I watched this late last night and what a great profile of Anita it is; great clips and great interviews and the dialogue was extraordinarily honest it seem to me . . .the American voice over reading from her posthumously discovered autobiography was a mistake but hey . . . . . whatcha gonna do, apparently it was Scarlett Johansson? Dreadful sci-fi actress and awful voice but heck . . . . . the content more than made up for it. [Didn’t recognise her at first and found myself always wanting to hear a teutonic or at least European accent to the voice over but I get it] Volker Schlöndorff and Prince ‘Stash' - Stanislas Klossowski de Rola (son of the fine artist Balthus) more than made up for it
Anita at Hyde Park
the deeply flawed and insecure Brian here dressed by Anita
‘pretty, pretty, pretty’ Anita costume shot from Barbarella
The Dark Angel
Barbarella gets to it!
Performance - caused troubles . . . . Michele Breton (to die from heroin OD, Anita and Mick
“I didn’t really fancy Mick but if you are spending all day every day in bed filming things happen"
Beautifully done for the most part and as we thought Keith comes over as lovely, self effacing and deeply in love.
Bryan not so much! (He beat her up but not when Keith was there!)
Obsessed, possessive and violently insecure and Keith open and bright but unsure what on earth Anita saw in him, which is really rather sweet.
The children were a delight and a revelation and despite the clear deep seriousness affecting lovely Marlon who is, if nothing else, ever his father’s son, the lovely ‘Dandelion' Angela was a revelation and I had never heard her interviewed before. Jake Weber’s account of being children in the chaos was extraordinary
The story of the loss of the youngest, Tara, from cot death syndrome was heart wrenching. Keith on tour did not break the ’show must go on’ adage and was his way of coping somehow. . . . when we didn’t really know what cot death was Anita blamed herself and was in the depths of screaming torturous despair so that the other children had to be taken away . . . . . . desperately sad and the beginning of the end of the Keef n Anita enclave . . . . . .
A coupla youngsters turn to the classics! Country classic (Donnie Fritts November 8, 1942 – August 27, 2019 and Troy Seals November 16, 1938 - March 6, 2025) that is!
The reason Noel stopped talking to his idiot brother was ‘ar kid' threatened to hit him round the bonce with a guitar and so it is always worth remember how Keef deals with over enthusiastic pillocks!
(maybe stick to your own generation and insulting Damon although I don’t fancy your chances there much either!)
Ronnie Spector with Patti SmithThere Is An End (2006)
"Featuring Smith on backing vocals, this great track is from Ronnie’s only release in the past ten years, The Last Of The Rock Stars. The album features Keith Richards, Joey Ramone, Nick Zinner of Yeah Yeah Yeahs etc and is well worth finding."
Camberwell Foxes Radio & Blog
Wow now here’s a revelation and as posted here by Le Ramassuer De Mégots, another from the Camberwell Foxes Radio & Blog!
Who knew? Not me! Ronnie with Patti, Keef, Joey Ramone and Zinner from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs!
Keith Richards tuning his guitar backstage during the Stones’ “Tour of Americas,” San Antonio, Texas, June 1975.
Keith:
"I’ve never tried to achieve anything. I achieved everything I wanted to achieve by being in the Rolling Stones and making records. That was the only real goal in my life, ever, but since that happened so quickly, like a laser beam...I think the next goal was not to become one-hit wonders. I mean, after that, no real goal, except to sort of keep on going. I mean, what does an entertainer do, basically? You get onstage and make other people feel happy. Make them feel good. Turn them on."
"I wouldn’t want to impress them with musicianship. I want them there because they want to be there and because they know that they’re going to have a damn good time. I wouldn’t take it any higher than that."
Keith Richards: I don’t see any reason why it should stop if there’s those of ’em still out there that wanna see it and I wanna play it, let’s get it together. I mean I get antsy just sitting in one place for too long. I’ve had a few brushes with old death, he’s kind of a friend of mine, actually, and er, if you hang around me you’ll have a brush with it too.”
“I played with Muddy Waters six months before he died, and the cat was just as vital as he was in his youth. And he did it until the day he died. To me, that is the important thing. I’ll do this until I drop.”
“I really feel for new bands that are coming up because these days you need a quarter of a million dollars before you can start. And with that big money, the marketing men want to play it safe. And when you play it safe, the best you’re going to come up with is something that’s not bad. We’re here because it is Fucking Great! Playing it safe is not what it’s all about. This music is about beautiful fuckups. And beautiful recoveries.”
"T-Bone Walker was one of the first to use the double- string thing--to use two strings instead of one, and Chuck Berry got a lot out of T-Bone. Musically impossible, but it works. The notes clash, they jangle. You're pulling two strings at once and you're putting them in a position where actually their knickers are pulled up. You've always got something ringing against the note or the harmony. Chuck Berry is all double-string stuff. He very rarely plays single notes. The reason that cats started to play like that, T-Bone and so on, was economics--to eliminate the need for a horn section. With an amplified electric guitar, you could play two harmony notes and you could basically save money on two saxophones and a trumpet. And my double-string playing was why, in the very first Sidcup days, I was looked on as a bit of a wild rock and roller, and not really a serious blues player. Everybody else was playing away on single strings. It worked for me because I was playing a lot by myself, so two strings were better than one. And it had the possibility of getting this dissonance and this rhythm thing going, which you can't do picking away on one string. It's finding the moves. Chords are something to look for. There's always the Lost Chord. Nobody's found it."
I have been talking guitars a lot lately and a couple of things occurred to me after the extraordinary story about Rory Gallagher's beloved Strat and its loss and rediscovery! One is my friend and guitarist mentioned that Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top used '7's strings on his electric guitar and to anyone not in the know, guitar strings come in widths and gauges that inevitably some develop a preference for. I always use 10s on my acoustic guitars and similar on my electrics but 7s are LIGHT! Then I discovered he uses a dime for a plectrum!
My Harmony H162 (1957)
That's a metal coin! On REAL thin strings! Plectrums are usually made of general plastic and earlier ones may have been made of tortoise shell and even compressed felt for something like an Autoharp! I heard in response to this from my daughter's most excellent singer songwriting other half that Brian May ( apart from making and designing his own guitar from the earliest moments on) uses a threepenny bit! This again to those not in the know is an extraordinary little coin with its usual portcullis design has an edge that might best be described as CHUNKY!
If you listen to ZZ Top play live I believe you can tell that Billy uses a coin as they are easier or prone to raise harmonics on hitting the guitar string just so!
My Gibson 'Kalamazoo' 1936 KG11(headstock)
The other day however I found this wonderful clip of Keith Richards expounding his unique (sic?) approach to playing in open G. You simply take the top string off and play with five! Watch out for this on film and video. Now I used to play a lot in open tunings and used an open E for the longest time even on my first guitar a 12 sting but enjoyed drop D the next step and DADGAD or open G is common too. I have also been fascinated but those of us using open tunings and to masters like Martin Carthy who I have heard uses HIS OWN tuning! Now you have to really know your chops and how it fits with other players to come up with your own tuning so this is as yet a step too far!
My Gibson 'Kalamazoo' 1936 KG11
Here's Keith in LIFE magazine:
Keith Richards: The beauty, the majesty of the five-string open G tuning for an electric guitar is that you've only got three notes--the other two are repetitions of each other an octave apart. It's tuned GDGBD. Certain strings run through the whole song, so you get a drone going all the time, and because it's electric they reverberate. Only three notes, but because of these different octaves, it fills the whole gap between bass and top notes with sound. It gives you this beautiful resonance and ring. I found working with open tunings that there's a million places you don't need to put your fingers. The notes are there already. You can leave certain strings wide open. It's finding the spaces in between that makes open tuning work. And if you're working the right chord, you can hear this other chord going on behind it, which actually you're not playing. It's there. It defies logic. And it's just lying there saying, "F*ck me." And it's a matter of the same old cliche in that respect. It's what you leave out that counts. Let it go so that one note harmonizes off the other. And so even though you've now changed your fingers to another position, that note is still ringing. And you can even let it hang there. It's called the drone note. Or at least that's what I call it. The sitar works on similar lines--sympathetic ringing, or what they call the sympathetic strings. Logically it shouldn't work, but when you play it, and that note keeps ringing even though you've now changed to another chord, you realize that that is the root note of the whole thing you're trying to do. It's the drone.
I just got fascinated by relearning the guitar. It really invigorated me. It was like a different instrument in a way, and literally too. I had to have the five-string guitars made for me. I've never wanted to play like anybody else, except when I was first starting, when I wanted to be Scotty Moore or Chuck Berry. After that, I wanted to find out what the guitar or the piano could teach me.
The five-string took me back to the tribesmen of West Africa. They had a very similar instrument, sort of a five-string, kind of like a banjo, but they would use the same drone, a thing to set up other voices and drums over the top. Always underneath it was this underlying one note that went through it. And you listen to some of that meticulous Mozart stuff and Vivaldi and you realise that they knew that too. They knew when to leave one note just hanging up there where it illegally belongs and let it dangle in the wind and turn a dead body into a living beauty - Life
ZZ Top live on Howard Stern playing La Grange (see if you can hear whether you think Billy is using a metal coin here as he makes the notes hit that harmonic ring from a kind of pinch stroke with the plectrum hand
The beauty, the majesty of the five-string open G tuning for an electric guitar is that you've only got three notes--the other two are repetitions of each other an octave apart. It's tuned GDGBD. Certain strings run through the whole song, so you get a drone going all the time, and because it's electric they reverberate. Only three notes, but because of these different octaves, it fills the whole gap between bass and top notes with sound. It gives you this beautiful resonance and ring. I found working with open tunings that there's a million places you don't need to put your fingers. The notes are there already. You can leave certain strings wide open. It's finding the spaces in between that makes open tuning work. And if you're working the right chord, you can hear this other chord going on behind it, which actually you're not playing. It's there. It defies logic. And it's just lying there saying, "F*ck me." And it's a matter of the same old cliche in that respect. It's what you leave out that counts. Let it go so that one note harmonizes off the other. And so even though you've now changed your fingers to another position, that note is still ringing. And you can even let it hang there. It's called the drone note. Or at least that's what I call it. The sitar works on similar lines--sympathetic ringing, or what they call the sympathetic strings. Logically it shouldn't work, but when you play it, and that note keeps ringing even though you've now changed to another chord, you realize that that is the root note of the whole thing you're trying to do. It's the drone.
I just got fascinated by relearning the guitar. It really invigorated me. It was like a different instrument in a way, and literally too. I had to have the five-string guitars made for me. I've never wanted to play like anybody else, except when I was first starting, when I wanted to be Scotty Moore or Chuck Berry. After that, I wanted to find out what the guitar or the piano could teach me.
The five-string took me back to the tribesmen of West Africa. They had a very similar instrument, sort of a five-string, kind of like a banjo, but they would use the same drone, a thing to set up other voices and drums over the top. Always underneath it was this underlying one note that went through it. And you listen to some of that meticulous Mozart stuff and Vivaldi and you realise that they knew that too. They knew when to leave one note just hanging up there where it illegally belongs and let it dangle in the wind and turn a dead body into a living beauty - Life
From 'Son of Rogues Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Shanteys'..and I bought both of these when they came out . . . . . . . .awesome fun!
Tom Waits on Keith Richards:
"Everybody loves music. What you really want is for music to love you. And that's the way I saw it was with Keith. It takes a certain amount of respect for the process. You're not writing it, it's writing you. You're its flute or its trumpet; you're its strings. That's real obvious around Keith. He's like a frying pan made from one piece of metal. He can heat it up really high and it won't crack, it just changes color.
You have your own preconceived ideas about people that you already know from their records, but the real experience, ideally, hopefully, is better. That certainly was the case with Keith. We kind of circled each other like a couple of hyenas, looked at the ground, laughed and then we just put something on, put some water in the swimming pool.
He has impeccable instincts, like a predator. He played on three songs on that record: "Union Square," we sang on "Blind Love" together, and on "Big Black Mariah" he played a great rhythm part. It really lifted the record up for me. I didn't care how it sold at all. As far as I was concerned it had already sold.
One of my favorite things that he did is Wingless Angels. That completely slayed me. Because the first thing you hear is the crickets, and you realize you're outside. And his contribution to capturing the sounds on that record just feels a lot like Keith. Maybe more like Keith than I had contact with when we got together.
He's like a common labourer in a lot of ways. He's like a swabby. Like a sailor. I found some things they say about music that seemed to apply to Keith. You know, in the old days they said that the sound of the guitar could cure gout and epilepsy, sciatica and migraines.
I think that nowadays there seems to be a deficit of wonder. And Keith seems to still wonder about this stuff. He will stop and hold his guitar up and just stare at it for a while. Just be rather mystified by it. Like all the great things in the world, women and religion and the sky... you wonder about it, and you don't stop wondering about it."
Photo by Max Vadukul
It kinda makes total sense and the work they've produced together makes pure sense too but just one thing . . . . . . don't go drinking with them . . . . . . would be my best advice!
"There's something primordial in the way we react to pulses without even knowing it. We exist on a rhythm of seventy-two beats a minute. The train, apart from getting them from the Delta to Detroit, became very important to blues players because of the rhythm of the machine, the rhythm of the tracks, and then when you cross onto another track, the beat moves. It echoes something in the human body. So then when you have machinery involved, like trains, and drones, all of that is still built in as music inside us. The human body will feel rhythms even when there's not one. Listen to "Mystery Train" by Elvis Presley. One of the great rock-and-roll tracks of all time, not a drum on it. It's just a suggestion, because the body will provide the rhythm. Rhythm really only has to be suggested. Doesn't have to be pronounced. This is where they got it wrong with "this rock" and "that rock." It's got nothing to do with rock. It's to do with roll."
From Life (Richards book)
Photo by Albert Watson
Thursday, May 02, 2019
ON THIS DAY IN MUSIC
1969 - The Beatles
The Beatles recorded a re-make of the new George Harrison song 'Something' at Abbey Road Studios in London. They recorded 36 takes of the song, which included Billy Preston on piano. The track is featured on the Abbey Road album. Probably one of the greatest love songs ever written George penned this for his then wife Patti who features in the video although she was to leave him and filed for divorce in 1977 for close friend Eric Clapton two years later for whom he wrote the love song 'Layla' . There is some dispute as to George writing i t more to the concept of Love {Krishna} rather than the individual person but it stands in fans eyes as being more corporeal and after all he does use the term 'she' but hey . . . . .
1964 - The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones self-titled debut album started a 12-week run at No.1 on the UK charts. The album spent a total of 51 weeks on the UK chart. Also on his day The Stones made their first appearance on the US singles chart when 'Not Fade Away' entered the chart at No.98.
1991 - R.E.M.
The video for the R.E.M. song 'Losing My Religion', was banned in Ireland because its religious imagery was seen as unfit for broadcast.
2006 - Keith Richards
Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards was released from hospital in New Zealand after the 62 year-old suffered "mild concussion" when he fell out of a coconut tree while on holiday in Fiji. He was airlifted to Auckland's Ascot Hospital for observation, where he underwent a brain scan.
2009 - Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan mingled unnoticed with other Beatles tourists during a minibus tour to John Lennon's childhood home. He was one of 14 tourists to examine photos and documents in the National Trust-owned home, where Lennon grew up with his aunt Mimi and uncle George. Dylan who was on a day off on a European tour paid £16 for the public trip to the 1940s house in Woolton, Liverpool.
Birthdays
1985 - Lily Allen
English singer, songwriter Lily Allen who had the 2006 UK No.1 single ‘Smile’, and the 2006 UK No.2 album Alright, Still which sold over 2.6 million copies worldwide and brought Allen a nomination at the Grammy Awards, Brit Awards and MTV Video Music Awards. She is the daughter of actor Keith Allen and film producer Alison Owen.
Sampling Professor Longhair made me sit up and notice what music my daughter was listening to . . . . . . . . . Horrified though both my children prolly were to find I dug the whole album!
