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| Jaxx |
i happen to see this wonderful compilation in the book store last week and after a quick "look see" put it on my xmas list. this book is huge with lots of great photos. the price at barnes and noble was $40 for this tome of info. here are some recent reviews:
According To The Rolling Stones
Reviewed by GRAHAM REID
New Zealand Herald
The Rolling Stones have had quite a marketing profile in their 40th-anniversary year: the reissue of all their early albums through to the mid 70s; the 40 Licks double-disc hit-stacked compilation; the 40 Licks global jaunt (billed as their "farewell tour" in some circles) which has been more musically and financially successful than any previous one; the new DVD live set; and now - almost inevitably - the tie-in autobiography.
This isn't the first Stones autobiography (they started in the mid-60s with Our Own Story, an excellent insight into their formative years) but as a large-format hardback with Jagger, Richards, Watts and Wood reminiscing during the 40 Licks tour, it has inevitably invited comparisons with the Beatles' Anthology.
The similarity is shallow as the Stones' career is more problematic. Where the Beatles' was a closed entity, that of the Stones' rolls on - and before and during the 40 Licks album/tour/T-shirt event they were interviewed frequently. Recently Mojo magazine offered a thorough special issue which not only covered their career and included lengthy, informative and sometimes funny interviews with the surviving protagonists, but also had profiles of their late longtime pianist Ian Stewart and Gram Parsons, who brought country music to Keith (but gets only three passing references here) alongside analyses of key albums and their social context.
What According to can boast is that it is the Stones' story told by the Stones themselves. Well, some of them. The inconvenience of death means neither Brian Jones nor invisible but key member Stewart have contributed. Stewart's reminiscences may have been hard to access (he was seldom interviewed) but being dead didn't prevent John Lennon's voice being heard in the Beatles Anthology, nor that of the late Graham Chapman in the newThe Pythons Autobiography which more closely resembles the Beatles' book than According to. Lennon and Chapman's recollections were taken from the numerous interviews they gave, and Brian Jones - who founded the Stones - was certainly much interviewed and quoted in the newspapers.
The voice of former Stone Bill Wyman, who didn't re-sign the contract in '91, is also absent from these 350 pages. That is more understandable, he has already written his exhaustive Stone Alone memoir and delivered a coffee-table breaking Rolling with the Stones picture-book of memorabilia a year ago. His version has already been heard - yet its absence still detracts from this.
One of the pleasures of both the Anthology and The Pythons Autobiography were the reminiscences of childhoods in post-war Britain, the crucible for the creativity to come. That is skipped over rather more lightly here, the anecdotes being about the music they heard rather than their home lives and school days.
So, all those omissions aside, what fills these well-illustrated pages? Aside from contributions by contemporaries and fellow travellers like photographer David Bailey, record label boss and friend Ahmet Ertegun, longtime business manager Prince Rupert Loewenstein and a few others, it is the surviving Stones walking you through a sanitised version of their illustrious career and sometimes wayward lives.
What is central is the music. You'll find no mention here of Mick Jagger's home on the exclusive Caribbean island of Mustique, but he does reveal a longtime love for "really fast, shit-kicking country music" even before he met Keith. However his voice disappears at key points (nothing about the Miss You period when he brought New York disco and glitterball soul into the group's sound) and it is Richards who gets the lion's share of the text. No bad thing: he's candid and amusing and has a better memory for details of the music than you might expect. He's a little more vague on other matters.
There are some interesting asides: Wood saying how only persistence and good timing would get you a writing credit; Robert Stigwood of PolyGram sending Loewenstein a magnum of Dom Perignon under his name and a bottle of cheap Californian Korbel with a note reading "Sent by Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records" attached, when trying to secure a Stones distribution deal in '77; Watts being asked to drum along to Dr Dre's The Chronic and saying it was just simple music ...
The Stones who emerge here are those we are already well familiar with. Jagger: astute, canny, businesslike and with an eye to staging, but also a musical chameleon and magpie. Richards: more witty and intelligent than his rogue gypsy attitude suggests and thoroughly grounded in music of all kinds. Wood: highly amusing and with an outsider's eye still after nearly 30 years in the band. Watts: consistent in his diffidence and indifference to what he thinks is a silly job and even worse lifestyle.
There are long quotes which should have been culled: Jagger on songwriting, "The problem with song-writing is that at the time you have to think that the song is a good thing, and that at some point it's a wonderful creation, but at the same time it usually isn't wonderful ... " Blah-blah.
Then there are others, usually from Richards, which leap out: "Musically I've never laid down a lie. I'll lie to everybody else - especially judges! - but I won't lie to my audience ... I just wish to transmit the joy I feel to somebody else and if I can do that, I've done my gig."
According to the Rolling Stones is as the title says. It is a story told with selective memory at a time when they had an important tour under way. It is no Anthology - but for the reasons outlined probably never could have been - but in this anniversary year which just keeps stretching out, it is another chunk of Stones memorabilia.
Longtime followers will learn little new and might prefer to seek out that Mojo special issue, but the casual fan will find much of interest and, if they are lucky, it will be wrapped up under the Christmas tree. That seems the intention.
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ACCORDING TO THE ROLLING STONES
Rolling Stones News
According to the Rolling Stones is the inside story: the history of the band by the Rolling Stones themselves. Here, in their own words and photographs, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, and Ronnie Wood have come together for this remarkable project to remember their forty years of making music.
This remarkable book is comprised of interviews with Mick, Keith, Charlie, and Ronnie that were conducted during their Forty Licks tour, between November 2002 and May 2003. This was a golden opportunity—breaking through the door into the Stones’ private on and off-tour worlds—to get beneath the surface and convey what makes the Stones tick—as musicians, songwriters, performers, and colleagues. Each Stone offers his own particular take on the events and influences that have shaped both his individual and collective career over the last forty years—views that are insightful, funny, poignant, surprising, and above all, completely authentic.
It’s all here: their beginnings, their successes, their failures, their demons, their passions—always revealing, with refreshing frankness, how their music has evolved and how their own lives have in turn, helped, or hindered, their music-making.
They begin with their roots: their personal roots in the south of London where a love of R&B brought them together as a band. From their first performance at the Station Hotel playing for three people to the huge stadium shows that have come to define the Stones since the ‘70s, from starting out as a cover band to one of the most covered bands in the world, it’s a journey that began with almost immediate success—and inevitable pressures. It’s also a journey that only the Stones can truly tell; revealing the spirit that is the Stones—one that has allowed them, through periods of acclaim and adversity, to continue together, always stronger, always exploring.
According to the Rolling Stones is filled with vivid recollections in visuals as well as in words. It features hundreds of photographs, the majority previously unpublished. These amazing photos—sometimes posed, sometimes candid—have been carefully selected from the Stone’s personal archives, the band’s central archive, and from those principal photographers who’ve recorded the band for over four decades. From a rare photo of Mick playing the guitar as a child on a family vacation to a choreographed photo of the band taken by Mario Testino, the selection of each image has been determined by a host of criteria: rarity, insight, or aesthetic quality—and preferably all three.
Interspersed with each of the chapters are short reflections written by key participants in the Stones’ story over the years. Including such insiders as Atlantic Records boss Ahmet Ertegun, photographer David Bailey, and current producer Don Was, they offer a singular perspective of the band.
Here, in their own words and images, is the life and work of a band which has played the soundtrack of our lives for the past forty years.
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Not fading away
The pout has lost its clout, but still the Stones' myth grows. They chart their journey from satanic majesties to pillars of the rock'n'roll establishment in According to the Rolling Stones.
Sean O'Hagan
The Observer
According to the Rolling Stones
It's hard to know what more there is to say about the Rolling Stones, a band who once defined rock'n'roll's dissolute glamour but whose continued existence highlights the contradictions of a form that has been subsumed into the mainstream, rendered harmless by formula and the relentless selling of a myth. As last weekend's BBC1 documentary-cum-celebration showed, that myth is itself so much an unchallenged part of the hoary notion of rebellion, that everyone from men's mag editors to C-list 'yoof tv' presenters can claim it, without a trace of irony, as the template for their own 'outlaw' lifestyles.
This, of course, is not entirely the Stones' fault, and, in some defiant if dog-eared way, they continue to roll on, untouched by the vagaries of pop cultural fashion, inured to the slings and arrows of critical analysis. Having written the book of rock'n'roll, they have now written a book of sorts about the 40-odd years since, enlisting acolytes and business partners to add their tuppence worth. It is, unsurprisingly, a ragged read. Keith Richards and Charlie Watts provide the most insightful sections, not least because while the former defined rock 'n' roll dissolution, the latter simply observed the excess with the detached eye of the outsider, a man steeped in jazz rather than rock.
Back when the group were celebrating their twentyfifth anniversary, Watts defined his stint as a Stone as 'five years' work and 20 years' hanging around'. Most of that time, he was hanging around waiting for Keith, who was hanging around waiting to score. 'By working at Keith's house,' Charlie says of the recording of Exile on Main Street at Richards's rented house in the south of France in 1972, 'Keith not being there for the recording was a problem we could generally avoid.' It remains the band's finest, and most ragged-sounding, album. Keef's album. 'The thing about Exile is that everybody loves it,' says an obviously peeved Jagger, 'but I don't really know why. There aren't any real hits on it, apart from "Tumbling Dice".'
After Exile, the Stones became Mick's band. There are some who think that the Stones have never been the same since. But the more they became a shadow of themselves, a set of self-replicating tropes - the riff, the pout, the prance - the more the myth grew. Nothing, it seems, not even the knighthood conferred on his once-satanic majesty, can dent it now. This book begins with a picture of Jagger and Chuck Berry, the Stones' rock'n'roll mentor, and ends, 40-odd years on, with an essay by Tim Rice. That's quite a trajectory, but the irony seems lost on everyone involved in this piecemeal book. The last word, though, belongs to Keith Richards, who, when asked to appear at a memorial concert for Princess Diana, replied: 'No, sorry, didn't know the chick'. You have to admit, the man's got class.
[Edited by Jaxx] |
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| nankerphelge |
What is going on in that avatar? |
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| Jaxx |
quote:
nankerphelge wrote:
What is going on in that avatar?
thank you madonna or your overactive imagination???? hehehe
call me naive, but i like to think NOTHING. as you can see i changed out my "pie waits for no one" signature....
[Edited by Jaxx] |
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| nankerphelge |
I think it is a scene from Paris Hilton Sex Tape #23: Me likes bitches!! |
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| Joey |
" I think it is a scene from Paris Hilton Sex Tape #23: Me likes bitches!! "
That's IT !!!!!!!!!!!!
It IS a scene from the Paris Hilton Sex Tape # 23 ( Paris -- A New Beginning )
Masterful .
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| Jaxx |
quote:
Joey wrote:
" I think it is a scene from Paris Hilton Sex Tape #23: Me likes bitches!! "
That's IT !!!!!!!!!!!!
It IS a scene from the Paris Hilton Sex Tape # 23 ( Paris -- A New Beginning )
Masterful .
indeed! i guess there's a reason the word IS "master"bation.
btw, what was she thinking, oh, that's right. she didn't think anyone would ever see them.... |
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| Joey |
" indeed! i guess there's a reason the word IS "master"bation.
btw, what was she thinking, oh, that's right. she didn't think anyone would ever see them.... "
Poor little lamb .........I certainly hope she can get through this .
I really really do believe with the solid support of her family , friends , bodyguards , chauffeurs ( Sic ) , pushers , siblings , trust fund , dope and one billion in inheritance that she WILL find a way through this turbid Hell Hole and see a new light from above leading her down the Primrose Path and right into young Joey's arms .
Come to Joey my Sugar Momma !
" The kid is tired of working Ronnie "
Jacky Hilton !
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| Jaxx |
>>Poor little lamb .........I certainly hope she can get through this .
well vanessa williams did and by george so can paris!
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