| September 8th, 2005 09:34 PM |
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| gotdablouse |
Nice one ! My two favorites artists ever too ;-)
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/ae/music/jump/3342038
McCartney, Stones come roaring back with best work in decades
By BEN WENER
Knight Ridder Tribune
Tucked into a new DVD set gathering memorable rock-related episodes of ABC's old late-night program The Dick Cavett Show is an offhanded yet revelatory moment about a future that has become a reality for today's mega-profiting gray eminences.
Reuters
Paul McCartney's Chaos and Creation in the Backyard will be released next week.
It's Aug. 4, 1972, a little less than three months after the Rolling Stones released Exile on Main Street a landmark that, though it initially garners mixed reviews, will soon come to be recognized as the band's greatest masterpiece.
Cavett, the epitome of hip-to-be-square, is seated across from a nervously laughing Mick Jagger backstage at Madison Square Garden. Jagger's "peculiarly gross and extraordinary red lips," as Tom Wolfe once described them, have faint traces of lipstick; a scarf dangles from his neck, a sparkly green gem glistens at the center of his brow.
He's within a year of turning 30, the age after which, as his generation once claimed, no one should be trusted.
Cavett: "Can you picture yourself at the age 60 doing what you do now?"
Jagger, without hesitation: "Yeah, easily, yeah."
Cavett: "Really? Going on stage with a cane and moving the way you do?"
Jagger, at first chuckling at the cane remark: "Oh yeah. There's a lot of people (performing) at 60. I think it's a bit weird, but they seem to still get their rocks off at it."
This from the same man who once vowed he'd never sing (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction at 40.
So here's the shocker: Now 62, Jagger and his fellow Stones also in their early 60s, save for Ron Wood, who is 58 are not only still among the most sought-after (and grossly overpaid) live acts, but they have released their best album since, what, Tattoo You? Some Girls?
A Bigger Bang, it's fittingly titled. It's the first assortment of fresh Stones stuff in eight years (out this week), and it amply proves the rebellious gents still get their rocks off. Its reinvigorated, loose-limbed blues-based attack, its fierce, unflinching nastiness balanced by open-hearted tenderness and, above all, its joyously renewed camaraderie evident between Jagger and feuding partner Keith Richards is simply a marvel.
Sequenced as if it were a four-sided sequel to Exile, it plays like yet another rebirth. Whether it is or not probably depends on whether this new cohesion produces more great music. But at the very least this one shows up iffy trifles like Bridges to Babylon and Dirty Work and even well-regarded titles like Voodoo Lounge and Steel Wheels as the feeble, pro forma exercises they always were.
But wait there's another shocker: They're not alone.
Due next Tuesday is a superb 13-song collection dubbed Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. It's the 20th studio set from Paul McCartney, now 63, and I'd rank it among his finest solo albums ahead of Flaming Pie and Flowers in the Dirt and even Tug of War, the other standouts from his last quarter-century of work.
It's a positively baffling development stadium-filling warhorses suddenly at the top of their studio games.
As with the clamor for Stones nostalgia, so it is with Macca. Even a month after Sgt. Pepper surfaced, there was never any doubt we'd still love him when he was 64. What's not to love about pop's greatest tunesmith? His songbook is one of the most durable in all of music, regardless of genre, so beloved that (like the Stones) he can charge fans the cost of a month's groceries and gas to see him perform selections from it.
Of course, whether we'd love him in his elder years wasn't the question the song posed it wondered whether we would still need him. After so many years of meandering, often meaningless albums that left no lasting impression, who would've thought the answer would be yes?
Just what has gotten into these geezers? In both cases, the impetus seems to be precisely what spurred them toward a life in rock 'n' roll in the first place: the thrill of it.
The Stones, for starters finally dropping creative differences in the wake of Charlie Watts' successful battle with throat cancer haven't come off so bonded and vicious and raw since Exile, nor have they so expertly scaled back to fundamentals, apart form the finer moments of the 1995 live album Stripped.
Three of the 16 cuts from A Bigger Bang including the surly stomp of Back of My Hand, with Jagger wailing on harmonica, and the already controversial swipe Sweet Neo Con feature only original Stones: Jagger (on an array of instruments, including bass), Richards and Watts. Four more sport only marginal outside contributions Darryl Jones' bass runs, or producer Don Was tapping piano, or Blondie Chaplin joining Mick's back-up holler on one of two solid Keith showcases, Infamy. (On all seven songs, Wood is curiously absent.)
Yet even the most-staffed numbers be it the swaggering double entendres of the roaring opener Rough Justice or the softer introspection of Biggest Mistake, a rare vulnerable turn from Jagger aren't busied up with slick, extraneous flourishes.
Indeed, only two tunes (both growers) step away from the back-to-basics approach. One, the noticeably programmed Rain Fell Down, harks to the dance groove of Miss You, its sultriness mirroring the song's seedy subject matter. The other departure, the INXS-y Look What the Cat Dragged In, gets by on the propulsion of Watts' unerring punch and Jagger's sneering conviction.
McCartney's Chaos and Creation is even more remarkable in its construction. Handling virtually all of the instrumentation himself L.A. scenesters Jason Falkner and Joey Waronker turn up once or twice to add scarcely noticeable bits and his road band helps him on Follow Me McCartney has essentially crafted a modern counterpart to his one-man 1970 debut.
Yet, unlike the sweetly skeletal feel of McCartney, this one sounds intimately warm and sweepingly orchestral. Sir Paul simply hasn't written a better batch of songs since his heyday with Wings, and he wisely took two years to shape their sound, deftly abetted by producer Nigel Godrich, best known for sonic daring with Radiohead and Beck.
The result is a very piano-based album that teems with gorgeous melodies and lyrics of love and hopefulness (naturally), yet the collaboration with Godrich has yielded welcome, Air-y atmospherics that hint at doubt lurking in the shadows. In its stranger moments the dark-vs.-light push-and-pull of How Kind of You, At the Mercy, Vanity Fair, the Queen-y Promise to You Girl and the Bacharachian This Never Happened Before the album achieves the same sort of eloquent but muted grandeur McCartney managed on parts of Magical Mystery Tour, the White Album and Abbey Road.
Then there are more acoustic-tinged bits, like Jenny Wren, something of a sequel to Blackbird. In the earlier piece, McCartney lent support to the civil-rights movement by encouraging a young black "bird" to "take these broken wings and fly/All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise."
Now his aviary creation surveys the whole of the globe: "Jenny Wren took wing/She could see the world and its foolish ways/How we spend our days casting love aside/Losing sight of life day by day."
As with the Stones' Bigger Bang, not everything about McCartney's Backyard is so profound; the baroque English Tea, for instance, merely proves he can still spin circles around offspring like XTC when he wants to, while the closing Anyway owes plenty to Curtis Mayfield's People Get Ready.
But though both McCartney and the Jagger-Richards team have penned dozens of lyrically substantial songs, profound words have long since stopped being what we expect from them; that's what Lennon and Dylan are for. And still both have found ways of opening up and expressing themselves in direct, heartfelt and sometimes (in the Stones' case) stinging lines.
For every heartbroken Biggest Mistake on A Bigger Bang Keith has one, This Place Is Empty there's a searing kiss-off like It Won't Take Long or an outspoken rant like the sniping Sweet Neo Con. The last is the band's most overtly political foray since the overlooked Gulf War piece Highwire in 1991, with an enunciating Jagger chiding Bush acolytes: "You call yourself a Christian/I think that you're a hypocrite."
If Bigger Bang had only featured that song and a handful of other strong rockers and if McCartney's latest had simply strayed from pap formula that would have been enough to consider both acts far from creatively spent.
These remarkable albums, however, prove so much more: As with recent Dylan, this, it seems, could be the start of a whole new era of brilliance.
At the very least it sure makes it hard to hate them for robbing fans blind with overpriced nostalgic tours.
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| September 9th, 2005 02:14 PM |
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| jb |
Macca=dog cock |
| September 9th, 2005 02:24 PM |
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| Jair |
I like Macca!
Driving Rain is cool, very creative.
The same about most of her albums, imo.
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