rolling stones - altamont

OK, so millions of words have probably been written about the Rolling Stones fateful gig at the Altamont Raceway in the dying days of the 1960s. The night of 6 December 1969 was cold and the assembled crowd was estimated at nearly 200,000 strong. For complex, and with hindsight, stupid reasons the Stones decided to use the local Hell's Angels as security, and it seems they were at least partly paid in wine, beer and narcotics. If anyone had been sober that day it would have been obvious that this was not a good combination...

 

I've come across an excellent matrix of two or possibly three audience recordings of the show, skilfully mixed together to recreate the whole gig. All the source tapes are very good, especially for 1969 recordings, and considering that this was late into the night, cold and dark, the tapers were probably hungry, tired and stoned, and also when you consider all the violence that was going down.

 

Only the first song, "Jumpin' Jack Flash" is muffled - you can hear Mick's vocals and Keith's guitar very clearly but the rest of the band seem to be absent. But when "Carol" gets going the sound dramatically improves and is a perfectly good listen from then on. The tapers appear to have been near the front, where the audience was squashed against a low stage with 200,000 other hippies behind them. And this places them right in the midst of all the violence. It makes for a frightening listen at times. "I wanna get out" mutters a scared, confused guy. "We got nowhere to go" is the equally scared sounding reply. When scuffles break out and halt "Sympathy For The Devil" you can hear various audience members screaming and shouting. The sheer confusion is actually quite disturbing to hear. Jagger tries to calm things: "Why. Are. We. Fighting? Brothers, sisters, who's fighting and what for?" It's clear what he's trying to do, but it's equally clear that his heartfelt words have little effect. 

 

Throughout the gig there's lots more of Jagger (and Richards: "look, if those cats don't cool it, we're splitting") exhorting the crowd to calm down, much more than I was familiar with from the Gimme Shelter movie. And also lots more from the Angels, who periodically grab the mic to angrily shout stuff like "Everyone sit down and shut up or you won't hear any more music" which really doesn't help. At one point Stones road manager Sam Cutler (who does all the intro announcements) comes back to the stage and orders everyone except the musicians off the stage, as by the middle of the set the stage was almost full of Angels, swigging beer and whacking anyone who came near with broken off pool cues. 

 

Then there's the horrendous bit halfway through "Under My Thumb" where the song grinds to a halt as Meredith Hunter is stabbed to death only yards from the stage. High on goodness knows what, he was waving a shiny pistol around, like the sort you'd see in cowboy films. Apparently it wasn't loaded, but a couple of equally high Angels simply took Hunter out, stabbing him five times and then stomping on him. The Stones couldn't see what exactly was happening, but it was clear very quickly that something very awful had happened. In the break Jagger sounds scared and extremely worried as he relays messages: "er, we need a Doctor. What's that, we need an ambulance down here? Oh… we need an ambulance... I really don't know what's happening." 

 

Later on the crowd seems to calm down a bit and Jagger nervously tries a few "Whooo, you're great, what a fantastic audience" type announcements. But you can clearly hear that his heart isn't in it and it's all false bonhomie, simply trying to cool things down. Oddly though, despite all the trouble, or perhaps because of the trouble, the Stones play superbly. The version of "Gimme Shelter" is incredible, arguably the most powerful I've ever heard, and songs like "Live With Me" and "Street Fighting Man" are shot through with genuine desperation and anger. 

 

It's not the best Stones recording by any means, though for an audience tape from 1969 it's pretty strong. But it's a valuable recording - on a par with something like Iggy and the Stooges' Metallic KO as a brutal slice of music history.

david bowie - leon

Today I'm in Oxford Town, investigating pretentious Art Crime with Nathan Adler, Leon Blank and old Mr Touchshriek, hot on the trail of Ramona A Stone. Yes indeed, this is 71 minutes of (apparently) 3 hours or more of the group improvisations recorded in the autumn of 1994 by David Bowie, Brian Eno and the band which eventually led to 1.Outside.

About 10 years ago this CD of music was rumoured to be in the hands of a select group of uber-fans, but it was never leaked out to the great unwashed. All we had was about 20 minutes of snippets of this material, uploaded onto the web in pretty low quality mp3. For years this is all that has circulated. But late last year a fan on one of the Bowie message boards was sent a disc anonymously marked "Leon". He thought it would be the same old recycled snippets and did nothing with it until someone else suggested that he should at least give it a listen! He eventually did and was astounded to hear that it contained the full 71 minute Disc One of this material, previously only available, apparently, to the fabled 'inner circle' of fans. Very kindly he uploaded it for everyone to hear. 

Bits of this are familiar - some of the segues on 1.Outside were edited out of this improvised, supremely pretentious nonsense. For example the "Baby Grace" passage is here, though much longer and instead of "Hallo Spaceboy" crashing in at the end when Grace says 'something is going to be horrid' it continues with lots of guitar noodlings from Reeves Gabrels.  "I Am With Name" appears almost unchanged on the finished album, but apart from this and the reworked segues it's all unreleased stuff - mostly Bowie doing silly voices, strange monologues, lots of Enoid squelchy drums, Mike Garson playing fractured piano, all that sort of thing. 

But even if you're familiar with the long available snippets, the full length disc is something else. Some of the songs are just superb - "We'll Creep Together" builds from a mechanised drum pattern and eventually dissolves into some lovely keyboards some 10 minutes later. The stirring keyboards remind me of the lengthy ending to "Absolute Beginners" actually.  "I'd Rather Be Chrome" is more menacing, with a very Eno-esque style funky rhythm. The spoken passages are bonkers - Ramona is a syllanibal, don't you know, she 'eats her own words…' Told you it was pretentious! There are many different voices used by Bowie, many more than appear on the final album.

It sort of all washes over you, swirling around. It would have been marvellous if Bowie had actually had the nerve to release this 20 years ago, but with hindsight you can see why he watered down 1.Outside with a lot more 'proper' songs.

The last time I got so excited by a new piece of music was the day "Where Are We Now?" suddenly appeared - good Bowie music must have that effect on me!