Rock is dead babies—rock is DEAD! Don't get me started on the state of music, specifically music created by/for today's young and those stubbornly refusing to grow old gracefully—that's another post for another day. But as a staunch member of the latter, I can stop bemoaning a world of digitally-altered divas foisting a steady stream of empty techno fluff onto the ignorant young of the world long enough to remember a golden age when music defined us and the jams were kick ass.
I was but a mere babe in 1969, and it would be a few more years before some of the rock gods of that time would be counted among my vinyl collection—but OH MY GAWD what a year that was musically. In August, half a million muddy hippies came together for three days of peace, music and dysentery under conditions that would have turned a Kiwanis picnic into a bloodbath and instead created the myth of the Woodstock Nation. Now personally, the idea of sharing space with acres and acres of naked, hairy hippies kinda makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit—but I think I would have braved it for the chance to see Jimi Hendrix, the Who and Santana for the price of a venti caramel macchioto.
After Woodstock, the biggest news of the year was the announcement that the Rolling Stones were coming to America for their first tour in almost three years. A lot had changed since that last tour. Screaming, seat-wetting teen girls had given way to stoned (possibly seat wetting) connosiurs who listened to every note—now audible thanks to advances in PA systems. The Stones themselves were changed as well. Founding member Brian Jones had drowned in his swimming pool only months before and the Stones had found themselves at a crossroads —continue as a group or seize the moment to become a supergroup that could define the decade to come. The group had come to symbolize the darker forces of flower power turned on is head and their latest music seemed to rip it's lyrics from the headlines of the day—protest, sexual freedom, and youthful hedonism run amok. While the flacid Beatles were satisfied to Let it Be, the Stones summed up the decade by saying Let it Bleed baby—Let it Bleed.
The infamous Stones tour kicked off in early November and cris-crossed the US playing everything from college gymnasiums to the place where most rock critics believe the two greatest rock shows ever performed were played—at Madison Square Garden on the evenings of November 27 & 28, 1969. The shows included WHITE-HOT sets by supporting acts BB King and the Ike and Tina Turner Revue and made up the brunt of the performances captured in the Maysles Brother's documentary Gimmie Shelter as well as the album that Rolling Stone magazine still hails as "possibly the greatest live album ever recorded"—Get Yer Ya Ya's Out!
When Ya Ya's was originally released a year after the tour ended, Mick Jagger bemoaned not being able to realize the group's original concept—presenting a full package of the Stone's Garden shows that would have included music from King and the Turners—due to disagreements between the artist's respective recording companies. But for 40 years, fans have known that the tapes from those mythic shows were languishing somewhere in the Stone's vault—and possibly contained Stones songs that were left off the original release as well. It was a long wait babies—but the Stones have finally delivered the goods in a newly re-mastered, re-packaged and thank-You-sweet-baby-Jeebus EXPANDED box set that includes all that and more.
The expanded Ya Ya's includes the original 1970 release with sparkling sound that adds more sonic power to the Stone's rhythm section as well as razor-sharp attack to Mick Taylor and Keith Richard's dueling guitars. A second CD includes 5 previously unreleased numbers that despite lacking the post-performance overdubbing of the 1970's original tracks, sound amazingly cohesive with the other songs. But the real gem of the new set is the third CD that contains the complete sets of BB King and Ike and Tina Turner Revue. BB King's set includes delicious blues standards played with the reserved style of a seasoned master, each punctuated by the great boom of his powerful voice. Ike and Tin'as set is excitement from the first opening notes of "Gimme Some Lovin' to the last frantic shimmies of "Land of 1,000 Dances." The showstopper has to be Tina's hyper-sexual rendering of Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You Too Long"—which must have sent every middle class, white boy in the Garden home in desperate need for a cold shower.
Unfortunately, the Stone's triumph at Madison Square Garden that Thanksgiving weekend would be eclipsed only a few weeks later by the final show on the tour. The infamous free concert at Altamont Speedway where Hells Angels hired as security would murder an audience member would go down in Rock 'n roll history as the end of the sixties dream.
In subsequent months and years to come, gallons of ink would be spilt to brand that final show of the the Stone's 69 tour as the day the music died—the death of that short-lived Woodstock nation. Personally, I think the pundits of the day faltered in their rush to too-neatly sum up a decade by pointing a finger to Altamont's bloody stage as the place where a generation's most noble dreams came crashing down around them— instead of extolling the band's Garden shows as the apotheosis of that generation's dreams gloriously set to three chords and a Bo diddly beat —dreams rent asunder by one senseless act of violence.
Cultural and social ruminations aside, it's the music that always mattered anyway. Perhaps Mick was right when he sang you can't always get what you want, but 40 years later—we finally have gotten what we wanted.
MOST excellent post; The Stones ruled my teen years. So much so that my mom took my 45 of "Brown Sugar" away till I could settle down a bit...
Posted by: Michael Guy | November 20, 2009 at 08:01 AM