I Got the Blues

   It is late in the day to talk about this, since it happened half a year ago, but I never got around to commenting on the Dec. 2 release of "Blue and Lonesome," the Rolling Stones' first studio album in more than a decade. This is a ghastly oversight for a forty-five-year Stones fanatic. 

   The album collects obscure cuts by bluesmen such as Buddy Johnson, Magic Sam, Little Walter, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon and others. (There are no original songs.) The band recorded it over a three-day period in December 2015, at Mark Knopfler’s British Grove Studios, in West London (Chiswick). They'd gathered to work out new songs. But guitarist Keith Richards, in interviews published with the album's release, said that “the room” was “fighting the band.” To get comfortable, the musicians kicked around the Memphis Slim song “Blue and Lonesome.” Singer Mick Jagger enjoyed the experience and called for another. Within three days the band had knocked out the twelve blues covers. Two include guest appearances by guitarist Eric Clapton, who happened to be recording down the hall. He sat in after stopping by to say hello.

   It is a stupendous album. The band swings and sways lazily, living in the pocket of the groove. Mick Jagger eschews his recent mannered vocal style for an approach that's honest and wild. His harmonica playing burns with yearning.  Richards' and Ronnie Wood's guitars snarl locomotively. Drummer Charlie Watts plays with crisp snap, bringing a jazzman's sensibility to the swampy tunes.

   Some reviewers raised the question of cultural appropriation. How, they asked, can rich white millionaires perform a music derived from the most painful aspects of African-American experiences of slavery and oppression? But long before the Stones became globally famous and, later, an ongoing corporate performing enterprise, they started out as a bunch of skinny teenaged English boys who revered and mimicked black American blues. Keith Richards has said the young band saw itself, in the early nineteen-sixties, as "purists" who wanted to expose the music to English audiences. Later, he has said, the band did the same for white American audiences, introducing them to a homegrown music they might not have known existed. Indeed, blues guitarist B.B. King and soul singers Ike and Tina Turner opened the band's 1969 U.S. tour. Three years later, Motown phenom Stevie Wonder had the opening slot, which, three years after that, belonged to the New Orleans funk group The Meters. 

   Intellectual questions aside, "Blue and Lonesome" rocks and swings with controlled abandon. It sounds as if the Stones, now in their seventies, have put enough miles on the odometer to inhabit these songs in a way that their teenaged selves could only dream of doing. 

   In interviews near the album's release date, Jagger said the band has four or five songs ready for an album of originals. But one senses it's a matter of pulling teeth for the band to get a new album together. If catastrophe strikes, and "Blue and Lonesome" winds up being their final album, it’s a perfect full-circle testament to the band’s roots, to the tremendous arc of their mad trajectory through more than a half-century of global history, and to their coming to rest where they started: with the pain and sleaze and contrary-seeming life force of the blues.

   The band had a busy 2016, which began with a tour of Latin American countries and culminated, March 25, with a free show in Havana, Cuba, in front of a crowd estimated to number a million. (They have European dates on the books for this fall.)

   A film of that concert, "Havana Moon," is available for streaming, as is a companion documentary about the tour, called "Ole Ole Ole: A Trip Across Latin America." That movie had a one-night screening in various theaters on Dec. 12, and a friend and I caught it at a local cineplex. 

   The drama of putting on the Havana show provides a minor plot engine for the film, directed by Paul Dugdale, which otherwise shows the Stones backstage, offstage, and occasionally onstage, in places such as Peru, Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina. 

   It is as much travel documentary as a diary of tiny, aged rock stars finding their way around a region they hadn’t visited in a decade. There are shots of kids playing soccer, women of the night standing on street corners, people dancing, shanties crowding hilltops. 

   Each Stone has a moment of his own in the film. Ronnie Wood visits a painter friend and talks about how art--Wood is a painter and illustrator--helps his music, and vice versa. Mick Jagger walks alone in a cemetery (what symbolism, that?), which was no doubt closed to the public for his convenience, and talks about performing. Keith Richards leads a film crew through his hotel room (door opens, Keith chortles, “Gentlemen! I thought you were room service!”) and onto a small balcony overlooking crowds howling his name. “I wake up to ‘Richards! Richards! Richards!'" he says. "I hear that, and it’s, ‘Well, I guess it’s time to get up!’” (Hur hur hur hur.) Charlie Watts, shown drumming in slow motion, talks about, well, drumming, and the jazzmen who influenced him. 

   A backstage shot finds Mick and Keith leaning casually against travel cases and reminiscing about visiting Brazil, in 1968, with Marianne Faithfull (then Mick's girlfriend) and Anita Pallenberg (then Keith's). It was there that they came up with “Honky Tonk Women,” originally conceived as a country song ("Country Honk" appears on the 1969 album Let it Bleed). Moments later, slouching on chairs in front of open wardrobe cases, they sing a couple of verses and choruses of the song, Keith strumming an acoustic guitar. It is an incredibly touching moment.

   The film focuses heavily on the band's fans, especially the “Ringolas” of Argentina, who have made a religion of the Stones. It's evident that for them to see the Stones in akin to witnessing a minor Second Coming. 

   Yes, the film is part hagiography, part propaganda, part celebration of the Stones’ incredibly huge collective ego. But it’s also a fair record, if one made by the State Apparatus of the Rolling Stones, of the incredible global effect the band has had, and not just in the spoiled West. Few if any other bands can claim such a massive and long-lasting effect, and there is an undercurrent of melancholy attaching to this filmic record: time is chasing down these tiny giants, and they will not be forever among us.