I spent a couple of hours with the recent HBO ROLLING STONES documentary “Crossfire Hurricane” recently and wanted to relay my findings to you. As you may have heard, the film repurposes a bunch of other Stones documentaries – including ones you’ve seen, like “Gimme Shelter”, and ones you haven’t, like the recently-unearthed “Charlie is My Darling”, and expertly stitches it together to tell the tale of the years the Stones were great, good and halfway decent enough (everything up to “Some Girls” in 1978, and no more, thank god).
The band themselves give audio interviews and commentary, not video, likely so as not to invite the inevitable ohmygod, theyresoold reactions. The footage is tremendous, especially the 1963-65 stuff with real, honest-to-god riots and complete mania at their shows. The stories they tell of 5-minute sets, over and over across Europe, because the crowd wouldn’t let them get any further without storming the stage, are priceless. The film tackles the Stones-as-devils mythos and how that was built, along with the respective exits and introductions of Brian Jones, Mick Taylor and Ron Wood. (I can’t watch the latter without my skin crawling a bit, but that’s me).
Dynamite Hemorrhage says see it. It’s good for your general overall rock studies, and hard not to admire one of the great bands of any era while they were at their loftiest peaks.
DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE 