Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Filmed on the eve of The Rolling Stones 50th anniversary as a band, the 2012 documentary Crossfire Hurricane begins by asking the most important question you could ask of any septuagenarian rocker: “How’s your memory?” Iconic frontman Mick Jagger says it’s “pretty good,” and the rest is “usually written down somewhere.” Right there is the challenge of any chronicle of the group; separating the reality from the myth, and few bands carry as much mythical baggage as the storied British blues band turned “Greatest Rock N’ Roll Band in The World.”
Part of the problem is the band has never seemed particularly interested in their own history. While other bands curated their legacies with deluxe archival releases, The Stones carried on like they were still duking it out on the pop charts with artists five decades their junior, as if by acknowledging their past they would suddenly age overnight like Dorian Gray. However, since 2010’s expanded reissue of their landmark 1972 album Exile On Main Street, the band has finally begun to give their middle-aged (and up) fan base what it has been craving. Crossfire Hurricane was directed by Brett Morgen, who also did the 2015 documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, and is currently available for streaming on Netflix.
Music documentaries easily fall into routine; talking heads blathering on about the artist’s importance, the ups and downs of success and drug abuse, and some sort of ultimate redemption at the end. Crossfire Hurricane was one of the first music docs I can remember that largely eschewed with the talking head format, preferring to use voiceovers restricted to the actual band members, and instead of providing an exhaustive overview of the band’s career, focusing on a finite period of time and a common theme. It’s in many ways a more satisfying approach, and one that recent documentaries on The Beatles and Oasis have copied. In the case of Crossfire Hurricane, the film focuses on The Rolling Stones’ 1962 inception through their dark, druggy days as what guitarist Keith Richards calls a “pirate nation unto themselves,” and culminates in their ascent into becoming a classic rock institution.
Taking their name from a Muddy Waters song, The Rolling Stones was formed by English blues devotees Mick Jagger and the guitarists Keith Richards and Brian Jones. Following in the wake of another young English rock group, it was early manager Andrew Loog Oldham’s idea to cast the band as “The Anti-Beatles,” the loutish, disheveled, four-chord “bad guys” to The Fab Four’s matching suits, good manners and effervescent pop melodies. The band took to the role naturally and with glee. While Jagger often talks about them playing the part, their contempt for the older generation and its buttoned-up rules of behavior is palpable in archival interview footage. And the feeling was mutual.
The demand for new material pushed Jagger and Richards together as songwriters, a move that would eventually force out Jones (despite him being the most accomplished musician in the band). The songs they wrote were brash, and loud, and spoke to the growing generation gap between the progressive ideas of ‘60s youth and the parental authority figures they felt were “running their lives,” as Jagger says. While their shows drove teenage girls into an ecstatic frenzy, it riled up the boys and made them want to fight, and the object of their hostility was more often than not the police. The band came to symbolize all that was rebellious about the counter-culture, drawing the attention of law enforcement.
The 1967 drug arrests of Jagger and Keith Richards were a pivotal moment for the band. Tipped off by London tabloids, and targeted by police, the band felt they were being persecuted for living life on their own terms. At their sentencing, Richards said defiantly to the court, “I’m not interested in your petty morals,” for which he was rewarded with a one-year jail sentence, while Jagger got three months. The sentences were thrown out the next day, and the band members freed, but the experience transformed them. “That was when we really put the black hat on,” says Richards, “It was Jesse James time. The cops turned me into a criminal.” If the straight world saw them as devils, they would sing about it, and Jagger was comfortable in the role.
The band increasingly seemed to embody the violence of the late ’60s in their music and behavior. First, they dispatched with Brian Jones, who — unlike his raven-haired co-guitarist — couldn’t handle his drugs and had become undependable. He drowned in his swimming pool less than a month after his dismissal from the band. Two days later, The Stone introduced new guitarist Mick Taylor in front of a half million people at London’s Hyde Park. They then headed to America for a 1969 tour, which climaxed with their infamous free show at Altamont Speedway, outside San Francisco. Initially envisioned as a “West Coast Woodstock,” the day-long concert ended in bloodshed as hardened Hell’s Angels, hired as security and allegedly paid in beer, beat the hell out of anyone who got too freaky … and there were a lot of people getting really freaky. 18-year-old Meredith Hunter was killed by Angels after brandishing a gun. (If you’re looking for more on this infamous incident, check out the Maysles Brothers documentary Gimme Shelter.)
Tax problems would eventually achieve what the police couldn’t, sending the band into exile in the south of France. Drugs pervaded their existence, as Richards “took to the stuff,” saying “junk was there to help me do the music.” From the murky sessions in the basement of his dilapidated Mediterranean mansion came the double album Exile On Main Street, arguably the band’s recorded high-point. Back on tour in America, the tumult of the late ‘60s had been replaced by the hedonism of the ’70s. Despite State Department threats, the tour was a glamorous media spectacle and full-fledged success. The rogues had won.
Taylor quit in late ’74, another drug casualty, and was replaced by fun-loving Faces guitarist Ron Wood. The new blood invigorated the band and brought some levity to counteract the darkness surrounding Richards’ drug addiction. His day of reckoning came in 1977 with a Canadian drug bust, which finally made him kick heroin. As he says, “The one thing that was more important than smack was the band.” With a newly “clean and sober” Richards, the band ended the ‘70s firing on all cylinders, arena-rock mainstays that had gone from being “the band that everyone hated to the band everyone loved,” according to Jagger.
Crossfire Hurricane concludes with footage from the band’s 1981 North American tour, which is a good stopping point since that was around when they stopped being relevant. While the film glosses over some of the band’s more unseemly moments, particularly in its treatment of its departed members, it does a good job of getting at the grist of what makes them so great. Rock n’ roll was rebellious from its outset, being as it was the province of the young and disenfranchised, but The Rolling Stones made that rebellion explicit. They were first rock n’ roll band that didn’t give a fuck. And, oh yeah, they also put out more great records than any of their contemporaries, and looked cool as hell doing it all. As Richards says at the film’s conclusion, “You just don’t fuck with The Stones. You know, this is a simple rule. It don’t pay.”
Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician who got The Rolling Stones ‘Hot Rocks’ for his 8th birthday and has never looked back. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.
