People, if you’ve got some dollars stashed in your piggy bank then bust that porcine ceramic open, stick the squids in your back pocket, and swim to New York, New York where Exhibitionism, The Rolling Stones retrospective, which has just closed in London, is due to open at Industria, 775 Washington Street, in the West Village.
Yeah.
This writer saw it at at the Saatchi gallery in London, once the headquarters of the Duke Of York, Doric columns soaring up into the blue London skies, huge windows looking out onto a perfect lawn and beyond it the roar of the King’s Road. With tiny Japanese girls taking artful photos of each other arching back against the giant, pink tongue logo.
The exhibition itself is a glittering, noisy, beautiful homage to “the greatest rock and roll band in the world” with 500 exhibits of Stones stuff including a multi-screen, three-wall collage of Stones history from sobbing teens to leaping, to super-wrinkly 70-something Mick Jagger & co performing at Glastonbury, to sound studios, costumes, photographs, posters, guitars, drum kits, lyric books, diaries, backstage set-up, drawings (by Andy Warhol, no less), miniature stage sets, video footage and film.
I loved the recreation of the 1962 one-bedroom flat in Edith Grove where Brian Jones, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards began; a grotsome-ness worthy of Withnail and I – dingy rooms complete with filthy single beds, no sheets, dirty blankets, mould climbing up, and down, the walls, ashtrays overflowing, LPs spilled out across manky carpets and unwashed dishes choking the vile-looking sink. A mum ahead of me, holding her young son’s hand, gasped. Oh yes indeedy this was well before Ikea and white duvets; here we have a fearsome ’60s crucible of filth in which young R and B troubadors will begin their transformation into the electrifying bad boys who took over the musical world. Or as Keith, the thinker in the band, so modestly put it, “it was pretty exciting. Something was going on and you were part of it”.
The Stones weren’t just part of it. Very quickly, they were it.
From grotty beginnings in Edith Grove to being spotted by a 19-year-old genius Andrew Oldham who, ruthlessly, culled piano man Ian Stewart, because Stewart didn’t fit his blueprint for the boys: menacing young white guys with long hair, leather jackets, no manners, an apparently endless supply of beautiful groupies and girlfriends, and drugs. Opinionated brats of the ’60s whose publicly declared aim was to “offend the parents, while seducing their offspring”.
The offspring lapped it up.
The offspring lapped up The Beatles as well, but while the blow-dried mopheads in matching suits, were singing Love, Love Me Do, Mick was tearing up the stage in skin-tight pants yowling I Can’t Get No Satisfation as girl fans wept, stormed the stage, ripped the clothes off the band and fainted.
Pick up a set of headphones at the acoustic desk by the re-created studio and remember what the fuss was all about. Honkey Tonk Woman, Sympathy for the Devil, Miss You and Doom and Gloom roar in, delivered by the five horsemen of the apocalypse. The music was, and is, fantastic. The Fenders, Gibsons, Hammond organs, the dulcimer used by Brian Jones on Lady Jane, the instruments on which these anthems were hammered out, now sit silently behind glass; lit reverentially as icons.
Other displays show Mick Jagger’s lyric books and you remember he’s a graduate of the London School of Economics, a clever, educated boy. The lyrics go down clean with only the most minuscule corrections. And Keith Richards’ diaries which would go on to become his exceptional autobiography, Life.
Ah, Keith.
Upstairs are the iconic and fabulous posters – check out the one from China – record sleeves, including Sticky Fingers complete with real zip, designed by Andy Warhol, and Delia Smith’s famous cake on Let it Bleed. Next door there’s a gallery of costumes including much over-the-top hideousness from the ’70s, and the beautiful 3D models of stages they’ve played on, including the Lotus, a sort of giant clam; Jagger claiming it was terrifying to climb to the edge each night, cling on for dear life, as the vast contraption was slowly opened.
Martin Scorsese presents a short documentary with clips from Shine a Light, Gimme Shelter and Cocksucker Blues. “I always felt they were speaking to me directly,” Scorsese says. “They were dangerous, ironic, layered, honest, brutal and they had this acceptance of the dark side.”
The dark side has bitten more than once. There was the tragedy of founding genius of the band, Brian Jones, found dead in his swimming pool just nine months after being chucked from the group; the day of his funeral Mick Jagger left the country. Dark, dark times. There was the stabbing to death of a young black man by the Hell’s Angels in Altamont; footage shows fans being battered with pool cues by beefy, tattooed Angels, who someone, it’s never been said exactly who, thought it would be a laugh to give a few beers to and let them be the “security” for the free concert, with a frightened-looking Jagger pleading, “Be cool everyone, why can‘t we all be cool now?” A night of hell or, as one commentator put it, a night that marked “the end of peace and love”.
The last gallery in the exhibition is a thrillingly ear-splitting 3D performance on a huge screen, ie, as if you were at a music festival. It puts any cynicism – that Jagger has made The Rolling Stones into a corporation that’s way more business than blues; that the Stones haven’t evolved musically; that this whole exhibition is a rip-off of the David Bowie show at the V&A in 2013 – on hold, when you hear that avalanche of sound, when you see those performances, that stage, the hours of work that go in to making it all happen. You’re with Keith Richards: “there’s a certain magnetic glue that pulls us together; when we get behind our instruments, something bigger happens”.
It does.
Exhibitionism opens on November 12th in New York. Get there; even if you can’t.
