sickle clowns in Notting Hill

Heard this the other day, and it was a revelation. I had forgotten how wonderfully loose and fluid the Pretty Things were circa Parachute (1970; Rolling Stone's record of the year).  It's also a great curio from a particular time and place: Notting Hill, late 60s. The Pretties were hanging with the  new hippie bands in the 'hood: with the Pink Fairies, the E. Broughton Band, the Deviants, and Hawkwind.  the hippie dream was still alive, but just barely: it was altogether an edgier, angrier,  aggressively anti-social crew.  But as you can hear here, the Rock was doing just fine. Something in the water or the dope seemed to have made for wonderfully loose, effortlessly expressive playing. This track percolates nicely all the  way through: no mean feat, for a seven minute song (I never realized the length till now, which tells you something): 

I don't work, I just speed

"That's all I nee-eed!"

"Just in case..."

been a long time been a long time been a long

The Stones' Rock and Roll Circus program was filmed 43 years ago today.

Tony Iommi recalls: "The Who were there and Taj Mahal and all the people who were in the movie, but I didn't know a soul and felt like a spare dinner."

Also: "half the people in that show are now dead. John Lennon, Keith Moon, Brian Jones, Mitch Mitchell. .. it's a Rock and Roll Circus all right." 

My Friend Jackie told me that John Cage conceived of a Music Circus as a populist avant-garde event. More on that when I catch up on my Cage...

RR Circus, Part 3 of 3

To sum up: The Rock and Roll Circus film attempts, in true counterculture spirit, to act out the community it wishes to create. The Stones used their concert film to communicate two messages simultaneously: their new, subversive artistic ambitions and abilities, as well as their solidarity with the revolutionary aims of the counterculture. How well does that work out for them, you may well ask. I will let you decide. Yes, this is where the paper gets interactive! I want to close by viewing what a clip of the final song of the film, where the cast joins in a performance of “Salt of the Earth.” The song is by Jagger/Richards and is on the Stones’ Beggars Banquet album, released less than a week prior to filming the Rock and Roll Circus.

That album would go on to receive commercial success and considerable critical acclaim in the nascent rock press (cf. Jon Landau's review in Rolling Stone; the band was praised for returning to and focusing on the straight ahead, heavy blues rock that many fans and critics believed suited the group best. In retrospect, though, "heavy” does not adequately describe the sound or overall feel of Beggars’ Banquet. There's a strong emphasis on acoustic blues on the record, , rather than the urban electric blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Old time gospel blues like “Prodigal Son” sit alongside English folk songs like “Factory Girl,” or the pastoral folk rock ballad, “No Expectations.” (It’s worth recalling that the only actual musical performance in the Performance movie is a brief scene of Jagger singing an acoustic blues, Robert Johnson’s “Come On in My Kitchen”).

With characteristic insouciance, the Stones rewrite “Salt of the Earth,” a expression of alienation from the masses, into a populist rallying cry for the film. Originally, “Salt of the Earth” was the final track on Beggars Banquet, where it put a question mark to the calls for revolution in “Street Fighting Man” or indictments of class hypocrisy (“Jigsaw Puzzle”) elsewhere on the record. “Salt of the Earth” also demonstrates the new reach and attainment of Jagger the lyricist, with its carefully cultivated ambiguity. The song’s chorus proposes a toast to the “common people.” The invitation to a communal sing-along is complicated by the introduction of much darker images of the working class; the chorus seems to proclaim a refined alienation from the masses. (circulate lyric sheet)*

(I showed the "Salt of the Earth" clip on DVD; YouTube has the clip as well, but only with the audio track. I've posted it here. Note Jagger’s Dylanesque phrasing; his rising intonation, suggesting distaste, when he sings “wife and his children”; most important, there are the ad-lib, revised lyrics: “they don’t look real to me” to “do we all look real to you?” It seems a pretty weak attempt to open up the song to a broad audience. It’s as if Jagger realizes in the moment, as cameras were rolling, that there's no way to present the song as a rousing, unambiguous, populist anthem.) 

(from Beggars')

(from RR Circus)

(For the hell of it: I never knew this existed! Admit it, you want to see the Rose/Jagger summit)

Although the Rock and Roll Circus was finally released on VHS in 1996, we still don’t know the specifics as to why the Stones, specifically Jagger, never tried to air their movie. Speculations include that the Stones acknowledged that they were bested by the Who’s performance (the Stones had taken the stage at 3 AM, at the end of a twelve hour shoot).* For me, the "Salt of the Earth" segment suggests another reason why Jagger might have decided to shelve the film. The scene demonstrates the gap that remained between the populist form that the Stones adopted for their movie and the band’s aesthetic, which, now more than ever, entailed the relentless pursuit of transgression aimed at alienating segments of the mass audience. The Rock and Roll Circus was intended to swallow whole all the contradictions that inhered in the idea of the commercial artist; it ended up strangling on them.  

A few years later, the Stones would release their double album Exile on Main Street, perhaps the first dystopian rock record.  Many songs on the album thematize the dissolution of the counterculture explicitly (“Soul Survivor,” “Shine a Light,”), others (“Stop Breaking Down,” “Casino Boogie”) seem to offer an allegory for surviving into a post-revolutionary era (one where revolutionary hopes that once were raised are now dashed). I have described The Rock and Roll Circus as a project based on dreams, several strands of them in fact, woven together.  Unintentionally, the film has become a melancholy testament to the dissolution of the counterculture ideal, at the very moment when it seemed that rock and revolution had finally taken over the world.    

Performance Interlude

I've alluded to this in some other posts, but here's another reminder that the Roeg/Cammell film Performance seems to have become a touchstone for some British indie rock bands of the 80s and 90s. 


The Godfathers allude to the East End gangsters in the film, both  in their wardrobe and by copying the mise-en-scene for "Memo from Turner" in the video for the unrelenting "Birth, School, Work, Death." I've written about this in an earlier blog; that song is particular favorite of mine for picking up the Nihilist flag flown briefly by the Sex Pistols in "Holidays in the Sun" and "God Save the Queen": 

\

There's not much that separates "Memo from Turner" in Performance from the Godfathers song; they share a stylized nihilism. Stranger perhaps, is the link between Performance and Oasis' breakthrough single, "Live Forever." The open hearted optimism of Oasis seems a million miles away from the ambiance of Performance. The latter is aggressively cult minded; the former imagines a mass audience that the band was fortunate enough to reach with the record. 

I suppose a kind of formalism was second nature to Oasis, so that they copied the form of Performance without considering content...

The Stones, Art and Politics, part 2

An unexpected thing happened on the way to the Stones making the concert film that would represent, among other things, their populist politics.  Mick Jagger, the Stones’ lead singer, songwriter, as well, as, in Robert Christgau’s words, the band member responsible “for bringing concept to the group’s music,” became a convert to artistic modernism (Rolling Stone Illustrated History). I argue that Jagger’s experience acting in Performance, a film by directors Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell, was clarifying for the singer in regard to his intuitive modernist aesthetic.  I believe the film helped shape Jagger and the Stones’ new ambitions for rock as art as seen in the Rock and Roll Circus. The paradox is worth noting: that a musical agenda was set by the experience of making an experimental film. 

Performance, with its open-ended approach to narrative and film making was a box office failure, and far too weird for mainstream success. Like many other such films, it has since garnered critical acceptance and a small but devoted cult following. I’m presuming that devotees of the film are not out in force tonight, and that a plot synopsis and some historical background will be useful. Here I will be drawing mostly from Barry Miles’ recent book, London Calling (2010). Miles book is a compendium of avant-garde activity in London since the end of World War II; rock music is not his exclusive topic, but Miles, wisely enough, includes an account of the making of Performance in his encyclopedic survey of counter culture efforts to “transform society” (3).

The wording of the publicity handout for Performance not only provides a sketch of the plot, but is full of phrases redolent of the era. Performance is the story of “[a] strange electronic poet, a latter-half-of-the-twentieth-century writer who has retired from the pop scene and established himself in an opulent life style accompanied by two young women. His privacy is shattered by the unexpected arrival of a gangster, on the run from both the police and his underworld colleagues for murder, who is seeking shelter.” Indeed, the first half of the film features Chas Devlin, played by James Fox, and depicts his gangster life style: at home, involved in sado-masochistic sex with his submissive girl friend Dana, and at work, where we see Chaz in numerous, disturbing scenes of graphic violence, brutally beating anyone who runs afoul of Harry Flowers, Chaz’s gangster boss. 

When Chas takes shelter in Turner’s flat, on the run from Flowers’ gang, the movie makes a drastic shift in tone. What had been an unusually violent gangster film quickly becomes a “head” movie. Random images disrupt narrative continuity. Chaz and Turner take part in role playing games, share girlfriends, and take a lot of drugs. The main purpose of these mind games seems to be a refashioning of haz’s gender identity. Pherber (played by Anita Pallenberg, Keith Richards’ girlfriend at the time) persuade the macho Chas to wear a wig and make-up and generally explore his feminine side. (As played by Jagger, Turner has clearly already gone a long way toward exploring his androgynous side, a point to which I will return to later).    

In the movie’s final scenes, Flowers’ henchmen locate Chas in Turner’s flat, and offer to take him on a ride. Knowing that he will be killed, Flowers’ men let Chas say goodbye to Turner.  Here is Barry Miles’ succinct description of the enigmatic end of the film: “In perhaps the film’s most discussed scene, Chas draws his gun and shoots Turner in the head, the camera following the path of the bullet into Turner’s brain. The film ends with Chas being led to Flower’s Roll-Royce parked outside, but as the car pulls away, it is Turner/Jagger’s face that we see in the window” (268).

Though highly original, Performance was not without precedent in British cinema; Cammell’s influences include Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963), also starring James Fox, and John Boorman’s thriller, Point Blank (1967). However, Cammell’s chief influence, experimental film maker Kenneth Anger, suggests the real reference point for Performance:  a modernist tradition of avant-garde art. From the Symbolists to the Surrealists, avant-gardes have been obsessed with magic and occult systems such as alchemy and the Cabbala. The debts to the literary avant-garde in the film are as evident as Anger’s influence. William S. Burroughs’ writing is a constant presence in the film, both explicitly and in a series of in-jokes. Pherber suggests that they call Dr. Burroughs to give an injured Chas “a shot”; Hasan-I-Sabbah’s maxim, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted,” a mantra of Burroughs’ writing in the sixties from Minutes to Go (1960) onward, is solemnly quoted by Turner in the film.* Turner also relates the story of the Old Man of the Mountain and his docile army of drug fuelled hashisheen, or “assassins,” another tale often iterated by Burroughs. Moreover, Cammell’s final edit of the film utilized Burroughs’ cut-up methods, with its random juxtaposition of images; cut-up editing dominates the last, trippy half of the movie.

 Cammell visited Anthony Balch, Burroughs’ film collaborator, to learn the editing technique he used for their experimental film, The Cut Ups (1966). Another reference point for Performance is Jorge Luis Borges, whose book, A Personal Anthology, was published in March of 1968 and quickly became a cult classic in “hip” circles; Turner/Jagger reads aloud from the book in the film (Miles ).

As I hope my synopsis makes clear, Cammell’s desire was not so much to direct a film as create a “happening,” an event that would alter perception, dissolve the stable self, and trouble the boundaries between art and life. In keeping with his subversive intent, Cammell hired real gangsters like David Litvinoff, a member of the infamous Krays gang until he ran afoul of the bosses, to act as consultants to the film. Litvinoff and John Bindon, who ran a protection racket as well as an acting career, quickly became the presiding spirits of Performance. Cammell had managed to execute an elaborate con game under the nose of Warner Brothers executives, who didn’t catch wind of what they were paying for until they saw the director’s cut. 

(Incidentally, every account I’ve read about the making of Performance, including Miles, repeats the story of the wife of a Warner Brothers’ studio executive throwing up at the first screening of the film in LA. I suppose the story is meant to establish beyond doubt the underground authenticity of the film; however, I think the phobic response of mainstream reviewers to the film, also cited by Miles, is proof enough of the film’s capacity for shock. Cf. Richard Schickel, writing in Time magazine: “The most disgusting, the most completely worthless film I have ever seen since I began reviewing” (267).

One can easily see how making this film would have provided Jagger with a crash course in experimental film and avant-garde literature. I would also suggest that the experience made matters of modernist form and technique a palpable concern for the singer. Obviously, Cammell’s decision to cast Jagger as a rock star wasn’t a stretch; however, Cammell constantly pushed Jagger out of his comfort zone, encouraging him to explore and cultivate a more androgynous, bisexual look, closer to Brian Jones than Jagger, but even more extreme than Jones. Typically, when Jagger felt insecure in matters of culture, he (wisely) turned to his well educated, highly cultured girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull for the answers.  She devised the solution to Jagger’s acting dilemma; at her urging, Jagger transformed himself into an uncanny hybrid of Brian Jones and Keith Richards: “You’ve got to imagine you’re poor, freaked-out, deluded, androgynous, druggie Brian, [with] a bit of Keith’s tough, self-destructive, beautiful lawlessness” (qtd. in Miles 272).

Paradoxically, Jagger’s lack of formal training as an actor meant that he was actually better prepared for the experience of making the film than a professional actor like James Fox. As a musician, Jagger was accustomed to the slow patient slog of collaborative work in a studio, as well as the art of improvisation. Jagger quickly got used to Cammell’s method of working from a plot outline rather than a script, creating the film narrative as the relationship between the actors evolved. In effect, Cammell overturned a standard pecking order where Fox the professional outranked Jagger the first time actor.  This turnaround mirrored the role reversal Cammell had put in place by casting Fox, with his upper class background, as a hoodlum, and Jagger, Fox’s social inferior, as the man of culture. The result was a heady power rush for Jagger, who started bullying Fox on the set. More reason why Jagger  “became this hybrid character and never left it,” according to Marianne Faithfull (qtd. in Miles 273). 

I want to suggest that playing this role constituted Jagger’s initiation into an older tradition of specifically modernist self-invention. My speculation is that the experience crushed any faith Jagger may have had previous in authenticity discourses, in pop music and everywhere else. Not that Jagger needed that much pushing in this regard. The collective passion of the Stones for American blues music implied the belief in the superior honesty, earthiness, expressive power, and existential authenticity of the blues over other music. This credo has often been associated with the problematic idea that the music represented a disembodied African-American essence.  Yet as Robert Christgau notes, the Stones, especially Jagger,” have never been very specific about what their passion for the blues has meant” emotionally: or politically, I would add. (Indeed, they have treated their passion for the blues as if it were pure contingency; compare Eric Clapton’s attempts in interviews and his recent biography to articulate a purely personal reason for his devotion to the blues). Jagger was never a simple imitator of blues vocal styles; to quote Christgau again, the singer “intuited from the start that their distance from the Afro-American source would be a necessary and essential part of whatever the group would do with the music.” Accordingly, Jagger’s singing enacts “his distance from the music he loved,” as a sign of his own “alienation” (222-3).

I would suggest that Jagger’s experience making Performance confirmed his intuition that, that identity was a construct, not an essence. Such an insight would forever separate him from his songwriting/musical partner, Keith Richards, who was certainly artful, but a more conventional believer in the power of music as a means to express an authentic self. 

Performance then marks not just a personal, transformative moment for Jagger, but through him, it effected a change in the Stones, as they navigated the new, heady notion that rock music was an art form, and rock groups, musical artists.

Allow me one more speculation about what Jagger might have gathered from the experience of acting in Performance.  I think the singer also learned to associate a modern experience of alienation with the greater authority of specifically modernist art. Modernist literature is full of declarations regarding the artist’s attainment of heightened states of awareness. These perceptions are inevitably found personally debilitating, even dangerous to the artist; just as clearly, the artist’s heightened perception is believed to empower the artist over the mass of humanity.  In this way, the assertion of the modernist artist to superior perception inevitably entails asserting an aesthetic hierarchy. Modernist art’s emphasis on the representation of subjectivity, of mental impressions, is promoted as an advance over “mere” realism in the arts.  Typically, the claim of French Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine to possess “painfully subtle sensibility,” becomes a proud assertion of the modernist artist’s distinction: “Particular souls are sensitive enough to receive, perceive, and decipher or be affected by their glimpses into the heart of things.”  The suicidal war veteran Septimus Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Marcel in Swann’s Way (and Proust himself), Thomas Mann’s Hans Castorp, Musil’s “Man Without Qualities, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: these are among the many artist heroes of modernist literature with distinct maladies.

The complex mixture of alienation and empowerment that Jagger experienced filming in Performance also initiated him into a longstanding practice of modernist art. He absorbed the idea from Cammell that art makes its deepest connection to the unconscious, bypassing rational thought. As Rimbaud proclaimed, the “systematic derangement of the senses” was a precondition for making modern art.  Beginning with Performance and continuing through Exile on Main Street, where Jagger relied on the cut-up technique of Burroughs for lyric writing, Jagger would subtly incorporate modernist techniques of making art. 

(In the recent Stones in Exile [2010, Grant Gee, director], Jagger downplays the avant-garde quality of the technique, suggesting that he only used it as a desperate attempt to provide content for the record, under pressure to meet deadlines. Jagger has always undercut his considerable talent as a lyricist, but this may be one of the most extreme examples of his tendency to self-deprecation. Seriously, is the cut-up any one’s first choice for a time saving device? Surely the singer is trying rather desperately to normalize his unorthodox mode of lyrical production and seem less “arty” than is the case.)    

In the case of the Rock and Roll Circus, this entailed taking the carefully assembled visual look Jagger adopted for Performance more or less intact to the sound stage in Wembley where the Rock and Roll Circus was shot, a month later. The aim was less to make a fashion statement than to trigger an unconscious response in the spectator, subliminally subverting gendered expectations for the look of the male rock singer. Recall that directors Roeg and Cammell encouraged Jagger to remake his physical appearance for the film, emphasizing an androgynous, bisexual appearance.  Again, Marianne Faithfull was a crucial catalyst; she persuaded Mick to dye his hair what she describes as “Chinese black, like Elvis’ hair” (272). The results pleased Faithfull, Jagger, and Cammell, giving the singer “a strong, graphic outline,” as well as, in Faithfull’s words, “a tinge of menace.”  Menace also describes the other inspiration for the unsettling look of Jagger/Turner, Lawrence Olivier’s Richard III, where Richard is a malignant, dark hued, pallid Goth prince. (A few years later, Shakespeare’s villain would also inspire a London Irish boy from Finchley Park, John Lydon, to transform himself into the Sex Pistols’ “Johnny Rotten” on stage). In the last song of the Stones’ concert set in the Circus film, “Sympathy for the Devil,” Jagger strips off his shirt to reveal a (drawn on) tattoo of the demon Baphomet, the infamous Goats’ Head (I’m sure you’re familiar with it from any Witches’ Sabbaths’ you may have attended!). Of course, the satanic imagery is of a piece with the song, a lyric monologue from Beelzebub himself, about the multiple catastrophes he’s caused, comprising human history). At the same time, the tattoo seems an obvious, and un-ironic homage to the Aleistar Crowley obsession shared by Cammell and Cammell’s chief aesthetic inspiration, Kenneth Anger. (Note for later: Cammell introduced Anger to Jagger; the singer would provide a spooky moog synthesizer soundtrack to Anger’s 1969 film, Invocation of My Demon Brother. 

Jagger’s moog playing seems inspired by Brian Jones’ mellotron sound on “2000 Light Years From Home”). 

 Jagger’s aim in reproducing his Performance look for the Rock and Roll Circus seems clear enough: a manipulation of signs that would work to subversive effect on the spectator’s unconscious.