The Wall Street Journal asks "What Drives the Rolling Stones?" but misses the obvious answer: same thing that drives Wall Street. GREED.




What Really Drives the Rolling Stones

November 13, 2012, 10:00 AM ET.



It’s Rolling Stones week:  their latest greatest-hits package “GRRR!” is available today.  It contains 50 tracks, ranging from their ’63 debut single “Come On” to “Doom and Gloom” and “One More Shot,” two new songs recorded in August in Paris, where the Stones played a club set last month.

And on Thursday, Brett Morgen’s documentary “Crossfire Hurricane” has its premiere on HBO.  It shines a light on the history of the Stones while not quite revealing, at least not explicitly, how they remained great despite the kind of turmoil that now seems a perverse form of wish fulfillment.

As Keith Richards points out early in the documentary, at the urging of their first manager Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones sought to be the anti-Beatles – the guys in the black hats, to paraphrase Keith Richards.  Violence broke out at their early ‘60s shows, and a young Mick Jagger suggests it was a natural reaction by socially dissatisfied youth rather than the result of a provocative marketing ploy.  Unbridled hedonism and drug busts ensued, and original member Brian Jones, fired from the band, succumbed to “death by misadventure” – Jagger says, “He was the author of his own misfortune.”  The band moved on to often-excellent second and third acts in its five decades.

With new interviews of Jagger and Richards, early members Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman, post-Jones guitarist Mick Taylor and post-Taylor guitarist Ron Wood as well as loads of archival footage, Morgen adds depth and insight to the Stones’ history, most notably the fiasco at Altamont.  He captures Jagger’s growth into his role as professional Mick and presents Richards as the firecracker bad boy who brandishes a gun and serves as the band’s snarky head cheerleader.  Charlie Watts who, at age 71 and with nearly 50 years behind the drum kits for the Stones, hasn’t much to say, but makes sure to convey his opinion that only the music matters.

Now and then Morgen wobbles away from the narrative power of the tale behind the Stones’ music, failing to reveal how they grew from a naughty cover band to write and perform a body of work that’s all but unsurpassed in rock music.  “Just playing the blues suddenly wasn’t enough,” Richards says.  Nor does he address how at age 20, Taylor moved in after Jones’s dismissal and contributed to the next great phase of the band’s career beginning with “Let it Bleed.”  (“That was a really good band,” Jagger says of the Taylor-era Stones.)  And where’s Ian Stewart?  A founding member shelved for not fitting its image, Stu played blues and boogie-woogie piano for the Stones until his death in 1985.  The film’s arc is incomplete:  “Crossfire Hurricane” sort of dribbles to its end, omitting such quality works as “Tattoo You” and “Steel Wheels” while ignoring how the departure of Wyman and the arrival of ex-Miles Davis bassist Daryl Jones informed the Stones sound.

But what makes the Stones great is in ample evidence, thus providing some answers the narrative doesn’t.  As they morphed into a machine that wrote both tough and tender tunes, a flood of excellent singles lift the film, revealing that in the studio the Jones-era Stones were a really good band too.  Live Wood-era performances of “Miss You” and “Hey Negrita” are powerful, startlingly so.  Says Wyman:  “When we got together, something happened, something magical happened and no one could ever copy that.”  Perhaps that’s all there is to it.

Jim Fusilli is the Journal’s rock and pop music critic.






http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/11/13/what-really-drives-the-rolling-stones/

Stones up next on Today Show with Matt Lauer.