Bob Dylan

Maybe the man is just a song and dance man or maybe he was, or is, the voice (or poet) of his generation or maybe he was just a guy who sang in a funny voice and had a way with words, especially once he took a few drugs, but for sure he is a towering figure in popular culture of the late Twentieth century and beyond. There are any number of writers, rock critics or merely observers of pop culture, who have made a living out of writing about Dylan, explicating the man and his music, and in general waxing lyrical about his genius. Michael Gray's rather academic book Song And Dance Man comes to mind (in fact the very first full length and learned work, covering Dylan's career up to 1974, that I ever read about the subject), Robert Shelton's No Direction Home biography, Paul Williams' 2-volume series about Dylan as a performer, and Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic and the biography of Like a Rolling Stone. I own all of these and some more.

Dylan was a man of words, and tune, and there are many words about him, some informative and sensible, some overweening and almost too dense in the language to make proper sense. Some of it just seems to be too much. I do not like to intellectualise the music I like and some of these authors appear to be under the spell of their own mind altering substance of choice when they start writing about a guy who is in reality just another musician out of hundreds who defined the Sixties and a zeitgeist and all of the rest of it, but could not sustain that creative force for the length of their careers.

I reckon Dylan finally lost it after Desire and has never been able to regain the mojo he had up to then, and that in fact you need not really listen to anything he released after John Wesley Harding. He may well have written a couple of good songs after that, and possibly improved technically as songwriter and musician, but if you get right down to it, there is nothing compelling to his output over the last 34 odd years. The "born again phase" is no better or worse than anything else released in the Eighties or Nineties, and the albums since Time Out Of Mind are most certainly not the best work of his career. They may shine in comparison to the dire dross that came before, and if one disregarded Dylan's great works, they may be workmanlike efforts that are at least pleasant on the ear, but none of the four albums released between 1998 and 2009 truly stand up to the legacy that was established between 1961 and 1975 when the terrible albums stood out like sore thumbs; since then the better ones stood out like sore thumbs. Sadly there has been nothing unreservedly excellent or definitive since Desire, no matter how you try to justify the man's later work.

Modern Times and Together Through Life have been lauded as masterful examples of Dylan doing what he does best in a retro-archaic musical setting where he mixes blues, folk and old pop styles, to make albums that will stand the test of time. I say that these albums either demonstrates that Dylan is putting us on again with the type of banality he foisted on the public with the Self Portrait album of the late Sixties, for which he was roundly excoriated, or he has really run out of ideas and is now content to recycle blues clichés and lyrics that are equally trite and free of the brilliance he once used to have. All through these albums one hears slightly disturbing echoes of various well known blues tunes and you wonder why he writes these lifeless words. To my ears Bob Dylan now sounds like someone who releases contractual obligations and not like someone who actually has something worth saying, or any interest in saying it.

For the life of me I cannot fathom why any new material Bob Dylan has released in the 21st century could ever be grouped with Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61 Revisited, or John Wesley Harding.

I am not a child of the Sixties and came to appreciate Bob Dylan only when I reached my early twenties when for the first time I actually listened to the first batch of albums with which he made his reputation. A mate of mine at university lent me a handful of Dylan records, mostly the early, folk stuff, and even Nashville Skyline, and I borrowed Greatest Hits Vol II from the public library, which had some of his songs with The Band. My big breakthrough happened when I bought Blonde on Blonde and really listened attentively and repetitively to the songs on it. At the time Blonde on Blonde competed with Sgt Pepper and maybe Pet Sounds for the title of greatest rock album ever made, and for my money Dylan won hands down against the competition, which still seems like callow pop to me.

'Visions of Johanna' is probably my favourite rock or pop song of all time and though I cannot quite say that I hear something new in the lyrics each time I listen to it, I have gained a greater understanding over the years, when certain words or phrases suddenly revealed themselves as different to what I had heard, and when I bought a remastered CD version of the album I also heard all kinds of musical flourishes in this song, and in all of the other tunes, I had missed on the record or earlier CD versions. This is the kind of song where the singer and band mesh together so effortlessly that the entire work of art satisfies fully, unlike some popular music where either the music or the lyrics is the real selling point.

My best 'intro to Dylan' story is one where ignorance and shyness combined to deprive me of pleasure that could have been mine during my high school years when I was totally uncool and sought ways in which to establish my cool, even if only a little bit. Mostly I failed. Anyhow, somewhere along about 1975 or 1976 I was browsing around in Sygma Records in Stellenbosch, with no money to buy anything but still keen on keeping up with new releases, when the guy behind the desk put on a song that sounded like a New Orleans marching band backing some freak who kept singing about "everybody must get stoned." It was a great sing-a-long type of ditty and because I was very much into jazz from the Twenties at the time, the tune really appealed. The reference to getting stoned seemed a tad risqué for the dourly conservative Stellenbosch of the time and my guess was that the sales guy was being a bit of a rebel. Of course I should have asked him who the artist was and what the song was, but I was far too shy to do so and for many years I fondly recalled the song while being blissfully unaware of what it was.

Only when I bought Blonde on Blonde some years later, from Sygma Records, no less, and played the opening track, Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35, did I recognise my old acquaintance from way back. Chances are I might have been looking at the album cover while the song was playing and would not have known this was a tune from this album, firstly because there was no track listing on the back of the gate fold sleeve and secondly because the song title did form part of the refrain.

Back in 1974 "You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)' off Before the Flood was a minor radio hit in South Africa, and this was where I took notice of the artist and during the following years I got to read a bit about his life and musical career and became fascinated with this icon of intellectual rock from the time where rock came of age and went beyond trite, banal lyrics about cars and girls. Dylan was then already in his thirties and moving away from being a revolutionary to merely being another rock artist amidst a whole universe of rock artists, albeit one with a magnificent back catalogue and awe inspiring reputation.

Kerneels Breytenbach, then a rock writer for Die Burger, and a major influence on my thinking about rock music, particularly because he was the first Afrikaans rock writer I encountered, wrote a rave, retrospective review of Blood On The Tracks, which he claimed to be perhaps Dylan's best album ever, and certainly his best since the glory days of the mid-Sixties. He was a bit vague on the details but he was clear on the vision. With this album Dylan put dust in the faces of the competition, raised the bar and generally cemented his well deserved reputation. About 20 years later I actually got around to buying the album and to this day I cannot fathom why it is so highly rated. There are one or two interesting songs, but for the most part the album is kind of static and lethargic and does not sustain interest. Maybe it was a diary of a break up but it was so personal a diary that it should have been kept personal and locked away.

The Cape Town based record store Ragtime Records that finally went under in the early Nineties briefly had a branch in Stellenbosch and when this branch took a nose dive I feasted on the sale records, including Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, which is when I first heard Like A Rolling Stone. I liked the later album better because the acoustic Dylan did not yet appeal all that much and because most of the electric tracks on Bringing It All Back Home, except for Subterranean Homesick Blues and Love Minus Zero (No Limit), sounded like jokes and I could not quite fathom why the poet of his generation would have put out such mundane stuff. Now I can see where his recent output has its roots; even when Dylan was young and full of piss and vinegar, he was not above triviality and being merely funny, but back then critics and fans alike sought deep meaning in even the most trivial of Dylan songs. Now the trivial songs are just trivial.

Anyhow, Highway 61 Revisited is quite splendid and Like A Rolling Stone is just one jewel among many. Something like From A Buick 6 is obviously also little more than a jokey romp, but Desolation Row was a revelation. I played this album to death and, with Blonde on Blonde, it was one of the first two Dylan CDs I bought. I cannot say that any of these albums gave me greater insight into the human condition or changed my life, but I can say that I became a confirmed Dylanophile and started building up a collection.

Of the early "folk" albums I prefer Bob Dylan, The Freewheeling Bob Dylan and Another Side of Bob Dylan because they are the most fun and the least preachy, and contain a great deal of well known tunes, and some lesser ones, that really define what it was that attracted an audience to him. Dylan was young, feisty and had a lot to say and had not yet started taking too many drugs. He was hip and happening but not yet the ice king he became at the time of the Don't Look Back movie. Another Side is probably the best of the early group of "folk" albums because it has the greatest ratio of truly excellent songs.

In my first year at the University of Stellenbosch my English tutor, who otherwise guided us through George Elliott, Thomas Hardy, D H Lawrence and the usual bunch of dead English poets, led an in-depth discussion of The Ballad of Hollis Brown from The Times They Are A-Changin' as an example of serious poetry that came from a different source than the poets who were in our syllabus. The point he wanted to make, I guess, was that rock lyrics could be as poetic and intelligent as anything by T S Elliot or Yeats, which was not a new concept by any means, and the most obvious choice would have been Dylan. Perhaps Leonard Cohen could have been an example too, but maybe he was just a minor rock poet and therefore not worthy of discussion, or maybe the tutor thought Cohen would be too obscure for us.

This discussion took place well before I had heard much of Dylan's music and the lyrics were a bit of a revelation, and it was weird to discuss a song by concentrating only on the words and without hearing the tune, though I recollect that the tutor did eventually play us the song. The performance seemed a tad stale after the close scrutiny of the lyrics and there was little intensity in the performance, and this made me believe that Dylan should possibly be rated more as a poet than as a musician. It was only by listening to Highway 61 Revisited that I reached a different conclusion, that there was indeed musical muscle behind the intellect and that it was the combination of the two that made the man such a powerful force in rock.

I just gave up on Dylan's Eighties output. It was bad decade for just about every rocker who came up through the Sixties. There is nothing Dylan released in that decade I would want to own.

In 1993 I finally bought John Wesley Harding as birthday present to myself. I'd read about it quite a bit, the laid back, acoustic based album released in 1967 after the infamous motor cycle accident and as a new direction after the frenetic period of "Dylan goes electric" and the furore that new direction had caused. It is interesting to note that John Wesley Harding was Dylan's contribution in the year of the Summer of Love, psychedelia, Sgt Pepper, Surrealistic Pillow, and all manner of other pop innovations where more intricate music and greater spectacle became the in thing. Dylan went against the grain and this direction and the album were seen as undeniable evidence of his genius. In any event, I immediately fell in love with this album. There is not one bad track on it and only the final song, I'll Be Your Baby Tonight, sounds a bit out of place and kin to the fluff on his earlier, and later, albums.

I already knew All Along The Watchtower in Jimi Hendrix's splendid version, and had read about all the other tracks in Song and Dance Man, and it was therefore a bit like meeting a pen friend, but it was a wonderful meeting. If I have to choose one Dylan album as a desert island disc (and cannot choose a best of compilation) it would be a stressful tossup between Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding.

This was why, more than the more obvious Like A Rolling Stone, I have such a thing for Visions of Johanna. There is a significant T S Elliot thing going on lyrically and also a solid shot of Allen Ginsberg, and both these guys are favourite poets of mine, plus Dylan's own druggy vision, and underneath it all a subtle interplay of instruments, a hefty yet light as helium interweaving of instrumental voices, to flesh out the visuals Dylan teases us with. Where Like A Rolling Stone is a raw, raucous yell of defiance and exhilaration, and for those reasons, and its length, the pioneer of intelligent rock as pop culture benchmark, Visions of Johanna, quite lengthy as well, is more subtle, engrossing and seductive. I've always loved the words and when I bought a remastered version of Blond on Blonde on CD, I could also hear all kinds of instrumental flourishes and decorations I had not taken note of before. This song is simply an all round joy to listen to.

Greil Marcus wrote an entire book about the genesis of Like A Rolling Stone and its impact on the world, and maybe this one song deserves such accolades and scrutiny, though I am not quite convinced that Marcus can be that serious and learned about what is after all a pop song and still keep a straight face. Maybe he is putting us on in the way Dylan used to put on journalists and everybody else who questioned him on the meaning of his work. Greil Marcus wrote a tour de force, as he usually does, though it is hard to conceive why anyone would bear down that hard on just one song out of an oeuvre that contains many great songs, and many just as good if not better than this one example.

My cousin Raymond also had a bit of a thing for Dylan and owned copies of Before the Flood, Hard Rain, Real Live (all live albums) and Empire Burlesque, a mid-Eighties studio album, and I taped all of them. Before the Flood is the best of the bunch, because it pairs Dylan with the Band and has excellent versions of the usual suspects from both artists. The other two live sets seem like travesties, perhaps good documents of their time but except for a roaring, furious and eccentric version of Masters of War that outstrips the original version by far, on Real Live, the concert offerings are rather pale imitations of the studio versions and not really improvements. It may be part of an artist's creative energy never to perform a song the same way twice, and apparently Dylan and Van Morrison are past masters at this practice, but different is not automatically better. Different can also easily become indifferent and that is no fun.

Empire Burlesque gives Dylan's music a lush, drum heavy Eighties production values sheen that makes him really sound like a pop artist and the songs do sound like pop songs, with a bit of the Dylan style thrown in and nothing is compelling enough to merit repeated listening though I tried hard. I had missed out on the "reborn" series of albums, apart from a few tunes heard on the radio, and I truly wanted to like everything the man released but here I realised that even icons can have feet of clay, and this record was porous clay indeed. He did not have to keep on repeating his mid-Sixties glory days but he did not have to write crap songs and release crap records either.

A couple of years later I bought The Basement Tapes, also a subject of a very learned tome (Invisible Republic) by Greil Marcus who must have had access to more of the basement recordings than the ones on the official release, and whose digging into American culture illuminates connections and diversions that absolutely seems to connect Dylan and the Band to roots I would imagine they may not even have known of. The book was quite heavy going for me, where the album seemed to be little more than a joyful romp by participants who had nothing to prove and who were pretty happy to make up mock folk tales just for the sheer hell of it, down in the basement where they passed the time and did not think of making meaningful art. That is the way the folk process works; the art of it, the meaning of it, seems to be a construct after the fact, put together by intellectual critics like Marcus who wasn't there when the music was made, but sure seems to know more about the creative process than the guys who were there.

The Basement Tapes shows off a happy Dylan, with no apparent need to keep proving himself as the poet of a generation, a guy who could just fool around with his buddies and make music none of them probably thought would ever see the light of day as official releases. This is not the thin, pinched looking Dylan with puffball hairdo and sharp suit of the Highway 61 Revisited period, but the more mellow, family man Dylan in gabardine suit and country hat and rabbinical beard. This is the Dylan who no longer put on his audience and was relaxed enough in his fame and creative space to forego the spite and invective that typified some of his best work of the early Sixties. it is a Dylan who has lost a considerable amount of edge, a man who is on the slippery slope of ageing towards contentment and containment.

Apparently the basement tapes were heavily bootlegged and put out it in all kinds of configurations before an official release and it was for this reason that they became legendary, as all surreptitious activity seems to be, and by the time they were polished up and set out before the general public, they represented a time and a place long ago left behind by Dylan. I guess it was a kind of precursor of the later extended Bootleg series of mostly live and some studio recordings from the vaults that were designed to shed some light on the workings of a creative mind, and to illustrate how his live performances evolved over the years.

Of the Bootleg series I own only the double CD of the famous Albert Hall concert from 1966, the one where a member of the audience calls Bob Dylan a Judas and Bob tells him he is a liar. This is at the start of Like A Rolling Stone, which is then intended to be played "fucking loud" to shut up all the critics and dissenters and folk obsessives who could not stand the idea of an electric Dylan. It is strange to know that there was once a time when such things mattered, and mattered dearly. The electric stuff is just so full of energy and vigour and rock 'n roll guts that I fail to see how an audience could not be moved by it. It's got a good beat and you can dance to it. In contrast the solo, acoustic performances are stiff and mannered and the version of Visions of Johanna just does not cut it. Bob might just as well have done a Peter Sellers and simply read out his lyrics on stage. Then he would really have been the poet his fanatical supporters wanted him to be.

In the Bootleg series there is now also a very much acoustic concert performance of the early Dylan, and a Rolling Thunder gig from the late Seventies, which would be a sharp contrast to the Live at the Budokan album that was almost universally panned at the time because the critics thought he was desecrating his own heritage and royally fucking up with this stupid new direction, and this was well before the "born again" records. Shortly before the release, or maybe just after, in 1979 Dylan played Blackbushe Aerodrome, in England, along with Eric Clapton and others, for a couple of shows to massive audiences that were his first sightings in the UK for many years and the reception was ecstatic and adoring from fans and critics alike, and here he was already adopting the radically revised Budokan arrangements of old, familiar tunes that upset so many when they heard them on vinyl. For many years it had been trite that Dylan set the pace, broke new ground, and that others followed, and that his intentions and vision were inscrutable. Here, perhaps for the first time, at least since New Morning, the knives were out and intolerance for the new was very evident even in respect of a guy who was meant to be permanently in the vanguard.

Then followed the "born again" albums and the same critics who had so loved Dylan at Blackbushe, turned against him and trashed his new world view, philosophy and music. It was so bad that Rolling Stone magazine ran back to back reviews of Slow Train Coming in two consecutive issues of the magazine. In the first review the writer absolutely panned the album. A fortnight later, publisher and editor, Jann Wenner took several pages to explain how wonderful the album was after all. The record was not as bad as all that -- Mark Knopfler played guitar on it and the tunes were okay -- but the ferocious, orthodox religious message and messianic fury was like a red flag to the many bulls who ran rock criticism at the time and who were not prepared to tolerate anybody touting a perceived reactionary fundamentalist Christian religion, especially not if he were Bob Dylan, a Jew to boot.

My exposure to those "born again" albums was limited to the songs played on the radio, one some Radio 5 shows and on the Hob Nailed Tacky Show on what was then still prosaically called Radio Good Hope. None of the songs seemed particularly wonderful or particularly bad. The most preachy ones got no airplay and the rest were just plain tunes with lyrics that did not quite sparkle. The title track from Shot of Love was fun, and I almost bought the record but could not quite persuade myself to shell out money for it.

I did not get the fuss. What difference did the religious kick make? Black gospel music was, and is, great, and nobody ever crucified Aretha Franklin for singing songs of praise to God, but I guess for a Jewish prophet of his generation to get all New Testament on our asses, was too much for the guys who wrote about rock for a living. My complaint was simply that neither the words nor the music was all that intriguing or engaging. Bob Dylan sounded liked a fortysomething guy who had lost his bearings trying to innovate and renovate his life.

Maybe the "born again" music does represent a low in Dylan's creativity but I doubt it. He just got stick for those records, almost knee jerk reaction, because he went so far out on a limb the critics simply did not like. They were no longer afraid to invoke the emperor's new clothes. Everybody had grown up, and when one grows up your idols are no longer so untouchable. And when they appear to be vulnerable, you just want to stick a knife in and twist for as long the consensus of fallibility lasts.

I bought Blood on the Tracks (1975) and the "return to his roots" album World Gone Wrong (1993) within a few months from each other, and where I immediately warmed to the later album, I remained lukewarm and unconvinced about the earlier album, which is generally regarded as one of Dylan's best, if not the best, but to my mind that kind of praise was more of a reaction of relief from critics who wanted him to return to form after the dismal run of albums since Nashville Skyline, than a genuine appreciation. Only about half of the album is truly any good. The rest sounds like filler.

World Gone Wrong contains more non-Dylan songs than any album since the debut and the production values are higher than the debut's spare sound, and may have taken quite a bit longer to record, but to me it is a very entertaining and joyous album, and one of my favourites. Bob is freed from the burden of writing songs or trying to give meaning to the kind of banal lyrics he was, and is, writing. These old blues songs may not be any deeper than anything off Modern Times, but they seem to carry a bit more weight and significance, possibly because none of them were meant to be particularly heavy or meaningful at the time they were written.

The one Dylan album I have shied away from buying for a long time now, is Desire (1976), and I am not quite sure why. Chris Prior, the Rock Professor of Radio 5 fame in the Eighties and early Nineties, was quite fond of Bob Dylan's music and liked Desire a lot and he liked One More Cup of Coffee and Black Diamond Bay the best. Along the way I taped Isis and Hurricane on a long lost reel to reel tape recorder, and like Sara which was on Masterpieces, a 'best of" compilation double CD I had and which was stolen. Somehow I have never wanted to spend money on the album and for a Dylan fan this must be quite stupid because it does seem like a good set of songs, probably better Blood on the Tracks, and maybe it is because I know so many of the songs already. Hurricane is just propaganda, and Joey is just a gangster's tale, but, along with the other story songs, Dylan creates masterful short stories accompanied by music, much like the original function of the heroic ballad or saga: a narrative of epic historical proportions designed to educate an audience in the history of its heroes or heroines, and to preserve that history for posterity.

This is possibly the same effect Dylan was reaching for in Senor (Tales of Yankee Power) from Street Legal (1978) but in the latter song the effect is risible rather than revelatory, though it has one of my most favourite couplets of all time, "Senor, do you know where you are heading / Lincoln County or Armageddon?" Is it a joke? Does it mean something deep? That is the Dylan enigma, right there. I've listened to the album only a couple of times -- a record from the Stellenbosch Municipal Library -- back in the day and found the lush, overproduced big rock band sound not at all to my primitivist taste of the time. It was kind of soft and smooth and had no punch, and that is not what I wanted from music.

In the last few years I bought DVDs of Don't Look Back, Martin Scorcese's Dylan biography No Direction Home, and even a cash in documentary featuring Mickey Jones, the drummer for the Hawks (in the absence of Levon Helm) during the tumultuous first "electric" tour in 1966, where there is mostly just footage of Mickey telling us tales of touring, and very little other footage. I'd seen Don't Look Back a few times before, in grainy and not very well maintained celluloid versions with jumpy visuals and bad sound, but I now own a kind of anniversary special edition, with not much new, in glorious digital format, and the tale the movie tells is still an eye opener of days when rock 'n roll fame, and what you could do with it, was a different thing altogether. The opening sequence with Subterranean Homesick Blues is still one of the best rock videos I've ever seen. It is very simple and very in your face and has an impact that accelerates the pulse to an almost unbearable excitement. It is a cruel comedown to realise that during the rest of the movie the music is purely acoustic and most songs abbreviated in performance.

A lot of the concert footage from No Direction Home stems from the 1966 tour that followed on the tour recorded in Don't Look Back, and is in colour, and is always too short. Just from these snippets one gets a pretty good idea of how almost unbearably exciting those gigs must have been. Bob has his big hair and mustard colour suit and Telecaster, and whips the band and audience into a frenzy and when the boys behind him play "fuckin' loud" (as can also be seen from the Newport Folk Festival footage of Dylan with elements from the Butterfield Blues Band), you can almost see them rise up to a different plane of higher rock consciousness. It was all new and strange and ground breaking. Today even outrage is merely pale imitation. I would have liked to see the Rolling Stones at Altamont; I would have liked to see Jefferson Airplane at almost any gig in San Francisco in 1967; and I sure as hell would have killed to be at the Albert Hall for the Dylan concert in 1966. He was a legend, he was a monster, he was a god of sorts, and he delivered. Love or hate, no audience at the time could have walked away indifferent.

I am not so sure I would want to go to a Dylan gig today. Who wants to hear him do an infinite variety of variations on his greatest songs, especially when he no longer even sounds like the Dylan to those far off days? Paul Williams wrote a two volume defence of Dylan as performer, on record and particularly on stage, and in a sense it seems as if he came up with this stuff because on the one hand he had access to a great deal of bootleg recordings of the man on stage, and on the other hand to get to a point where he can justify the "born again" period by making a convincing argument that those songs truly came into their own only when Dylan performed them with the fiery intensity that breathed life into an apparently abhorrent religious viewpoint, because the on stage passion redeemed the content. Back in the day Bob may well have been a dynamic performing artist whose songs could be twisted and turned and be illuminated from all kinds of angles and still remain mysterious and engrossing, but what good is it if he croaks his way through his repertoire?

The tales Dylan told in John Wesley Harding or Blood on the Tracks are somehow convincing because one feels that Bob Dylan believes in these words -- although some of the stories are pretty thin once you start analysing them -- because he is still young and has some juice in him. Nowadays it really sounds as if the sexagenarian Dylan, youthful rebel no more, is going through the motions, telling a tale he has no real interest in but must persists with, given his reputation as story teller. This is clearly where the teller is more important than the tale.

It is always terrible to state that you only like a band or artist's early stuff. The creative impulse does not suddenly die when you turn thirty, nor does the recording contract come to an end. Once you have made your career path, you gotta stick to it to the bitter end, and it as has happened with a lot of older artists, if they managed to survive, is that showbiz and the audiences out there have been kind enough to elevate former bad buys and social outcasts into elder statesmen of rock or pop. Now they have become entrenched and valuable parts of the establishment they once mocked or attacked and swore to avoid. Now they have become lucrative brands and they make more money than ever. The thing is that they make most of their money retreading those old hits that gave them the breakthrough to notoriety or fame when they were youths, and those old songs are generally far superior to current output, even if the songwriters have really honed their craft over a lifetime, precisely because craft often replaces the passion which drove them in the first place.

It is for this reason I very much prefer the Dylan of the Sixties to the later Dylan, even if I must admit that I have never listened to New Morning or Planet Waves, or for that matter just about every Dylan product from the Eighties. Becoming older and wiser does not make you better in my eyes. Why would I want to listen to the crap stuff when there is still so much good stuff? One day a definitive critical biography will be written (I almost hope it won't be by Greil Marcus, much as I admire the man's erudition and ability to bear down hard on a subject) and it would be interesting to see if the author is going to maintain the fiction that Dylan was a genius who kept on redefining himself, leading the pack even when his course seemed stupid and wilfully obscure, and kept growing in creative powers and stature, even through the previously perceived dry spell of the late Seventies and Eighties, and that there are diamonds in even the worst albums released by him. My take is that the true originality and creativity came to an end circa John Wesley Harding and that careerism and craft took over after that and Dylan slowly but surely changed from being unique and a powerful innovator into a professional musician who realised the value of the brand and carefully nurtured it, sometimes less carefully I guess, and maintained the mystique for marketing purposes whilst turning into just another artist amongst the thousands out there. He remained 'Dylan" in the way the Beatles or Rolling Stones or the Who remained popular in the image of their early incarnations regardless of reality, but amongst the many "new Dylans" who were good musicians but tainted by the odious comparison, the real Bob Dylan was little more than just another "new Dylan" trying to rekindle a glimmer of the former glory.

Does Dylan at 67 really still have all the creative powers he had at 27? I do not think so and neither of his two latest releases convince me otherwise. Forty odd years ago Dylan swam for gold, now he merely treads water.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHEAP TRICK COLORED MY WORLD

 

Ostensibly the cheap trick here was the band's dichotomous visual image displayed on the front and back covers of the In Color and Heaven Tonight albums, where two pretty boys gazed dreamily at us from the front cover while two nerds, one thin and geeky and one a chubby accountant-looking guy, hid on the back cover. Robin Zander (vocals) and Tom Petterson (bass) are the good looking guys and Rick Neilsen (guitar) and Bun E Carlos (drums) are the geeks. I guess the marketing strategy was to get the little girls to cream over the pretty guys and therefore buy the record before getting suckered into listening to a band that was not all pin up beautiful. Or maybe the in-joke was just for the boys who liked hard rock and wanted it to be less po-faced and grim than the run-of-mill ugly bands like Uriah Heep, Kansas, Boston or any number of other metal heavyweights of the era.

I read about Cheap Trick in the New Musical Express long before I ever heard their sound. There was a piece that lovingly detailed how wonderful the debut album, Cheap Trick, was because it had this hard rock veneer underneath which all kinds of weird and wonderful lyrics and attitudes hid. Perhaps this was the other cheap trick – it sounded like standard hard rock but it was more subversive. The other neat aspect of the music, particularly In Color and Surrender, was that it owed a big debt to the Beatles. In the New Wave crazy NME and in the wake of the power pop phenomenon, this vaunted Beatle-esque approach made Cheap Trick highly credible. This was excellent praise for an American hard rock band of the late Seventies who did not come out of the New York punk scene that influenced and informed so much of the British punk scene.

'I Want You To Want Me' was the lead single from In Color and eventually became something of a hit when a live version of it, from the Live At Budokan album was released as a single, but it was the studio version I first heard on Radio 5 and which I immediately fell in love with. The song had a kind of clunky, stomping en deliberate riff and vocals and lyrics that very much sounded like something the Beatles might have come up with circa 'Love Me Do' or 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand'. I adopted Cheap Trick there and then and loved them. I did not know much about them, had not heard anything else by them but I still loved them. I guess the imprimatur from the NME had quite a bit to do with it.

The NME reviews for In Color and Heaven Tonight were glowing. They loved Cheap Trick too.

Somewhere around 1978, after the release of Heaven Tonight, the third album by the band, I found a sale copy of In Color, possibly at the bi-annual CNA record sale, and bought it, took it home and loved it for real. The album cover had Robin and Tom posing on serious motorcycles, looking all moody and dangerous. On the back Ron Neilsen and Bun E Carlos crouched over mopeds, looking dangerous in a completely different way. The album had a gatefold sleeve and on the one side of the inner cover, Zander and Petterson really posed their hearts out: they were so pretty either the little girls would gush or the gay guys would. On the other side Carlos faced front like a rumpled accountant in a police lineup and we saw Neilsen from the back with his weird short hairstyle, the baseball cap and a sating bomber jacket with the band name all over it. He looked like a guy trying to avoid the paparazzi after spending time in the same line up as his cohort Carlos. No guesses which band members would grace the official poster.

The music on the vinyl consisted of short, intense, riff laden songs with the incredible vocals of Robin Zander. As is the case with Robert Plant, Zander's voice was another instrument in the lineup. As I learnt later, the music and lyrics fitted in with all kinds of American musical traditions from Pacific Northwest and Nuggets style punk, to the Beach Boys, hard rock, pop, and freak out. This was a fun album where each successive tune was as delightful as the previous or the next. This was music for smiling to.

In Color has echoes of early Kiss, Angel, the Move, the Dictators, Big Star, and a number of other pop-styled bands of the Seventies who also liked heavy guitars. Sometime after I bought In Color, I also stocked up on a couple of Aerosmith albums and the first three Blue Oyster Cult albums, and these records, more than the icons of British metal such as Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep and Black Sabbath, were where I really got into hard rock. All of them kicked out the jams, but had a lot of melodic smarts and serious craziness going for them. Where Aerosmith was gonzo sexist riffmeisters with a bent for the Mick 'n Keef frontline, and Blue Oyster Cult were funny and heavy at the same time, Cheap Trick was the quirky kid brother, the one who was not nearly as normal as he looked and was proud of it.

It was difficult to think of Cheap Trick as hard rock at all. I thought of the band as New Wave American style and that was alright with me. So Good To See You was on repeat play for the coda where Robin Zander really gave his pipes a semi-operatic (but in a good way) workout. It would have been a monster hit in any parallel universe where I compiled the charts.

I played In Color so much (this was in the days before I had a decent tape recorder and had habitually recorded m vinyl records on tape) that the snap and crackle and pop of the eroded vinyl made listening a chore.

I found the debut album, Cheap Trick, in some sale bin somewhere. I'd read that this album was far heavier, weirder and less pop-oriented than In Color and I was therefore keen on discovering what the band sounded like before they started listening to proto punk. Indeed, the guitars on Cheap Trick are tough, crunching and almost traditionally hard rock compared to the lightness of touch on the second album. Rick Nielsen's concept was probably a band in the vein of the more intelligent hard rock of, say, Blue Oyster Cult, than the blustering thudding of Grand Funk Railroad or the plod of Black Sabbath. He wanted radio hits as much as he wanted to rock the house. In a way Cheap Trick could have been the precursor of Smashing Pumpkins whose Billy Corgan had a similar approach except that Robin Zander had a much more powerful voice and Cheap Trick probably aimed at direct mainstream success in the days before grunge became an alternative mainstream of its own.

Cheap Trick found success only after the release of the At Budokan album, which was originally meant to be a Japan only release as the band had found favour in the land of the rising sun when it was still a struggling band in the USA. At Budokan sold so well on import that the label released it officially in the States and took the live version of I Want You To Want Me off it as a single, and had a bit on their hands. Cheap Trick had released three studio albums without much commercial success although rock critic, especially the cognoscenti in the NME, loved them to death.

The release of Dream Police the follow up to Heaven Tonight, was delayed because of At Budokan's success. It was going to be the big breakthrough album that would cement the band's position in the mainstream and make them top dogs once and for all. The cover was in full colour and all four band members featured on the cover in their Dream Police uniforms.

I had skipped Heaven Tonight, for reasons unknown and probably irrational. The NME review had been ecstatic but it also seemed to me that it would be a tad pretentious and too weird for me after the first two albums and I never bothered acquiring it when released in South Africa.

Therefore, Dream Police was the third Cheap Trick album I bought. Like all of the others I bought it at record sales, but unlike the others the vinyl was a dud. There were deep scratches all over both sides of it to the extent where one could hardly listen to the last couple of tracks because the record jumped so much. I did not like the music much anyway. There was quite a bit of the hard rock style of the debut album but far too much sweet angelic harmony multi-tracked vocals for my liking. The Trick had gone all sophisticated on my ass and I did not care for it. It was an ambitious record form a band that apparently suddenly had the money to blow on studio time but had not quite managed to produce songs that matched the money spent on the production.

When I spotted Heaven Tonight in yet another discount bin, I snapped it up, took it home and prepared to love it. Funnily enough, though it is much in the vein of In Color, there is no tune on it that hit so hard in the guts as almost every song on In Color. It is on this second album that Cheap Trick perfected their early pop influenced, Beatlesque rocking groove. Heaven Tonight was not bad but I did not have a gut reaction to it and I did not play it all that much.

Next up was the EP Found All The Parts which consisted of tunes in the early style, and a great cover of Day Tripper, which emphasised the critics' fondly held view that the late Beatles informed the quintessential Trick songs. Otherwise the guitar sound was thicker, less gritty and to an extent more conventional than the early Trick but the tunes were great and the brevity of the EP makes for a brilliant record that ranks up there with anything that went before.

My final Cheap Trick purchases, both on one day, and I think it was a Ragtime Records sale in the late Eighties, were the early Eighties albums One On One and Next Position Please. By the release of these albums Cheap Trick were no longer the critics' darlings they had been in the Late Seventies and apparently the albums were not particularly commercially successful either. That is a pity for I loved both albums. Sure, they were not In Color, but the songs were great, the production muscular and the musicians were on top form. Just about every song had a memorable tune or hook and I sensed a deal of joy in the playing, even if this may not have been the case with a band that was facing a steady decline in popularity.

Some years later I found All Shook Up at Vibes Vinyl (long since defunct) in the Old Mutual Arcade in the centre of Cape Town, a shop specialising in second hand records, and even cassette tapes. At the time, and after I had not bought records for a very long time, I again became interested in acquiring vinyl versions of albums I had long wanted, never bought when new, and could not really get on CD. Who knows why I bought this, the 5^th Cheap Trick so long after the fact, but perhaps it was because I wanted to complete my collection and because the record was cheap. Anyway, I bought the thing and played it perhaps twice before putting it away and into storage along with all my other records. Unlike In Color, or any of the earlier records, All Shook Up just did not appeal at first hearing and I was not prepared to give it time to grow on me.

Supposedly the Trick became more experimental with their music on All Shook Up, though I would have thought that Dream Police had already been pretty experimental, but for the most part it sounds no more and no less like a pretty standard, middle of the road hard rock album with not much to distinguish it from anything else around at the lime. The power pop influence and attack was gone, the joy and fun were gone. This album seemed to have been made by a band that was solidly set on producing a professional product that would suit their record company and mainstream rock radio rather than a set of quirky songs that would appeal to a more selective but more appreciative audience, such as the original fans who loved the first couple of albums. Perhaps Cheap Trick embraced a certain amount of hard rock cliché in order to subvert the genre, but on the other hand this cheap trick was not nearly as entertaining as the sneaky pop smarts of In Color.

I have to confess that my current assessment of All Shook Up is based on a five CD box set of the first three albums, plus All Shook Up and Next Position Please I recently bought. It is a good idea, the packaging of 5 early albums by an artist, in replica record sleeves, and with additional previously unreleased tracks except that for some unholy reason, in the 3 such box sets I own, the albums are not completely in sequence. For example, Dream Police is omitted from the Cheap Trick box set though it is the follow up to Heaven Tonight, and Cheap Trick at Budokan is also not in its rightful place in the sequence of releases. Perhaps this is a marketing ploy motivated by the fact that the two omissions were and maybe still are good little earners in their own right and do not need bundling and also because the live set has been released in an expanded double CD version, for the serious fans.

Never mind my small gropes. When I listened to In Color for the first time in many years, at age 49, I was as thrilled by it as I was when I first popped the record onto my turntable when I was about 19. I believe that this album in particular has not aged one bit, is not such a faddish artifact of its time that it now sounds a tad stupid and lifeless like so much self-consciously "new wave" music of the late Seventies or early Eighties does, or even the leaden hard metal of the era. This is something Cheap Trick has in common with early Aerosmith and Blues Oyster Cult; all of them made hugely enjoyable and interesting music with a degree of intelligence and suss not enjoyed by most of their peers and a resultant long half life.

I liked and still like the tricks Cheap Trick played on my mind. Whether they were pretty boys or dorks made no difference. The music in the grooves kiboshed any visual cliché that would have us file the band under this label or that. Melody end power rock, serious skills and humor, light and shade, all of these aspects make Cheap Trick's music a fun experience. In my book In Color is definitely up there with the greatest albums of all time, or at the very least the albums that always brings a grin to your face when you hear the opening chords of the first song and you know you will be mightily entertained for the next 40 minutes or so.

 

 

 

The Beatles

THE BEATLES

 

The first I knew about The Beatles was that their music had been banned from broadcasting on the South African airwaves, at least through the SABC, because their music was blasphemous, or perhaps because they were blasphemers for claiming that The Beatles were bigger than God, arising from a comment made by John Lennon that also got the band into trouble in the US Bible belt.

Many years later, when I was in the middle of my high school career the Rector gave a two part sermon on the evils of pop culture and used a couple of Beatles songs as examples of how subversive popular music could be and how the tunes contained all kinds of disguised drug, satanistic and generally anti-authoritarian references calculated to undermine the moral fibre of the youth. By that time I had heard a number of Beatles songs, owned a greatest hits album of theirs and was not prepared to accept this bullshit for anything but bullshit from an out of touch, conservative Afrikaner teacher. Maybe the songs contained drug references, but who cared? Those subtle or not so subtle references were what made us like the songs in the first place and I could honestly say that no Beatles lyric, or any song lyric for that matter, ever influenced me to renounce Calvinism or made me take up drugs or become a homicidal loner who hated society and everyone in it. I rejected my parents' religion because I did not believe in it, I took up drug long after I left school because I was curious and interested and they were available, and I was a loner through inclination and choice but never became an addict or mass murderer because of my alienation and eventually snapped out of it when I finally grew up, quite late in life.

The point is: no Beatles song ever influenced my thoughts or actions in any way whatsoever. I saw them as a perfectly nice pop group with some terrific tunes, realised their iconic status put them in a different league to everyone else, and left it at that. The Beatles was just one more band I liked.

The first time I really took note of their music was when Oh Darling off Abbey Road got quite a bit of airplay in South Africa, presumably after the band had officially broken up, as understood the reason why the Beatles was suddenly allowed back on the SABC channels had something to do with that technicality, i.e. they no longer existed and the radio ban could only apply to a working, functioning entity. At least that is what I heard; it may have been completely untrue, but in the context of the times and the sometimes stupid rules and regulation we lived under, and the many loopholes that existed, or were created, to allow one to escape from the full force of the repression, this explanation for the Beatles being in favour again, did not seem especially outrageous.

Most of the Beatles hits, apart from parodies of their tunes by the likes of Peter Sellers and the Carry On film series, were beyond my ken until I had the opportunity to listen to the two greatest hits sets, 1962 – 1966 "red" album and 1966 – 1970 "blue" album at the house of a school mate whose older brother owned the albums. I immediately liked most of the early hits, and found Hey Jude almost unbearably exciting with its (to me) inscrutable lyrics and huge sing-a-long coda. The Beatles seemed to be the kind of band one could enjoy on many levels though at the time I was only into the visceral attractions of music. If it had a good beat and you could dance to it, I was into it.

I've owned vinyl copies of the 1962 - 1966 "red" hits album, The Rock'n Roll double album, and had the benefit of listening to Municipal library copies of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour and Let It Be. Latterly I've bought the double CD sets Anthology 1 and Anthology 3 , and With The Beatles and Rubber Soul, to date hereof my most recent purchase.

I own Phillip Norman's biography of the band and Ian McDonald and Tim Riley's two separate song by song commentaries on the music, the infamous Albert Goldman biography of John Lennon, a slim picture volume called The Beatles In Their Own Words, a day to day activities diary, and some other written odds and ends. The Beatles story is pretty well documented in my rock library.

Does this make me a Beatle expert? I suppose not, given the vast mass of material out there, not to mention the latest Phillip Norman biography of Lennon, and the many authors who have had something publicly and in print to say about the group. Having said that, I do have an opinion about the band and its place in pop cultural history, and the relative merits of the various members' contributions to the music and the myth.

Simply put, I believe that George Harrison was the least talented songwriter in the group, that Lennon's supposed genius is vastly overrated and inflated by his so-called premature death -- he had been artistically dead for some time before he was shot -- and that even McCartney, who is most probably one of the most talented songwriter ever, pissed away his talent with inconsequential pop after he left the Beatles. Maybe all of them needed the others (and George Martin) to make something better than the sum of the parts and try as they might none of them ever really improved on their Sixties, youthful creativity.

Double Fantasy was crap when I first heard it, and Lennon's death made no impact on my assessment. I would think it would not have sole as many copies as it did if Lennon had remained alive to promote it. Although forty is by no means old he sounded like an old fogey making old fogey music in a cocoon of wealth and privilege but with no link to reality, either to what was happening musically or socially.

Somewhere in the late sixties John Lennon realised that his wealth and prestige gave him enormous cachet and leeway to do almost anything he wanted. He probably learnt from Yoko Ono that just about any activity could be labelled art and if you were John Lennon your farts could be made into art happenings if you declared them such. Hence sitting in a bed or in a bag for peace. The best things Lennon did after leaving the Beatles can be summed up in the Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine albums. After that he trod water and essentially became famous for being famous.

George Harrison was the "quiet one", interested in guitars and guitar solos (his greatest sphere of creativity on record until he was allowed a song of two per album) and later Indian mysticism, the sitar and a huge beard. Much later, probably when he realised that his musical career was the pits, he bankrolled some good movies, and some poor choices like Shanghai Surprise, and then joined the Travelling Willburys where he could slot into his standard Beatles role and be a great supporting instrumentalist. But really, apart from All Things Must Pass, and some nice early Seventies singles, Harrison could never surpass Taxman, Something or even While My Guitar Gently Weeps and even the latter track became something special mostly because of Eric Clapton's solo. George Harrison was capable of writing a good song every now and then but he was not consistent and that is why he is secondary to both Lennon and McCartney who almost always delivered the good. Even a mediocre Lennon / McCartney tune can be interesting; a mediocre Harrison song is just dull.

I can think of a few prominent McCartney songs from his post Beatles career, such as Band on the Run, Live and let Die, Silly Love Songs, Ebony & Ivory, The Girl is Mine (both collaborations with Black artists that seem to be little better than frivolous novelties), Tug of War and Mull of Kintyre, and these are all from radio play. Apart from the Band on the Run album I have not listened to any Wings or solo McCartney album, and have no desire to. Of all these songs, only Mull of Kintyre is a true classic, a standard, the kind of song that can really bring a lump to the throat under the right circumstances. Lennon's song Imagine comes closest to a standard, but I cannot think of anything Harrison wrote or released after the Beatles break up that would ever be a standard of such proportions. Say what you will about McCartney, he can sure write them if he puts his mind to it.

John Lennon may have been the genius and may have been the true iconoclast in the Beatles, but he is the kind of artist who creates best on impulse and not all impulses are good. McCartney probably has impulse and dedication to craft, and can work a song into something splendid even if the effect is wholly calculated. This makes him the real genius and one of the giants of popular music. Sadly it seems to me that most of his output over the last 20 years or more has relied more on craft and polish than on creative spark.

I used to own a vinyl copy of the late Seventies John Lennon album Rock & Roll, bought as a budget re-release in the Eighties, because I recalled the hit from it, Stand By Me, as a particular favourite of mine back in the day and it seemed to me that the menu of rock and roll covers could not be a bad thing, and I must confess that I did enjoy the album and played it often when I still played records. I would not mind owning it on CD. The only other solo Lennon album I would want to own, is John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band, though I would not mind listening to Imagine again, and maybe Mind Games and Some Time In New York City. On the whole, though, a greatest hits collection is about the best way to experience John Lennon.

As for Paul McCartney, I once had a taped copy of Band on the Run and listened to Back to the Egg, (which was terrible)
but I cannot really think of any one Wings or solo McCartney album I would want to pay money for or necessarily would want to listen to either, though I guess I would then be guilty of dismissing a whole body of work because of some individual examples I did not like. The thing is, whereas Paul at least had the gumption to start up a whole new band and drive it to success, he went into a musical direction that was the antithesis of what I was listening to or deeply interested in when I was a teenager, and the adult in me has not reconciled with the AOR rock of Wings. The post-Wings pop has left me totally cold.

As for George Harrison, about the only thing associated with him that I am interested in, is the DVD of the Concert for Bangla Desh movie, which may well have been his shining hour. Maybe All Things Must Pass as well, but in his case I do not think that even a greatest hits package would find favour with me.

As for Ringo Starr, the singing drummer, I must confess that his early Seventies hits such as Back Off Boogaloo and She's Sixteen were firm favourites of mine and they are still fun. He had no pretentions to art or artifice and made records because he was allowed to and fortuitously had some hits along the way. The movie career did not quite take off, perhaps because of bad choices, and nowadays he is on the road again, with a new band and new releases, and I guess he can make a living retreading some nostalgia and offering more modern sounds that will never trouble the charts or find favour with a general rock audience again. Perhaps Ringo is one of the lucky ones, who managed to hitch on to a speeding train to stardom without needing to be the talent or the ambition, and he became as famous as the rest, as lovable, and can now boast of being one of only two surviving Beatles. He is a living legend of sorts and maybe dozens of biographies will flood the booksellers after he dies, but I do not think anyone will ever write a revisionist tome in which he is found to be the most underappreciated genius of the century. About the best one could say about him in the context of the Beatles, it seems, is that he was a very capable drummer who did make a very useful contribution to their sound.

The genesis of this piece is my purchase of Rubber Soul a couple of weeks ago, from a CD seller on Greenmarket Square, along with Anthology 3, which covers the "White Album", Abbey Road and Let It Be final years. The anthology contains mostly demos and it is interesting to hear the naked, unadorned versions of songs better known in full arranged and orchestrated fury, such as Helter Skelter or Hey Jude, and even While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Something, but one allows for the fact that these tracks are demos and if they sound a bit cheesy or flat, the reason is that they have been fully worked out and need polishing. However, it was Rubber Soul that was the revelation, in a manner of speaking, of disappointment.

If one is used to greatest hits compilations of pop groups, listening to albums can be less than satisfactory when not every song is a killer. This is what Rubber Soul is like. As I understand the conventional wisdom of how Beatles albums and the body of work are categorised, Rubber Soul is where they start maturing into the era of the peak that is Revolver, and perhaps Sgt Pepper, before dipping into the trough that is Magical Mystery Tour and the rocky period of the "White" album and the Let It Be sessions, before peaking again with Abbey Road. Before Rubber Soul, the Beatles were quite good, but still somehow a bit twee and hidebound and too much of the family entertainers. From here on in they take LSD and expand their personal and musical consciences and truly become avant garde.

I approached Rubber Soul with much anticipation. The cover is great, my favourite Beatles album cover, and it has a number of songs I knew and loved, close to half of the album's songs can be found on the 1962 - 1966 greatest hits set. As it turned out, the well known tunes are also by far the best of the bunch and the other tunes seem mostly like filler to me. The two Harrison songs are dire, and Lennon's Run For Your Life, that seems like a left over from the debut album or maybe With The Beatles, is just terribly naff. Where was the quality control? These kind of songs counter the argument that the Beatles were simply the greatest pop group ever. Okay, maybe Rubber Soul is just a flawed album by a great band, but it seems to me that just about all their albums are similarly flawed, as most of Harrison's songs up to maybe the "white" album were at best mediocre, Ringo just had his single goof per record, and the quality of Lennon's output fluctuated wildly -- for every Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds there is a Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite.

Apparently a New York rock critic Richard Goldstein was just about the only rock writer who did not think much of Sgt Pepper at the time it was released and found himself lonely and castigated out on a limb of his own making. Perhaps he was more correct in his opinion of the album than everybody who did and still reckon it to be one of the best albums ever made, if not the best. It seems to me that the event of Sgt Pepper has overtaken the reality of the music, which is not that bad and not in total all that wonderful either if you get right down to it. Like most Beatles albums it is a mixture of wonderful and mediocre lent more weight because it is a Beatles product.

If one wants the best of all possible Beatles worlds, buy the "red" and "blue" greatest hits sets, or the later Beatles 1 album, and you will have all the good stuff. The rest, barring an exception here or there, is disposable. The best one can say for the Beatles, to paraphrase John Lennon, is that they became very popular and are now, even more than ever, cultural icons of a magnitude that it would be hard to diminish and, as is the case with Elvis Presley, the music becomes of secondary importance, just background to the big show. The hits will always be with us, the mop top images will always survive on posters and other merchandise, John Lennon will most likely always be thought of as the genius more than Paul McCartney, and the Beatles industry will thrive for as long as pop culture exists.

Despite my high school principal's dire warnings and greatest fears, my only Beatles connected drug experience occurred when I was already close to my mid-forties. It was a night I spent with fortysomething friends when we were all high on some herbal substance (not the obvious one) they smoked and I consumed as a kind of infusion, and the guy played the Beatles 1 album. Somehow he became fixated on and obsessed with Eleanor Rigby. It is probably not the first track on the CD, so we must have listened to the preceding tracks in the ordinary course but for some reason the guy got stuck on this piece of McCartney schmaltz with its deeply meaningful lyrics about alienation, set to a great pop tune. My host identified with the deep meaning he perceived in the rather mundane lyrics. The pause and return and play buttons of the remote control to the CD Player worked overtime. We'd listen to half the song and then he'd pause, share his stoned insights, then return to the start of the track and let it play for a few seconds before pausing again, and sharing more insights, or maybe even the same insight, put slightly differently, before starting the track from the beginning again.

This process lasted a couple of hours, or so it seemed, and we never got through the whole of the song. Obviously the guy and his partner, who had theories of her own, were heavily into their explication of the lyrics and intent behind them and so forth, and may well have had true insight in their attempts to relate a pop song to the greater human tragedy around us, but it got a tad trying after a while, especially as I was not nearly as stoned as they were and rapidly became bored and irritated with having to listen to the same bits of the song over and over. I went to bed and they carried on and for all I know, never did get to the end of Eleanor Rigby.

This experience should probably be a convincing reason why one should not take drugs.

Perhaps it was totally coincidental that the Beatles drove my friends to this kind of excess and maybe it would have happened with any other album they'd chosen to play, but I almost think not. Whatever it was that John, Paul, George and Ringo had, it was something that still has some of us caught up in imagination and awe.

 

 

 

Metallica

From certain angles Kirk Hammett looks disturbingly like Steven Buscemi. James Hetfield has a pockmarked face and looks better after rehab with his glasses and all. Lars Ulrich changes hair style and colour every couple of weeks.

Hammett is the peacemaker and self described ego free guy. Hetfield is at first merely angry and unhappy and then quite self aware and self deprecating and seems to by the kind of guy it would be fun to hang out with. Ulrich comes off as a bit of a pompous prat who seems to weigh up just about everything he says in a kind of million calculations per milli-second in his mental computer.

The music they make together sounds pretty awesome even when they believe it is "stock" or just going through some motions they have gone through many times before. It is a portrait of men who have collaborated for twenty years, have been hugely successful in doing what they do and still cannot quite grasp what it is. They do not have spontaneity in making records, unlike the party pose they might have on stage. Making records is hard work and sometimes unpleasant work if you have competing and uncompromising egos to contend with.

These are some of the insights gleaned from the documentary Some Kind of Monster, the history of the events comprising the making of the St Anger album, released in 2003. I have not watched another rock documentary as often or as with much continued enjoyment as this movie. Some of the stuff seems so out there that one can hardly believe it has not been scripted. Despite myself I kind of warm to Lars Ulrich, even if he seems to be the asshole of the band; he is so serious, he is so analytical, and yet he can bash the drums pretty good. James Hetfield, the sober James Hetfield, is someone I want to hang out with, maybe go for a spin in his low-slung custom street legal racer. There is just so much psycho drama going on, high comedy, farce, weirdness, and through all of it one gets a good sense of what it takes in the world of Pro Tools to make a rock and roll record if you are one of the biggest bands in the world – the biggest metal band of all time as Jason Newstead puts it in one of the rare interview snippets he is allowed. Metallica cannot just go into the studio for a week and bash out ten tunes. It has to take then a year to do it, and not only because they talk their way through the process, but because that is what it takes to make a "Metallica record."

I am the kind of guy whose first Metallica album was the black album simply called Metallica, released in 1991, and which was their serious, large scale breakthrough to the mainstream and mega success. Enter Sandman was the single that got major airplay in South Africa and it must rank up there with the classic rock anthems of the Seventies as a recognisable riff and memorable lyrics and tune. Of course I did not buy the album when it was released because I was not particularly a fan of the band and was at the time much more interested in Guns 'n Roses, with their retro styled Aerosmith like music, and the neo punky Nirvana were much more to my taste.

I bought the black album somewhere in 1992 during my first phase of CD buying, and it was stolen a year later, along with most of my collection, and then I made the effort of replacing it as I did with the Nirvana, Guns 'n Roses and Bob Dylan albums I had lost. By this time I was thoroughly enamoured of the Metallica album and played it constantly. My only gripe and misgiving about the album was that the production seemed to be too smooth. Unlike Guns 'n Roses, Metallica's riffs did not come roaring out of my stereo player. It seemed that the producer had aimed for what one could call orchestral metal: a huge but somehow blunted sound that did not quite kick me in the guts. I guess it would have been a different story when the band played those tunes on stage before thousands.

I was not persuaded to buy either Load or Reload or any of the other Metallica product that followed and precede St Anger, because I simply was not a fan. The black album was enjoyable but it somehow seemed to be an anomaly in the oeuvre of thrash metal purveyed by the band.

The DVD of Some Kind of Monster was a present to myself shortly after it was released in South Africa, somewhere in 2004. The St Anger album had been around for a while and I had ignore it but for some reason the documentary appealed to me and I have not been sorry I splashed out on it . I must have watched it, all the way through or in episodic pieces, about ten times and each time is as enjoyable as the first. It is just a first rate piece of story telling.

Then I found out the St Anger album packaging also contained a bonus DVD containing in studio band performances of all the songs on the album and because I was also curious to hear the full length complete versions of the tunes from the documentary, I bought the album. The live performances featured the then new bassist Robert Trujillo who did not actually play on the album. His audition and selection as replacement for Jason Newstead is one of the highlights of the documentary, and live in studio performances showcase him splendidly.

However, I was not so enamoured of the music on the album. The production was quite in your face and there were some strong tunes but overall it seemed to me that the album was way too long to sustain my interest. Although I am not a huge fan of the technically proficient kind of metal guitar solo practised by Hammett the complete absence of guitar solo did not quite work for me either. The sound seemed grinding and overly harsh and there was nothing as gripping as the tunes on the black album.

Apparently many fans thought so too and the album is not highly rated. Too experimental. Shortly thereafter Bob Rock, who'd been Metallica's producer for a long time, was put out to grass. Not that he was particularly to blame for what had happened with St Anger but I guess he was the only expendable part of that team.

After that and in quick succession I bought Ride the Lightning, ... And Justice For All and Kill 'Em All and I must confess that my earliest suspicions of thrash metal were confirmed and amplified. The arrangements were mostly too elaborate and convoluted – too many changes in tempo, and probably key as well, just to show off -- had no real tunes and did not engage me. And in general it was just too soft. I wanted to be bludgeoned by Metallica, not lightly tapped, and these albums did not do it. I must have listened to them once or twice, did not get it, and have not listened to then again and have no desire to ever hear them again. Maybe I should have been into then at the time they were released and when I was much younger and less critical than I am today.

I do however think I should give St Anger another chance. It is kind of brutal but for that very reason it slams certain metal truths home. This is a mega successful band, very adept at what it does, and when it does it with this kind of intensity, even as a rehab record, it works on very many levels I can appreciate. It should have been somewhat shorter though.

By the conclusion of Some Kind of Monster, some two years after the recording of St Anger started, the band has kind of sorted out its internal issues, the members, mostly Lars and James, have come to terms with each other and their new roles, they have found a new bass player and have been most generous to him to welcome him into fold, unlike their treatment of Jason Newstead when he joined, the album is done and they face the prospect of a new, mega successful tour. All's well that ends well. At least for now. It's exactly like any other movie happy ending – one does not know whether the new found sobriety, unity, peace and happiness will last, but that is a story for another day, for Some Kind of Monster II.

We know that Metallica have released another studio album after St Anger, and that they have therefore not reached the end of the line for their brand of heavy rock or their long term commitment to their band, an Robert Trujillo is still hanging in there.

Metallica, along with U2, could be the Rolling Stones of their generation.

Tarquin Rises Up

A small, skinny bald-headed fucker listening to tunes on his iPod and carrying a laptop carry bag came looking for me at the place I was having breakfast. It was kind of my local, where I ate once or twice a week, and the staff knew me and could almost predict my order. Call it my comfort zone in the morning before I faced the day. It was not the place I wanted to have to dodge anyone much less someone who was there specifically for me.

The baldy came in, looked around, walked past me to the back and then turned around and came to a stop in front of me. I had just scooped up a forkful of perfectly scrambled eggs. He put down the laptop bag and removed the earpieces from his ears. He was bald simply because he'd shaved his head and, if I were any connoisseur of male pattern baldness, that he would soon be hairless for real. In a freaky kind of way he resembled Moby the American musician who once was a punk and then became a guru of electronic beats. The look could have been cultivated. Maybe he liked the idea of people doing a double take when they saw, wondering whether he was not perhaps that famous guy.

Baldy stared at me. I chewed my eggs.

"Hey," he said.

"Hi," I said. I gave him the raised eyebrow of 'can I help you, fucker?' but this did not deter him.

"I'm Craig", he said.

I was very happy for him.

"Craig," he said again as if I had not heard him the first time.

"Hello, Craig. Was there something?"

My eggs were getting cold so I had another mouthful while I waited for Craig to alert me to his mission status. He may have beamed in from Planet Bald-headed Freak for all I knew. I wondered what he had been listening to on his iPod. Maybe he was not only a Moby lookalike but perhaps he also only dug the guy's music.

"Are you still up for the thing?"

The Thing? The Marvel anti-hero from the Fantastic Four comic book? Or was it a thing in the sense you always hear Mob guys refer to the movies when they want to be clear as mud?

"Please sit down, Craig, have some coffee or something. Then you can tell me all about it."

"I don't like coffee. The thing ... are you in?"

In or out, out or in. Why must there always be this dichotomy of choice spelt out in direct opposites? Craig seemed like an overly serious and obsessed individual. Moby is or was a Vegan and I think Vegans are kind of kinky in the weird eating habits they have. It's not like I am a voracious omnivore but I do like my food non-organic and fattening at times.

"Look, mate, I do not know you. I do not know anything about your thing and I don't think I care too much about it either. What is your thing?"

Maybe his thing was nude disco dancing or steroid enhancement.

Craig was not a happy Craig. He was meeting resistance he had apparently not foreseen, which is strange considering that he was confronting a total stranger with some total crap question. I suddenly wondered whether this was an attempt at picking me up. Craig, you are just not my type, my dear. I prefer them slightly more hairy and voluptuous.

"Are you Carl?" Craig asked.

"I am not," I said, for I was not. "I believe you might have the wrong number."

"Why the fuck are you wearing a black T-shirt?"

Now, now, Craig, what has that got to do with anything? Of course I wear black T-shirts. All of the T-shirts I own are black in colour, okay, by now some of them are close to grey, but they were all black once. Maybe Craig is the Fashion Mafia representative in these parts. Guilty as charged. I wear black T-shirts. I guess I will soon be sleeping with the fishes.

"This is my fashion statement for the day," I said. "Life is bleak and tomorrow we die, or our loved ones die. I am a Black Metal fan. Back in Black by AC/DC is my favourite album. Paint it Black is my favourite grim yet catchy Rolling Stones tune. Black Consciousness is my favourite political movement. Enough reasons for you, Craig?"

"I'm supposed to meet Carl here and he'll be wearing a black T-shirt."

"I guess he is not here yet. I haven't seen anyone else in here with a black T-shirt while I've been here. Maybe he is running late, or was way too early for you. Sorry, kid, I am the best I can do for you at the moment. Pull up a chair, have something to drink that is not coffee and we can talk some more."

"Fuck, no," Craig said. "Weirdoes like you freak me out."

Craig re-inserted the headphone earpieces in his ears, took his laptop bag and went to a table at the rear where he set up his laptop and started messing about on it. He completely ignored me now. I finished my eggs and ordered a café latté and sat staring off into the middle distance for a while.

Just as I was about to drain the last of the coffee from my mug a tall, tubby guy in a black T-shirt and baggy shorts came in and sat down at a table between me and Craig who looked up and immediately perked up. My guess was that this new arrival could well be the hitherto mythical Carl. He looked like a parody of a heavy metal drummer with a long ponytail of dark hair and a stupid cap.

Craig got up and went over to the new guy and spoke softly to him. This trick worked. The two of them exchanged exuberant handshakes and the new guy followed Craig to his table where they sat hunched up around the laptop and talked softly amongst themselves. They ordered health juices from the waitress.

Oh, Death!

Tom Waits sounded old when he was young. Now he is old, he looks old and he still sounds old and even crankier than he ever was.

Kurt Kobain looked incredibly young, like a little kid lost in a world het never made. He sounded young and pissed off too. Then he killed himself and entered the legendary world of rock musicians who died young.

Buddy Holly set the bar for rockers who die in plane crashes. After him came Ritchie Valens, Otis Redding and some guys in the Bar-Kays, some members of Lynyrd Skynyrd, John Denver, who had the kind of career of a guy who ought to have died in his sleep, and Stevie Ray Vaughan who went all modern and died in a helicopter crash.

Keith Richards kept getting older and older, piling wrinkle on wrinkle and allegedly using his body as some kind of medical experiment, yet has never stopped rocking because like a shark has to keep moving, Keith has to keep rocking or he will die.

Lots of rockers, famous and not so famous, have died from all kinds of drug overdoses or the nasty side effects of taking too many drugs too often.

Eric Clapton too heroin and became an alkie, and survived it all and is now a senior citizen in the rock'n'roll old age home and like a veritable Keith-clone he keeps on playing the blues.

I was so angry when I heard Chris Whitley had died. I think he liked a drug as much as the next guy and perhaps a little more and then he shuffled off the mortal coil because his body forsook him. He was once featured in Time Magazine as member of a new peer group of American roots musicians who were harking back to old school blues and country music. Some said he wanted to make a pact with the Devil.

That leads us to Robert Johnson who is the most famous barely known musician in the blues field and one of the most influential too. There are only two known photographs of him. It took me a long time to get into his harsh, doom laden music and now I believe he is the modernist in music, the man who brought a backwoods music into the 20^th century and made art of it. Not many White people ever saw or heard Robert Johnson perform live but lots of spotty teenage blues fans think he is a deity.

More grunge musicians, or maybe they were post-grunge, died drug related deaths, like Shannon Hoon from Blind Lemon, who died just when the band was starting to become really successful. He sang back up on some songs from the Use Your Illusion I and II double albums by Guns 'n Roses whose members were no strangers to substance abuse, yet only the first drummer was fired for being too untogether. Layne Staley from Alice in Chains flirted with disaster for a long time for succumbing. They were grunge before grunge took off, and I never liked their music.

The drummer from Smashing Pumpkins was fired for not being able to handle his drug addiction.

Danny Whitten, Crazy Horse's lead singer, guitarist and songwriter died from a drug overdose, as did one of their roadies. These deaths inspired Neil Young into writing a whole album of dirges that is still some kind of milestone of doom laden depresso music that not many people want to listen to voluntarily. The album, Tonight's The Night, sold poorly. Strangely enough, these drug deaths did not stop old Neil completely from taking a drug or two of his own. It is rumoured that when he went on stage for his turn at Winterland, on the Band's Last Waltz concert film, coke crystals could be clearly seen around his nostrils and they had to be airbrushed out in post-production.

Neil Young also wrote a song about the death of Kurt Kobain.

Bob Dylan took lots of drugs in his time. Speed, weed, LSD, cocaine, to say the least but he survived all of them and all kinds of airplane flights. He had a motorcycle crash but by now it is trite that the damage was inflated to give him time off from incessant touring and to allow him to get his head together in Woodstock so that he could write the songs on John Wesley Harding and The Basement Tapes. Late in life he had a kind of medical scare where there was some expectation that he might not make the age of 60 but now he and the Rolling Stones are way up there in the never say die rocker stakes.

Southern Rock had its casualties too though these ol' boys liked their weed and their Jack Daniels better than drugs, they were probably not totally immune to substances either. Back in the day everyone did everything they could lay their hands on. The thing of it is that the Southern rockers seem accident prone more than anything. Duane Allman and Berry Oakley from the Allman Brothers Band both died in motor cycles creepily close to the same spot and on more or less the same day a year apart. Younger brother Greg Allman was a bit of a cocaine hound in the Seventies but survived. He probably does not ride a motorcycle or is very careful when he does.

Brian Wilson is still alive, having long outlived his younger brothers Denis and Carl. Denis drowned, probably because he was wasted when he swam, and Carl died of a heart attack or something. Some say that Brian was de facto dead to the world for a very long time and that indeed his talent had died while he was still shuffling around like reclusive retard. Recently he has made a big comeback with some new solo material and his reworking of "legendary" Smile suite of songs that was supposed to have put Sergeant Pepper to shame but was never released in the form Brian's vision envisaged until his late period attempt to do it.

John Lennon was shot, cementing the genius legend forever. Yes, well, what did he ever do after John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, not to mention the Beatles years. Someday soon someone is going to take a long objective look at Lennon's creative output and is going to put the myths to rest, as Albert Goldman almost did, except that no one liked his attempt to put a fresh spin on the picture of Saint John so many people fondly hold. Lennon coasted on his status as Beatle for a very long time, way beyond his sell by date and produced a bunch of crap for his final album which only sold strongly because of his untimely death. As was the case with Elvis Presley, Lennon's death was the best career move he ever made in later life to secure his waning status.

Sadly George Harrison could not win his battle against cancer, which also goes to show that living healthily is no guarantee of anything in life. He also made some really crappy music after the purged his creative closer with All Things Must Past. I guess George was a great guy, who loved Monty Python and who could play a mean rockabilly guitar solo but he was no great shakes as a songwriter. No loss to the world of music, just a loss to the world.

I kind of like the idea that Bon Scott from AC/DC and John Bonham from Led Zeppelin both almost literally drunk themselves to death. Ron "Pigpen" McKernan from the Grateful Dead also terminally abused his liver. Brett Mydland, who followed in Pigpen's footsteps as Grateful Dead keyboardist also died from drug related abuses. Jerry Garcia was a long time dragon chaser and crack head whose heart could no longer handle the shit and gave up on Jerry. Now many remember him only because of the Cherry Garcia flavour produced by Ben & Jerry's' ice cream. Many others remember him as the resident guitar genius continuously on display in an endless series of CD releases of Dead live concerts.

One of the weird true death stories in rock connect father and son, Tim Buckley and Jeff Buckley who had rock careers several years apart and both of whom died too young. Tim at least had a relatively long career and left a number of fine albums behind while Jeff managed only one official, though wonderful, album and various releases of outtakes and unfinished material, and some live stuff. Jeff drowned; Tim mistook a lethal combination of heroin and morphine for cocaine. It is a moot point which death was the more tragic. At least Jeff Buckley had a very good looking corpse.

The so-called unnecessary deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin always loom large and seem to serve as salutary lessons in the price of excess and hedonism, but they were probably both completely accidental and almost incidental to the lifestyles of the two dead rock stars. To my mind both of them died at exactly the right time for their place in posterity. They had achieved the heights of stardom and their brand of creativity and who is to say they would have improved during the Seventies? I do not think so. Spare us a jazz funk obsessed Hendrix or a Joplin doing time in Las Vegas.

Brian Jones outlived his usefulness to the Rolling Stones and his meagre talent and there was really no future for him. Sid Vicious was a cartoon and had no purpose beyond his iconic role in the Sex Pistols. One cannot imagine that he would really have mastered the bass or become a singer-songwriter.

Jim Morrison went into exile in Paris to get his shit together and then died in mysterious circumstances to the extent, like the Elvis Presley scenario, many believe that Morrison faked it all to escape from the spotlight and that he is somewhere in the world writing poetry and fucking young girls. I bet the other, less popular members of the Doors are pretty pissed off about this. They had recruit Ian Astbury from The Cult as a make-do-Morrison just so they could hit the nostalgia trail and make some money again.

The late great Johnny Ace died from the after effects of badly played Russian roulette and inspired Paul Simon. Hank Williams died in the back of his car, body riddled with consumption, wracked by alcoholism and a fast life, and inspired a bunch of country stars and rockers, and his grandson Hank Williams III.

Al 'Blind Owl' Wilson from Canned Heat got wasted, laid down next to some railroad tracks in the winter and died from exposure. He was also depressed because he was really going blind. Some years later Wilson's cohort in Canned Heat, Bob 'The Bear' Hite died from a heart attack induced by obesity and an unhealthy lifestyle. Both of them were collectors of blues records.

Somehow Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf died almost peacefully after long lifetimes of playing first the juke joints, lounges and backstreet halls and then the clubs and stages of the wider White audience where they made more money in relative old age than in their younger days.

The biggest death of all is owned by Elvis Presley. He died too soon yet he died much too late. He had no more purpose in this world, yet his death served a greater commercial purpose than his life ever did and now the Elvis Presley Estate is one huge enterprise that never needed the Colonel to run it or steer it into profit. There are images everwhere of the young Elvis, the mid-Sixties Elvis, even the Aloha from Hawaii Elvis in his weird jumpsuit and cape. There are DVD box set of all his movies. There are endlessly recycled collections of his tunes. This is an Elvis universe and we only live in it. He's been gone for almost 32 years and people still see him everywhere in the most remote corners of the earth.

There is always Good Rockin' Tonight because Elvis made the breakthrough. Some say the music died with Buddy Holly, I say the music died with the Big Bopper.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Martin Scorcese Shines A Light On The Rolling Stones

The Last Waltz was the first Martin Scorcese movie I ever saw and Shine A Light, the Rolling Stones concert movie, has been the last Scorcese movie I've seen to date.

In The Last Waltz Scorcese presented a combination of concert film and biography of The Band's last performances before retiring from "the road" and becoming a strictly recording unit, although it really meant the end of the group as a functioning entity. Shortly thereafter the individual members went their own ways and if the Band still kind of functioned after that, it was without Robbie Robertson and then Richard Manuel and Rick Danko died.

The thing was that the guys in The Band felt that 15 years of touring was enough already. Compare that to the Rolling Stones who have been going for over 40 years and have never had enough of "the road." Mick 'n' Keef are well past 60 and still wanna rock like the young studs they once were. It should have been a lesson to The Band: maybe staying on the road keeps the group going, keeps you alive (provided you control your substance intake) and acts like and elixir of eternal youth. I guess it also helps that Rolling Stones tours are massively profitable affairs for the 4 official members of the band.

Marin Scorcese is not the first moviemaker to film the Stones doing what they do best. If you want to see the Stones on stage, you can watch Gimme Shelter, Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones, the DVD of performances from the Bridges to Babylon tour and the Four Flicks multi-DVD set of shows from the Forty Licks. There is actually a lot of footage of latter day live Stones, all wrinkled and desiccated, yet rockin' like demons. Perhaps Keith Richards does believe he can keep old age and death at bay by furiously riffing away in as many locations as possible.

It seems to me that since the turn of the millennium Scorcese divides his attention between "proper" movie projects and musical subjects. There is the series of documentaries about the blues under the banner "Martin Scorcese presents ..." and the No Direction Home Bob Dylan biography of the early iconoclastic years of Dylan's career. This way of going about making documentaries must be like new journalism, where you apply the methodology of making a fiction film to making a factual film. There is no reason why the documentary cannot be as arty as the fiction movie and if you can bring your own stamp to it, you edify the subject and subject matter, in the way serious writers like Norman Mailer and Truman Capote brought literary weight to journalism.

Scorcese wants to be super prepared to film a bunch of old guys rocking out on stage and his concern for finding out what the set opener will be, is almost a parody of comic fear of failure. Scorcese wants to make the best concert film ever and he cannot stand the idea of leaving part of his sphere of control to the subjects he is filming. The Rolling Stones have a huge back catalogue of songs, many hits and many obscurities and can probably play several shows without having to repeat any song, so why is it so important for Martin Scorcese to know exactly which song will open the show?

As it is, the Stones open with a hoary old warhorse, Jumping Jack Flash, and then present a set that mixes well-worn favourites with some relative obscurities, particularly favouring Some Girls and Tattoo You as their nods to the most recent work, and ignoring anything they've done since 1980. This is a festival set, in fact a charity set, and not a concert in support of a latest album so they feel no need to showcase anything the audience would not know by heart if they have been Stones fans over the past 40 plus years.

I guess I am not alone when I say that the Stones tunes I like best all stem from the Sixties and early Seventies, up to (at best) It's Only Rock'n'Roll, but the last of their albums that I truly like as a whole is Exile On Main Street. From then on there are a number of great Stones tunes but there are no studio albums where I can say I unreservedly like the entire thing. Stripped is a good album with some unusual choices in tunes, but it consists of live recordings, and that is about where I drew the line with the post-Eighties Stones. Voodoo Lounge and A Bigger Bang both have the odd decent rocker and some nice ballads but the problem for me with the listening to these albums is that it all sounds too much like the guys going through the songwriting motions of professionals who have perfected the craft part of the deal but no longer have anything left for the art part. The youthful enthusiasm and brio are long gone; all that is left is the necessity to fill up an album with tunes to comply with record company demands and to have something to tour behind so that nobody can say the Stones are nothing but a nostalgia act. The Stones no longer have to release albums of new stuff and perhaps they should not.

Shine A Light is an excellent showcase for the band in its autumn years, refusing to go quietly into that good night, and of how far it has gone in becoming part of the establishment it once eschewed and railed against. Many years ago, in the days when some people seriously held that no one over 30 should be trusted, Mick Jagger indicated that he could not quite see himself doing the pop star thing beyond that age. A few years later, when his career had been well-established and with the wisdom brought by maturity and pragmatism, Jagger used the example of bluesmen who carry on making music into their sixties and said he would want to have that kind of career. And so it became true. The Biggest Rock and Roll Band in the world can keep on rocking well beyond normal retiring age for most workers and still retain some kind of hip cool.

Of course, rock and roll is so young that nobody yet knows how long anyone can keep on rocking. Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby and the like had careers that stretched for 40 years or more; Elvis Presley's career got cut short but he would have been going today if he had stayed alive. It is al just show business and if the Rolling Stones could keep their brand fresh and alive through 5 decades, more power to them.

It is weird to see the wrinklies in their satin and tat jumping around on stage like very much younger men. Jagger has the body of a young dancer, not too much different to what he looked like back in the Sixties or Seventies, but the face tells a different story. Maybe he made a pact with the devil: his body will stay trim but his face deteriorates. I bet Mick Jagger uses more make up now than he did in the Seventies gender bender era. Keith Richards is also kind of thin, except for a bit of a paunch and has really freaky hear – bad hair day everyday – and his face could really use some Botox to flesh out the wrinkles. Keith was never too pretty but now resembles a bit of a mummy. Ron Wood is just thin; maybe he has an eating disorder or an extremely overactive thyroid gland. Charlie Watts has not changed much over the past twenty years. He went grey early and developed a major bald spot on the back of his head. This is pretty still the situation. Fortunately for Charlie he looked old when he was 30.

For all that, Keith, Ronnie and Charlie still rock out solidly and when they fire on all cylinders it is a thrilling ride. Close your eyes and you could be at any gig the band has played since the Seventies. The only difference would be that the sound is probably much better today than it ever was back in the day.

There are three cameo appearances, Jack White on Loving Cup, Buddy Guy on Champagne & Reefer and Christina Aguilera on Live With Me. God knows why. None of them bring much to the party and Aguilera emotes far too muck all over what is a moderately sinister tune from the Sixties heyday. She would have done much better as backing vocalist on Gimme Shelter, one of the all time great Stones tunes that did not make it to the set list. Apparently this is the first Scorcese movie that does not feature Gimme Shelter.

There aren't any real highlights among the tunes. All of them are well played and well sung, without any interesting creative spark to make them fresh or different. The Stones, and their backing musicians, are professionals who have been doing this thing and playing these songs from a very long time and they deliver a professional product that cannot be faulted for attention to detail and the overall customer satisfaction in terms of songs played and the quality of the presentation should be high. It is a big show, with big sound and big tunes that have been part of our musical history and cultural education for so long they might as well be pre-historic. For most of us the Rolling Stones have always been there, astride the world like a rock and roll colossus and it is sad to think that the evidence of Shine A Light will mostly serve to prove only that you can rock until you are almost dead, but that getting better at it does not mean you are more vital or interesting, except as a bit of a curiosity.

I walked out of the theatre really stoked. This was as close to a live Stones concert as I would ever come, but when I got home I sought Hot Rocks 1 and 2 and Exile On Main Street, and immersed myself in Stones music in the versions that originally won me over and meant something to me. These are the versions I will listen to over and over because they are performed by the young men who turned rebellion into money and made good, solid, satisfying rock along the way, most of them classics that will forever define a particular zeitgeist and also define what rock should be in its rawest primal form. Of course I am biased in my opinion. I like the blues and I like what the Stones have done with infusing their rock with blues without adulterating the one or stultifying the other and for my money, you cannot really make good rock music if you do not fuse the two. This opinion may also make me sound like a relic from a bygone era who has no idea of what informs current rock and who no longer has any clue, and that is alright. I am no longer a teenager and I do not have to like or understand the stuff teenagers listen to nowadays.

The thing is: how many of today's bands will still be with us in 40 years time, going as strong as ever? Maybe the paradigm has changed and maybe rock is no longer so brand strong that anything has to last beyond the initial success and maybe the Internet will kill rock as we know it, but I know this: there has never been anybody like the Rolling Stones and there never will be again. They made records in the days when rock music was really important because it was still in its infancy and rebellion seemed real. Now it is all either corporate or independent and Internet fuelled and making money is the chief objective.

Very little matters in music anymore. There is too much of it, too many genres, too many artists, too many merely technically excellent albums.

One should ask this rhetorical question: of today's big bands or artists, how many will be the subject of a Martin Scorcese movie? Okay, I know he is of a certain age and will prefer acts from his youth, but if there is major movie maker who embraces the idea of making a documentary about a big act, which of today's big guns will be chosen? Are there even big guns amongst us anymore?

The Rolling Stones have become older and have carried on for far longer than they or anybody else would have imagined but for all that their light shines strongly and brightly and still illuminates our lives far better than any alternative currently available.