I don't remember any of Martin Scorsese's
fiction films. I wrote a critical review of his documentary about the
blues (reprinted in my forthcoming Skeptical Critiques on the 21st
Century). His Bob Dylan documentary was limited for a reason he
didn't acknowledgemuch of the footage available to him was not his
own but Dylan's, beginning with the extended interview. Dylan
controlled Scorsese to a degree that a more independent filmmaker
might have found unacceptable.
The theme of Scorsese's most recent, Shine a Light, is that the
Stones have been and still are the greatest rock performersand
indeed they are. Ostensibly, the film documents a 2006 concert not at
an arena or a sports stadium, but at New York's Beacon Theater, an
Upper West Side former movie palace that is, at roughly 2600 seats,
the same size as the Fillmore East, since destroyed. People skilled
at filling a stage are also skilled at filling a screen.
Disliking the small screens typical of today's multiplexes, I saw
Shine a Light at Manhattan's Ziegfeld, another historic movie palace,
where I'd previously enjoyed the last rerun of David Lean's Lawrence
of Arabia. However, whereas Lean's extraordinary cinematography often
made me observe things in the corners of the screen, Scorsese's focus
reflects television in focusing upon the faces of the performers,
mostly Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Especially on a large screen,
they seemed made for TV, so to speak, or a DVD.
Curious faces they are. Now in their mid-sixties, both men have
pronounced vertical lines running down their cheeks. So do their two
colleagues, reminding me of a truth observed four decades ago during
a year in England: This is how Anglo-Saxons' faces age. (Other
Europeans, by contrast, develop double chins and horizontal lines
across their forehead.) Sunken cheeks may also reflect too many years
of smoking. Scorsese shows enough of them offstage to make it clear
that Jagger on stage must have makeup covering a blemish on this
right cheek, and that Richards uses eyeliner.
To anyone familiar with contemporary dance, both Jagger and, say, the
late James Brown are limited performers. Whereas the latter favored a
continuous shuffling that was so easily imitated that his sometime
protégé Al Sharpton duplicated it deliciously on Saturday Night Live
several years ago, Jagger's choreography is best defined as energetic
prancing with finger-pointing. Both men depend upon a capacity
sustained into their sixties to keep their stage movement going and
going. As a singer, Jagger is better when I can understand him, as
when his lyrics are familiar; sometimes here he sounds muddled.
Otherwise, Shine a Light is a brilliant film about brilliant
performers. Whenever they played, as they do for most of the film, I
didn't touch my popcorn. Only when Scorsese incorporated interviews
from decades ago, or oddly black-and-white footage of himself
preparing to shoot the film, or a pre-concert visit from Bill Clinton
and his mother-in-law, did my fingers dip into the bag. Since
Scorsese employed several first-rank cameramen, he had an abundance
of footage to draw upon. However, rather than use extended shots from
a single source, as was done in Monterey Pop, Scorsese chose to
emulate the currently modish editing style of MTV with a succession
of very brief clips from different angles over a continuous song.
What's missing from this film is any sense of the group's
preparation, other than a brief sequence of Jagger on an airplane
preparing playlists, drawing from printed papers that tell him which
past songs have been more successful than the others. How do the
Stones rehearse? How do they work up a song? Their performance is
portrayed as spontaneous, which it obviously isn't. What are the
dynamics within the group? Is Jagger as bossy as he seems and drummer
Charlie Watts as deferential?
When Keith Richards says that neither he nor the other guitarist Ron
Wood are very good but that together they are great, the viewer would
like to know more about how they collaborate. In published interviews
Richards has spoken intelligently about how the two men realize "the
ancient art of weaving. At our best, me and Ronnie make the Bayeux
Tapestry onstage." Nothing is said about the culture of the men.
Watts reportedly has a sophisticated art collection, while Keith
Richards' personal library is featured in At Home with Books (1996).
Another detail not mentioned, reflecting thoughtful preparation, is
that Richards appears to have a different guitar for each song. Some
of these instruments must be tuned differently; at least one was not
a six-string but a twelve-string. One had a visible capo pitching all
the strings a few notes higher. Between songs Richards' guitars are
unobtrusively replaced, much as the Pope's speeches are during his tours.
Caveats notwithstanding, I loved Shine a Light as a great music film
and will no doubt purchase a DVD (not yet available from the A-train
disc pirates!), regretting that I lack at home a screen dozens of
feet wide on which to see it best.
For more about the Monks documentary, see http://www.playloud.org/themonks.html
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About the Author
Richard Kostelanetz has edited many books of writings of and about
John Cage and other contemporary composers
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