*****
And so we come to the end of the road of this appreciation of the long film history of the Rolling Stones. The've always been one of the most visually recorded bands to ever exist in the world. Between their feature films, thousands of photographs, an early adoption of the music video, pay per view concerts, and original television coverage (like the Dick Cavett special shot during the Exile tour), the band hardly made a move without being recorded from the time Satisfaction blew up until the 50th Anniversary pay per view from New Jersey last month. I remember watching TV as a kid playing hooky from school one day as they closed down the Brooklyn Bridge for the band to drive across it and announce a tour, then played on the back of a moving flatbed truck through Manhattan. What a way to find your first real exposure to a band. As I've written this my thoughts on the band have changed. I've come to love albums I used to skip over, like Some Girls, and come to sort of loathe Brian Jones as a person, even though the band wouldn't exist without him and he was a great guitarist. Reading life humanized Keith Richards in a way that didn't damage his otherworldly status as a rock god like I originally thought it might. I like to believe in myth more often than not, and reality intrudes on that too much, but, really, if it was possible, they've only grown in status in my mind and my estimation over the last two months. Most of the research for this series came from the following books: Life, by Keith Richards; Let It Bleed: The Rolling Stones, Altamont, and the End of the Sixties, by Ethan A. Russell; Every Night's a Saturday Night: The Rock 'n' Roll Life of Legendary Sax Man Bobby Keys, by Bobby Keys and Bill Ditenhafer; The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, by Stanley Booth; Hell's Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club by Sonny Barger, Keith Zimmerman and Kent Zimmerman; Being Hal Ashby, by Nick Dawson. NEXT: 50 more years?*****
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part V | Part V
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