WSJ:
The World's Oldest 'School Boys'
NY CULTURE
November 15, 2012, 8:53 p.m. ET
By EDWARD HELMORE
"They were fairly determined to not go beyond joking," said Academy Award winning playwright Tom Stoppard, after being largely thwarted in his effort to attach literary gravitas to the Rolling Stones' 50th anniversary during an hour-long discussion with the band at the Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday night.
"Like four recalcitrant schoolboys," said Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke, who was in the audience along with museum trustee Ronald Lauder, MoMA director Glenn Lowry and Walton Ford, the celebrated artist whose watercolor portrait of a gorilla, adapted with the Stones' lips-and-tongue, logo now graces the posters for the bands' upcoming five-date tour, as well as its latest greatest hits compilation "Grrr!," out this week.
"It's my first ever commission and it was fun to paint," Mr. Ford said. The band owns the reproduction rights, but not the painting itself. Is it for sale? "Maybe eventually. It belongs to my wife."
Perhaps expecting Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ron Wood to undergo serious cultural analysis in a museum setting was too much to ask of this premier anti-establishment bands.
Mr. Stoppard cited a study of 1,000 Floridian women of whom 984 had become pregnant listening to rock 'n' roll. "Immaculate conception, or were their husbands listening to it, as well?" quipped Mr. Richards.
The museum is currently showing the Rolling Stones: 50 Years on Film, including Peter Whitehead's "The Rolling Stones Charlie Is My Darling—Ireland 1965" (1965/2012); "Ladies & Gentleman: The Rolling Stones" (1974); and Kenneth Anger's "Invocation of My Demon Brother" (1969).
Footage of the band's live shows is also on view, including their astonishing live performance on the T.A.M.I. Show in 1964, topping the bill over a peeved James Brown, whose stage moves Mr. Jagger sought to emulate.
"I don't know how I had the affrontery to go on and try to do James Brown in front of James Brown, but that's youth for you," the singer said.
Mr. Stoppard presented a clip from Jean-Luc Godard's "Sympathy for the Devil" (1968) that comes closer in spirit to the Czech-born writer's "Rock 'n' Roll" (which looked at the significance of music in the Prague Spring of 1968 to the Velvet Revolution of 1989) than, say, "Shakespeare in Love." What did the band recall of making the film?
"I remember Godard set fire to the ceiling of the studio and we had to evacuate," Mr. Watts said. "Then he got into a fist fight with the producer."
"At the same time," said Mr. Richards. "Very French."
Apologizing to any fans of the film in the audience, Mr. Jagger conceded he found Godard's film "almost unwatchable."
"And the blood looked fake," recalled Mr. Richards.
Mr. Wood, a comparative later comer to the group (in the mid-seventies, after an apparently homeless Mr. Richards came to stay), recalled that he first seen the group at a blues festival in London in the early sixties. "I was lured toward a marquee that seemed to be moving like an elephant," he recalled. "And I thought, what is this animal moving to this beautiful music?"
Mr. Stoppard moved on to "The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus," another long-shelved performance film that has resurfaced as a Stones-aficionado period piece. Mr. Richards recalled he was assigned to play bass guitar while John Lennon and Eric Clapton played lead on the Beatles' "Yer Blues." "Like I always wanted to play bass!"
"So Keith's playing bass, Eric's on guitar and then we hear this awful wailing noise in the middle of the song," picked up Mr. Jagger. "And the camera pans down to this bag. The musicians aren't paying attention, but there's this racket coming out the bag and it's Yoko! It was her performance piece and she called it "BAG."
"Well, she's that kind of girl," reasoned Mr. Richards. "Bless her. She's a sweetheart."
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