Mick Jagger Rocks His Own Wedding Reception in St. Tropez

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ST. TROPEZ, FRANCE — Ten hours after he’d gotten married, Mick Jagger was on stage performing. But he left the limelight to the others as he joined Doris Troy and P. P. Arnold to make up a chorus for a 25-minute soul-standard jam session, put together for the couple of hundred guests at the reception by Steve Stills, Bobby Keyes, Nicky Hopkins and Michael Shrieve and David Brown of Santana.

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Mick would have liked the Stones to have played, but Keith Richards was out to the rock world, flat on his back with his mouth open. Confronted with an undefeatable amount of food and booze, the party hung on till four the next morning.

At four in the afternoon, Mick and his bride to be, whose name on the wedding certificate is Blanca Rosa Perez-Mora, 26, daughter of a Nicaraguan businessman, were still entrenched in the Byblos Hotel in the center of St. Tropez. They’d heard that a hundred photographers were crammed into the wedding chamber of the local town hall, where the mayor was waiting to perform

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‘Tommy’ Does Not Vindicate The Who

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NEW YORK — The Who is a group that was nurtured in gimmickry. I remember five years ago Brian Jones calling me up on the trans-Atlantic phone to play me the Who’s first record from London. “That’s not atmospheric interference you hear,” he said. “That’s the guitar player banging his guitar on the amp.”

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How far has the Who progressed since then? Their latest achievement has been to become the first rock group ever to play on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, an event which turned out to be as transparent as all the fancy, tiedyed silken see-throughs it attracted.

To see through one see-through is not to see through them all. Tommy is no more an opera than Albert Goldman is Renata Tebaldi, and to place the Who at the Met was less a contribution to music than to showmanship. In the end, it is the music that must stand on its own feet. The booking at the Met was just another gimmick.

Let this not be an indictment of promoter Nat Weiss, who

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Stones’ Record Still Up in the Air

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London — A new Rolling Stones album, Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out, is now finished and set for a late summer release. It is expected to be their last record under their contract with Decca in the United Kingdom and London Records in the United States.

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Recorded during their Madison Square Garden appearance last November, the sound is better than the bootlegs, although Mick Jagger’s voice is still down a little in the mix. On “Oh Carol,” road manager Ian Stewart, hidden behind the amplifiers at the concert, can be heard rinkling-tinkling on piano. “Stray Cat Blues” begins on a sad, almost mournful switch. “Midnight Rambler” is eight minutes long, and shows how controlled this album actually is, when compared to their speedfreak Got Live If You Want It album. “Little Queenie” is rendered slow and funky. And then “Love In Vain.”

The other cuts are “Honky Tonk Women,” “Live With Me,” “Street Fighting Man” and “Sympathy for the Devil.” The drama of the songs, especially on the latter two, seems to be missing in part, but, just being

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Bootleg Bust: One Small Step for the Man

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In this very industrious town, in a brand-new industrial park complex, the National Manufacturing Company makes tapes—–eight-tracks and cassettes–—with 100 employees on the payroll working two eight-hour shifts and with armed guards at the doors backed by a 24-hour red alert monitored by a private security police system.

A pretty sizable operation. In fact, when federal marshals finally made their way past one of the guards—–after serving a writ of seizure signed by US District Judge William P. Copple–—they discovered a full day and night of work ahead of them. It took almost 12 hours—–beginning at 4:20 PM –— to clear the facility. The five marshals ended up with five semi-vans filled with 150,000 blank tape cartridges, 25,000 pre-recorded tapes, 17 winding machines, duplicating equipment, wrapping and labeling machines. Some 30 tons of equipment in all.

“This, make no mistake, was the big center for the whole country,” said Al Berman of the Harry Fox Agency, which instigated a copyright suit on behalf of 59 music publishing firms. “They were probably responsible for half of bootleg tape merchandising in the United States.” “

“In five months of operations in Phoenix,” the Fog agency’s attorney, Pasquale

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John Entwistle’s Own ‘Smash Your Head’

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Entwistle is the one that stands on the side, immobile, slaving away over a hot bass guitar. The sweaty one that grunts and tries to kill his innocent drum kit is Moon. Townshend, discoverer of the secret of antigravity, hangs around three feet in the air. Daltrey is the one that stands at the front, then walks backwards in the bank of amplifiers, and sings.

John Entwistle, possessor of 12 bass guitars, three trumpets, three French horns, two trombones, a melofonium, two pianos and one hellava cramped guest room in his London suburban house, has done his thing with vengence. With the help of Jerry Shirley on drums and Cyrano (late of Cyrano and the Bergeracs) on guitar, Entwistle has written, played and produced an album of his very own.

Moon has his Kings Road Chelsea flat and country pub, Townshend his smooth townhouse by the Thames, Daltrey a place in the country. Entwistle sits in a shiny black shirt, straining a little round the waist, and a brand new pair of blue leather trousers, listening to his album. His wife opens the serving hatch and says, “Keep the tea on a tray, it’s a polished

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The Rolling Stones Sue Allen Klein

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In a flash and unexpected move, attorneys representing the Rolling Stones have filed a whopping $7.5 million suit against Allen Klein, ABKCO Industries, and ABKCO Klein Corp., alleging that Klein, either through ABKCO Industries or other companies which Klein had established to handle the music publishing and subsidiary rights to the Stones’ material, had made “false or fraudulent” representations with intent to “deceive and defraud” the group and various of its individual members.

In response, Klein said in a formal statement issued through the New York-based public relations firm of Solters & Sabinson:

“The attorneys for the other defendants including ABKCO Industries, Inc., have not had a reasonable opportunity to study the complaint, which was served only yesterday [September 1, 1971]. ABKCO, however, in connection with its nine month earnings report issued on August 17, 1971, denied any impropriety in their dealings with the Rolling Stones and further declared that they believed the Rolling Stones’ lawsuits to be without merit. Speaking only for myself, however, I believe the allegations are at best ludicrous, and at worst, malicious.

“The transactions apparently now complained of by the Stones date back to 1965 and 1966, and such transactions,

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Jackson Five The Biggest Thing Since the Stones

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At one point during the Jackson 5 concert at Madison Square Garden October 19th, a ten- or eleven-year-old girl standing on the seat in front of us turned to one of her equally young friends and, grasping the other girl’s hand in excitement, said, “Feel my heart!” That’s what it was all about: Heart Throbs. I hadn’t heard such ecstatic, passionate, I-can’t-stand-it screaming since the Rolling Stones played New York’s Academy of Music in 1965. Police fortified the stage, people clogged the front aisles nearly in heaps, girls climbed frantically, screeching, over seats to get closer, no one downstairs was standing still much less sitting down. It’s one of those Phenomenons again, folks, and a fan letter is more appropriate than a critical report.

The Jackson 5 hadn’t been in New York for over a year, during which time the group had moved (moved – on a succession of million-selling singles and three albums since the beginning of the year) from the position of a three-minute filler in the Miss Black America pageant (also at the Garden) to an act which could fill that monstrous shell on little more than a week’s notice. With the promotional campaign entrusted to

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Recut Rolling Stones-Godard Flick Gets Screening For Fundraising Drive

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One Plus One, Jean-Luc Godard’s original and unaltered version of Sympathy For the Devil, is being shown here by the West Coast Cinema Workshop, an organization of young, mostly penniless filmmakers who arranged for the premiere showing as part of a drive to raise $20,000.

The bread will be used to set up an editing and sound-transfer studio for 8mm and 16mm, which will then be made available to independent filmmakers at a nominal cost.

The Rolling Stones, 1963-1969: Behind-the-Scenes Snapshots

The showing is a direct result of criticism directed at producer Ian Quarrier, who fucked over Godard’s final cut by changing the title and adding an ending which Godard considered in direct contradiction to the meaning of the film.

Godard didn’t want to include the final version of the Stones’ Sympathy For the Devil as performed in the recording studio. Quarrier tacked it on anyhow, and changed the title so as to appeal to rock and roll/Stones freaks.

Quarrier has not withdrawn the altered version – he’s just put both films into distribution; prospective, exhibitors can choose whichever version they want. But regardless of the version shown, New Line Cinema (the distributor)

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Tea with Townshend A Post-‘Tommy’ Chat on Rock ‘N Roll, Recording

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Pete Townshend’s quiet and unassuming 18th Century house stands on the Thames Embankment in Twickenham facing Eel Pie Island where, eight years ago, the Stones, Aynsley Dunbar, Acker Bilk, et al., first used to blast music out of the island’s club where the floors bounced in all directions. “Free were on the other night,” Townshend told us. “I opened the double frame windows and listened and they sounded good.”

The gardener was pruning the roses in front of the house when Jan Hodenfield and I arrived. Boats were grounded in the low tide riverbed, scores of gulls resting on them. “When spring comes, the birds fly to the sea,” he told us as we waited for Townshend to return home. It was one of those lazy afternoons when spring promises and river scents set you in the mood for an 18th Century English gardener to say something like “Sir, I for my part shall almost answer your hopes, but for this gentleman that you desire to see has stretched his legs up to town.”

Pete Townshend soon stretched his legs back down to the house, invited us into the living room where, hanging just above scores

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Bob Dylan’s Secret Recording Session With George Harrison and Friends

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Bob Dylan snuck into Columbia’s Studio B in New York on May Day and recorded for 12 hours with George Harrison, lead guitarist for a reportedly defunct British rock and roll group, the Beatles.

Denials that the session took place were issued by Dylan’s personal secretary and by producer Bob Johnston, who chuckled: “Where did you hear that? Some people’ll say anything!” But a session there was, and, according to reports, it was a monster. Described as “kind of a nice, loose thing,” the get-together was produced by Johnston, who also sat in on keyboard. Other musicians included Charlie Daniels on bass and an unidentified drummer.

The material covered by an amalgam of new Dylan stuff, Beatles songs, and a number of early Sixties tunes. About five of the numbers are reportedly of high enough quality to merit inclusion on a future Dylan album.

Dylan and Harrison hit it off well, and spent part of the time with Dylan singing Beatles songs and George singing Dylan songs.

The new Dylan material is reportedly different from his recent stuff, but is not a radical change. The songs are “family-oriented,” and one of them seems to

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A Heavy Trip Inside Mick Jagger’s Head

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Are you ready for a trip inside Mick Jagger’s head? This isn’t a hypothetical question – it’s a heavy trip, and if you’re not ready for it you’d better steer clear of Performance, the new flick starring Mick Jagger and James Fox, co-directed by Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg. Jagger has no credit other than the dramatic lead, but it’s hard to believe that he didn’t have a lot to do with the direction of the film – especially since it all revolves around Jagger as Turner as Jagger. A question of identity (“Can’t you guess my name?”) is resolved, in a manner of speaking, and we all know who Jagger really is, don’t we?

Performance is a stunning film, stunning in the sense of a body blow, and if Woodstock presented one sort of reality, Performance presents another sort, a dark yin to Woodstock‘s yang. The Maysles brothers aside, this is the Altamont movie. We have to deal with Altamont – and of course Jagger knew about Altamont even before it happened. Performance was shot nearly two years ago, long before the apocalypse at the Speedway, but it’s all here in final form – future tidings

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Crashers, Cops, Producers Spoil Newport ’69

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Northridge, Calif. – Once again violence has severely mauled the face of rock, with several hundred persons injured in rioting outside Newport ’69, what probably was, in attendance, the world’s largest pop festival.

Because of this violence, and perhaps as much as $50,000 in damage done to neighborhood homes and businesses, the Los Angeles police commission has launched a full investigation. It could result in new city policies on the granting of concert permits and certainly means there will never be another rock festival held here.

Over 150,000 attended the three-day series of concerts – featuring Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Johnny Winter and the Rascals among the 33 acts – and for most of those visiting this suburban Los Angeles community, the only bummer was the festival itself. They were not aware of the bloody violence erupting outside the gates. For them there was only the last logjam of humanity that made the festival like attending a high school reunion in a closet.

The producers of Newport ’69 – no relation to the folk or jazz festivals in Rhode Island – spent $11,000 on hurricane fencing and it was this fence that hundreds of

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‘Pop Chronicles’ Chronicle Pop

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For more than six months KRLA, this city’s “intellectual” pop radio station, has been presenting hour-long weekly installments of “John Gilliland’s Pop Chronicles,” an in-depth history of rock and roll. For the serious aficionado of pop music and the casual listener alike, it’s been a nearly unqualified success.

Each Sunday evening at six the program has begun, recounting the development of the music and the individual musicians in chronological order, starting with what the program’s creator, researcher, writer and and narrator John Gilliland called “Tin Pan Alley Pop: 1950,” featuring interviews with Mitch Miller, the Weavers and Stan Freberg.

Since that time, in February, the chronicles have come forward to 1964 and 1965, when the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan assumed the divergent thrones of pop. In some cases, a week’s episode has assumed coverage of entire periods or categories of music, while others have been devoted to single artist or group.

A recent chapter considered the Stones. It opened with a brief interview with Mick Jagger, conducted during a Stones rehearsal in London; behind the talk you could hear the others in the group jamming. And in the background of the

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A Ticket to Ryde Bob Dylan at the Isle of Wight Festival of Music

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Ryde, Isle of Wight – The Isle of Wight Festival of Music was Bob Dylan’s personal possession long before his appearance there. Indeed, before the festival ever began. Not that there weren’t plenty of other good reasons for buying a ticket to Ryde – the Who, Joe Cocker, the Band, Richie Havens, Tom Paxton and dozens more.

But this was Dylan’s first scheduled public performance in more than three years. It was clearly going to be the Event of the festival, no matter what Dylan had done. On TV, the resemblance to Woodstock was striking – the same traffic clogups, the same hordes trudging afoot toward the pre-hallowed festival turf.

British TV newsmen, as bewildered as their American counterparts had been three weeks earlier, asked some of the 200,000 who came to Ryde why they were there. “Oh, Dylan, it’s Dylan,” exulted one 16-year-old Manchester girl. “I’m very heavy into Dylan and, oh, if I couldn’t be here with him that would end it for me. It’s going to be so fah-out!”

The press had caught the scent and had actually tried to get up close to the 29-year-old singer (who reportedly got something around

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Why Your Brain Craves Music

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If making music isn’t the most ancient of human activities, it’s got to be pretty close. Melody and rhythm can trigger feelings from sadness to serenity to joy to awe; they can bring memories from childhood vividly back to life. The taste of a tiny cake may have inspired Marcel Proust to pen the seven-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past, but fire up the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” and you’ll throw the entire baby-boom generation into a Woodstock-era reverie.

From an evolutionary point of view, however, music doesn’t seem to make sense. Unlike sex, say, or food, it did nothing to help our distant ancestors survive and reproduce. Yet music and its effects are in powerful evidence across virtually all cultures, so it must satisfy some sort of universal need — often in ways we can’t begin to fathom. A few years ago, a single composition lifted Valorie Salimpoor almost instantaneously out of a deep funk (it was Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5, to be precise), and from that moment, she decided it would be her life’s work to figure out music’s mysteries.

It’s working out pretty well so far: in the latest issue of Science, Salimpoor,

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The Stones Put the Weight on Mick and He Carried It

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OAKLAND, California—We flooded into the Oakland Coliseum in 1969 with memories of the Cow Palace in 1966 – but this time there weren’t any twelve-year-old kids kicking over the seats and wetting their pants. The Sixties are over – the first thing that hit you when the Stones came out on stage was the evidence of the years in Mick Jagger’s face. It seemed to have fallen into place for good. His features were no longer supple and loose; they were hard and thick, like the marble ridges of a statue. But that’s a long way from the House of Wax. He still looked beautiful.

Jagger was dressed right out of Sympathy for the Devil, but for me the costume didn’t take hold until near the end of the show, when it no longer seemed like a costume. Black tight pants with silver studs up the side; a black blouse with a beige horseshoe on it, special astrology for the warlock’s tour; an Uncle Sam hat out of Ginsberg; and a red scarf that might have been ten feet long. Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, even Mick Taylor, they all looked like Rolling Stones; but they

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Why Does Music Feel So Good

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One day several years ago Valorie Salimpoor took a drive that would change the course of her life. She was at the peak of what she now calls her “quarter-life crisis,” not knowing what kind of career she wanted or how she might use her undergraduate neuroscience training. Hoping an outing might clear her head, that day she jumped in her car and switched on the radio. She heard the charging tempo and jaunty, teasing violin of Johannes Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5.

“This piece of music came on, and something just happened,” Salimpoor recalls. “I just felt this rush of emotion come through me. It was so intense.” She pulled over to the side of the street so she could concentrate on the song and the pleasure it gave her.

When the song was over, Salimpoor’s mind raced with questions. “I was thinking, wow, what just happened? A few minutes ago I was so depressed, and now I’m euphoric,” she says. “I decided that I had to figure out how this happened — that that’s what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.”

Music moves people of all cultures, in a way

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Is Music the Key to Success

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CONDOLEEZZA RICE trained to be a concert pianist. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a professional clarinet and saxophone player. The hedge fund billionaire Bruce Kovner is a pianist who took classes at Juilliard.

Multiple studies link music study to academic achievement. But what is it about serious music training that seems to correlate with outsize success in other fields?

The connection isn’t a coincidence. I know because I asked. I put the question to top-flight professionals in industries from tech to finance to media, all of whom had serious (if often little-known) past lives as musicians. Almost all made a connection between their music training and their professional achievements.

The phenomenon extends beyond the math-music association. Strikingly, many high achievers told me music opened up the pathways to creative thinking. And their experiences suggest that music training sharpens other qualities: Collaboration. The ability to listen. A way of thinking that weaves together disparate ideas. The power to focus on the present and the future simultaneously.

Will your school music program turn your kid into a Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft (guitar)? Or a Woody Allen (clarinet)? Probably not.

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Altamont Movie On Its Way ‘Before Christmas’

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Gimme Shelter, the Maysles Brothers’ film of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 American tour — including the infamous Altamont concert — now has a distributor who is shooting for a “before Christmas” release.

The film will be a Cinema V release. It’s a 95-minute documentary produced by Maysles Film Thing and directed by David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin.

The Maysles and Stones had demanded that they retain at least some measure of control over advertising and ticket prices so that the film would be presented in good taste and so people wouldn’t have to pay high prices to see it.

“Rugoff’s got a good reputation that way,” said David Maysles. “He’s fought people who’ve tried to raise prices and exploit this kind of film.”

David was referring to the feature-length Eldridge Cleaver documentary which Rugoff’s Cinema V has been handling in New York for $1.50, a price agreeable to Eldridge and the Panthers. Cinema V also distributed the controversial Z.

Meanwhile, reverberations from that tour, especially Altamont, are still bouncing around, and came to light again recently when several travel bureaus and hotels filed suit against Stones representatives for unpaid bills that

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Why Music Makes Our Brain Sing

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MUSIC is not tangible. You can’t eat it, drink it or mate with it. It doesn’t protect against the rain, wind or cold. It doesn’t vanquish predators or mend broken bones. And yet humans have always prized music — or well beyond prized, loved it.

In the modern age we spend great sums of money to attend concerts, download music files, play instruments and listen to our favorite artists whether we’re in a subway or salon. But even in Paleolithic times, people invested significant time and effort to create music, as the discovery of flutes carved from animal bones would suggest.

So why does this thingless “thing” — at its core, a mere sequence of sounds — hold such potentially enormous intrinsic value?

The quick and easy explanation is that music brings a unique pleasure to humans. Of course, that still leaves the question of why. But for that, neuroscience is starting to provide some answers.

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