[Review originally published 11/16/2010 on Skratchdisc. RIP Charlie Watts!]
What makes a great concert film? Terrific music, for one. Great sound? Definitely. Interesting cinematography? Yeah. An historic event? Sure. And what makes a great concert film director? Someone who knows how to present the band, their music, and what it looks like on stage in a way that makes you want to see it more than once.
So who is this guy, ROLLIN BINZER? Well, he’s the guy who directed Ladies & Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones. But I’m not sure he was the right guy for the assignment. This movie, now repackaged, remastered and remixed for 5.1 surround sound, has been out many times since the home video era began, and this time they even put it out on Blu-ray. A concert film about the Stones’ classic Exile on Main St., it’s certainly got great music. The performance of that music? About what you’d expect of Mick & Keefco in that era. The sound? It’s alright – nothing to write home about. (Not that my parents would give a shit.) The cinematography is just okay. Not only would I decline to write home about it, I might even have bypassed the movie entirely if I’d heard that it was just a basic multi-camera shoot with nothing really special about it.
All of these gripes go a long way to answer the question: If it’s such a dull, cookie-cutter concert film, why are they re-releasing it now? Well, duh. They just executed the marketing campaign for the reissue of Exile, so naturally they had to reissue the movie that went along with it. Can’t miss an opportunity to milk the golden cow, now, can we? And what’s more, as you’d expect, there’s an insert inside the case hawking official Rolling Stones t-shirts and the documentary DVD Stones in Exile, which tells the story of how this magnificent, brilliant rock ’n’ roll record was rendered. Well, I’ll stand by the album as being a great one (though I like Sticky Fingers better), but I’m not a fan of this Blu-ray showcase for Rollin Binzer’s vision of what made the Stones great. I’ll bet my stepmom could’ve made a better concert film. – Marshall Gooch
2.5/5 (Eagle Vision; DVD & Blu-ray)
Phase 2 in which Doris gets her oats…* 
The bulk of the rest of the cuts are in-studio early takes, trial mixes and edits of the songs you’d expect, including an instrumental version of “Because,” a strings-only track for “Something,” and a strings ’n’ brass one for “Golden Slumbers”/“Carry That Weight.” It’s great to finally hear alternate takes of “Come Together” and “I Want You (She’s so heavy)” complete with Billy Preston’s amazing organ that was all-but-obliterated by the white noise that builds up in the last half of the original side one closer. Interesting, too, is a trial edit and mix of “The Long One,” i.e., the side two medley that makes up the last third of the album. Here you hear “Her Majesty” in its original placement, smack dab in the middle of “Mean Mr. Mustard” and “Polythene Pam.” It was wise of them to snip it out of there and move it elsewhere on the LP, as its stark acoustic guitar and voice completely destroys the momentum building up to “The End.” (And that’s not to mention how “ironic” it is to have “The End” at, ummmm, the end of the record – if only to be followed by the originally unlisted little ditty that eventually closed the album out.)
It’s kind of wonderful, this worldwide wankfest over a 50 year old rock ’n’ roll album. All kinds of people, everywhere, getting all hot ’n’ bothered over THE BEATLES’ Abbey Road, the last album they recorded together but the penultimate release during their actual time together as The Fab Four. The cynical among us probably consider it another greedy cash grab, the romantic might think it’s a real sweet thing, and I’ve heard there are even those among us who don’t care! Whatever, I’m devoting some column inches to it (as they would’ve said in ’69), so I must care.
In terms of formats, well of course there are more than you can shake a stick at. You can get Abbey Road on single LP, double LP, picture disc LP, single CD (which is what I’m basing this post on), double CD, or the 3 LP and 3 CD/1 Bluray box sets (coming in the mail later this week!). As I’ve said in the past, what’s gonna work for you is largely a function of how big a fan you are. Take the guy on the left in the photo at left: he’s probably not going to get any of these, but was nice enough to play John Lennon to my McCartney (I couldn’t be bothered to take my shoes off, though) when we entered a Seattle area record store yesterday to pay our respects. But (his sister) Shirley there must be an edition that will work for you, so I suggest you get on down to Abbey Road at your earliest convenience and see what son Giles has done to dad George’s recording of The Beatles’s first or second greatest moment. — Marsh Gooch
JOHN LENNON’s first solo album, Plastic Ono Band, was a raw slab of rock ’n’ roll, primal and painful and pretty near perfect. The followup, 1971’s Imagine, was a much more elegant affair… at least, that’s how it came off at the time. But, you’ll find when dipping into The Ultimate Edition, there is a vast sky of treasures that went into its creation. This substantial 2 Blu-ray/4 CD set gives us so much of it that it’s hard to know where to begin.
That’s only BD disc one. The second Blu-ray gives us another, further set of raw mixes, another set of out-takes, a set of elements (for instance, just the strings from “Imagine” or a solely acoustic take of “Oh Yoko”), and what they call “The Evolution Documentary” (which I haven’t gotten to yet). Are you lost? Because it’s easy to feel that way among all of this audio.
The Woodstock of the ’80s? In a way. The US Festival was Steve Wozniak’s “brainchild,” in quotes because the Woz didn’t quite know what he was doing when he decided he wanted to put on a bigger-than-Woodstock festival to “unite us in song.” But somehow he put together a crew that was able to avoid most of the issues that plagued the iconic ’60s rock fest. The US Festival: 1982 The US Generation is a documentary film that tells the story of the ’80s event, which was attended by some 400,000 people over three days. The doc also features a few artists performing complete songs, including Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers (“Refugee”), The B-52’s (“Strobe Light”), The Police (“Can’t Stand Losing You”), The Cars (“Bye Bye Love”), Santana and Fleetwood Mac.
Some of what they did for US has been incorporated into today’s Bonnaroos and Coachellas.
Late Christmas gift or early birthday present to myself? Who cares. It finally arrived, just seven weeks after they shipped it from the UK… and I’ve been listening to it practically non-stop ever since. XTC’s Black Sea is the 1980 album by these British heroes of the new wave, and it was an amazing slab of wax: muscular power pop, thinking man’s rock, whatever you wanted to call it, it was an album like no other in their catalogue, past or present.
Those songs still excite me — I never get tired of ’em! — but the side enders “Language” and “Travels” are pure pummel now, with both their lyrics and their gargantuan grooves coming through loud and clear!
Fast forward twenty years to 2016 and RON HOWARD’s Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years. Here we get a 105 minute documentary that covers only three to four years of the band’s history and uncovers hardly anything new or revelatory. (There’s both a standard one disc version and a “Special Edition,” both on Blu-ray or DVD, with an extra disc of bonus material.) The fact that the project started out as a highly publicized idea to examine the band as a live act is interesting. Either Howard and his pals were unable to come up with a good story (hard to believe, given: The Beatles!), even enlisting the public to share their stories and/or audio or video, or for some other reason they changed horses midstream and scrubbed the original plot. Well, you may have guessed that I think they botched it up, big time.
NuDisc 