Kills Me Dead

If you’ve been around me longer than five minutes you will know two key facts: 1) that the Rolling Stones are my favourite band and 2) that Martin Scorsese is my favourite director. These guys teaming up for a documentary should be my ultimate match made in heaven, no? Sadly, no. When the trailer first came out six months ago, I worried that they were going to focus mostly on what would likely be the least interesting part of the movie, i.e. the concert itself. There was some process-oriented stuff in the trailer, which gave me hope that the actual film would be more of a push-pull, behind-the-scenes thing between Scorsese and the Stones, but that never came to fruition. The film starts out with some behind-the-scenes stuff of Mick bitching about the set design and Scorsese fretting over not having the set list but once the show starts, all that pretty much goes out the window. From that point on it’s concert footage, concert footage, concert footage, archival interview footage, concert footage, concert footage, archival interview footage, lather, rinse, repeat. Then the concert ends and we momentarily get thrown back into the behind-the-scenes stuff again for about thirty seconds before the film finishes.

I actually had no option but to see this in IMAX (it’s not playing in regular format anywhere that I can get to), but IMAX really does wonders for the sound of the film, which is good because we’re documenting the Greatest Rock and Roll Band In The World™. The Stones look and sound fantastic, and it’s clear they’re having a bloody fantastic time. And by the Stones, I mean Keith, Charlie, and Ronnie — Charlie always brings his A game, no question, but Keith seemed to be goofing off less than usual. I’d attribute this to the fact that the concert was being recorded for posterity but let’s be honest, since when does Keith Richards give a fuck what anyone thinks? Anyway. I have this weird love/hate thing with Mick Jagger. On the one hand, I think he’s a great front man because he does all the ridiculous showmanship crap that people in the audience love, which leaves the rest of the band to actually deal with the music. Everyone wins! On the other hand, his voice isn’t what it used to be and the way he delivers the songs these days (and by “these days” I clearly mean “the last ten years”) doesn’t always sit well with me. It’s too… staccato? I don’t know. At any rate, I can get over my Mick hate because seeing him dance six stories high is absolutely priceless, holy crap. He is effing hilarious.

As I said, the performances are strong all around but it’s not anything you haven’t seen before. They’ve done a really great arrangement of “You Got The Silver” that’s even twangier than the original, which is great because I don’t think the Stones’ country tracks get nearly as much credit as they deserve. That said, you kind of wish they’d take that kind of initiative with the rest of their set list; all the other arrangements are pretty much exactly as you would have heard them if you’ve seen them on tour at any point since the Steel Wheels (1989) tour. There’s no spontaneity to it and it’s all very planned out, but then again the Stones are a well-oiled machine and have been for decades now. I don’t want to say it’s soulless, because it’s not, but after a while it starts to lack a little bit of warmth. I was pretty grateful for the Buddy Guy duet because that injected a nice jolt of life into the performance; it made me wish that the Stones were the house band at some blues dive because you know what? They’re a pretty good little blues band. It’s all about the roots!

[As an aside: I remember reading a quote either by Mick or Keith (probably Keith) from around the Some Girls era explaining that the reason they sucked in the Seventies was because for those three middle albums they were up studio musician creek without a paddle. By this they meant that all the people they brought in to play on their sessions were becoming the Stones sound rather than augmenting it, which was problematic. Some Girls was refreshing because they did away with most of these session players and it was just the Stones stripped down to their bare essentials. I feel like they need to do this again. You can have a huge touring band (and it's almost required, given the arrangements of the songs and the instruments needed), but when you go back into the studio to work on a new album (which they are rumoured to be doing in the near future), you've got to go back to basics. Get back, as the Beatles said, to where you once belonged. Hey-yo! The best song, IMO, on A Bigger Bang was "Back Of My Hand", which was this old school country number that would not have sounded out of place on Beggars Banquet. I'm not saying their sound should stay the same and be identical to what it was in 1968, I'm just saying that the spirit of what they were doing in that 1968-1972 period was pretty effing magical and so much of that has to do with the fact that they were playing off each other rather than off of the session guys.]

And this is the thing: I love this band. I love this band, and even though I listen to them all the time, I tend to forget how much I love them. But seeing them up there just killed me. There’s this one cute moment during “Faraway Eyes” where Mick and Keith are being all BFF and I kept whispering to “OTP!! OTP!!” Because really, Mick and Keith were my first OTP and they will be my last OTP. (Thank god I’m not in bandom, although maybe bandom needs to be shaken up by the Stones.) And Keith? Keith will always be my one true unrequited celebrity love. No one will ever come close, not Gary Oldman, not Leonardo DiCaprio, not Casey Affleck, not anyone else who I’ve ever said I’d have ten thousand of their babies. It’s all Keith, baby. Even on a bad day, Keith is at least a thousand times cooler than anyone in the room and that is not an exaggeration. (No, really, it’s not.) How can you not love Keith Richards? How can you be a fan of music or a musician and not love the man? He’s the funkiest looking cat on the planet and yet when they do extreme close-ups of his incredibly craggy visage and he’s smiling away, you can actually see his twenty-two year-old self in his face. (Assuming you can remember what he looked like at twenty-two.) I’m not joking, it’s all there; it may be buried under years and years of fissured skin, but it’s all right there. This is a man whose face tells a million stories, only none of those stories end up in the film. They’re occasionally alluded to — there’s one passage where they play a radio clip regarding his drug arrest in Toronto in 1977 — but it’s all the superficial, uninteresting stuff that even those with the vaguest idea of who the Stones are already know.

Now, the only other Scorsese doc I’ve seen is The Last Waltz, which I think is a much better film to compare to Shine A Light than his Dylan documentary, No Direction Home (which I still haven’t seen for reasons unknown to me), since it also revolves around a concert. The difference between the two is that there’s a point to The Last Waltz: The Band were breaking up and they wanted to document their final live show. One of them, probably Robbie Robertson, makes a point of talking about how for the first eight years of their career they were strictly a touring band and the Stones are very much the same — they have some truly phenomenal albums, but where you find them at their best is on the road*. That’s what The Last Waltz is: it’s the final concert of a touring band, with tales from sixteen years on the road thrown in via interviews conducted by Scorsese himself. The stories act as introductions to the guests who perform with The Band during the show and while you know it’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what kind of stories these guys could tell, what you do get to hear about is fantastic.

*Which is why I think they should forgo the charade of touring in support of new albums every five years and just do a Never Ending Tour, Bob Dylan-style, because they just really like to play live.

There’s a structure to The Last Waltz, a plan. If you’ve watched the making of featurette on The Last Waltz, you know that Scorsese storyboarded all the song lyrics as a means of creating a “script” for the film; this explains why he’s ready to have a heart attack at the start of Shine A Light when it’s minutes before the show and he still doesn’t know what song the Stones will be leading off with. (Three guesses, and if you say “Jumping Jack Flash” you’d be correct. Come on, Marty.) It’s funny how formulaic a Stones show can be and yet they’re still not planned enough for Scorsese’s meticulous nature. Without having story boarded the show in advance, there’s only so much Marty can control and the movie turns into any other concert flick that the Stones have done over the years. There’s nothing about this that really screams SCORSESE SEAL OF APPROVAL, no place where he really makes it his own. It seems to me that half the point of this collaboration is the collaboration itself, so wouldn’t it make sense for that collaboration to be seen or felt on screen? It almost feels like anyone could have directed this movie.

Also, the IMDB plot synopsis calls this a “career-spanning documentary” which it pretty much isn’t. Inserting a couple of clips from the sixties and seventies for no real purpose doesn’t make it “career-spanning”.

As a concert film, it’s pretty good. As a documentary, not so much. It really truly pains me to say that.