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Reviews Shine A Light - The Film Thursday, May 29, 2008 Martin Scorsese gives us one of the best concert films ever. Pity about the show. By Brian Wise
SHINE A LIGHT
DIRECTED BY: MARTIN SCORSESE
VERDICT: SEE IT
It’s no secret that I am a Stones fan. I have seen them on every visit to Australia bar their first tour in 1965. In 1966 they were the first band I ever saw in concert. My greatest concert going experience ever was seeing the band with Mick Taylor on guitar twice at Kooyong in 1973. I saw them at Earls Court in London in 1976 – the concert that introduced me to The Meters and a whole new world of music. A few years back I saw all three of their concerts at Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne. In 1999 I saw them in Chicago and then San Jose.
Of course, I’ll see them if they come back to Australia again. We share a lot of baggage! But being a fan doesn’t mean I have to like everything the band does. Mick and Keith have frustrated me for years by not getting into the studio and making a blues album. (If you doubt their ability have a listen to their contributions to the Jimmy Rogers tribute album, the B-sides over the years and ‘Back Of My Hand’ from the last studio album).
Despite that, the tours over the past few years have been some of the most consistent that the group has ever done. Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood can still hit the groove and Jagger is still possessed of an inhuman energy.
The backing band comprises a fantastic bunch of musicians - from Chuck Leavell on keyboards to Bobby Keyes on sax and Lisa Fischer, Bernard Fowler and Blondie Chaplin on backing vocals – that allows the Stones, even on a bad night, to sound pretty close to their peak.
The Rolling Stones even made the greatest live album of all time in Get Your Ya Yas Out. But, while Shine A Light even doesn’t come close to that, the album is a soundtrack to a filmic experience and the film transcends the mere audio recording.
See the band on the big screen (as I did at iMax) shot by eighteen (!) cameras and hear the sound through a massive set of speakers. It is then that the strengths become exaggerated while the flaws diminish. As a record of a Stones show the film is spectacular. You almost feel as if you are on stage with the band, more so than any other concert film that I have seen.
Director Martin Scorsese, who also gave us one of the great concert documentaries of all time in The Last Waltz, convinced The Stones to film their benefit show for the Clinton Foundation in the intimate surroundings of New York’s Beacon Theater in late 2006. It is a far more satisfying setting than some of the giant arenas the band had been playing in on their current tour.
Scorsese inserts himself, as he did in The Last Waltz, with the implication that he received the set list just as the band hit the stage. It seems highly improbable but it acts as a device to create some tension. Unlike his film on The Band, the director declines to do any contemporary interviews so if you thought you might find out something about the relationship between Mick and Keith these days, forget it.
While it is ostensibly a documentary about the band, there are excerpts of archival interview footage from the 60s and 70s interspersed into the performance. These act as ironic punctuations to the fact that the band is still in existence. Brian Jones is glimpsed briefly, Mick Taylor is never seen. Charlie Watts emerges as the most humorous, wandering through press conferences as if he is in somewhat of a daze and cannot quite believe he is in a successful rock band. In the most telling excerpt, a young Jagger says that he can see himself performing at 60!
What you see is a ‘warts and all’ performance with Keith, Ronnie and Charlie driving the band and Jagger strutting around with the sort of frenetic energy that no-one in their mid-60’s should have. Lock up your grandmothers! It is probably not the band’s best show of the recent tour, and most of the footage comes from the second of two nights, but it is the one they chose to film so they are stuck with it, replete with the occasional flat vocals from Mick or Keith.
Granted it would be difficult to compile a set list but surely Jagger (who is credited with devising it) could have come up with some better choices than ‘Shattered’ and ‘She Was Hot.’ ‘As Tears Go By’ and ‘I’m Free’ are interesting curios and when they launched into ‘Just My Imagination’ I could not help but recall the fact that some years back they recorded a mighty version of Jerry Butler’s ‘For Your Precious Love’ (which would have been a better choice).
The enduring image for me of Shine A Light is Buddy Guy guesting on ‘Champagne & Reefer,’ which recalls the great version of ‘Mannish Boy’ on Love You Live. For a few minutes, the band members are out of their comfort zone, playing a song that they have probably never previously performed live and showing that when the inspiration takes them they can still conjure up moments of greatness. It is stunning.
That is one of the several musical highlights in a film that is really a paean to both the band’s endurance and Mick Jagger’s staggering energy. Musically, it is not one of the Stones’ best shows – as is evidenced by the audio CD – but the film itself is ample demonstration that a ‘show’ can be more than the sum of its parts.
Apart from Guy’s exemplary spot (during which he shows Jagger how to actually sing the blues and prompts Mick to whip out the harmonica to good effect) other highlights include Keith’s versions of ‘You Got The Silver’ and ‘Connection’ (which he notes he previously performed at that theatre with the X-Pensive Winos).
Jack White looks chuffed to be guesting on ‘Loving Cup’ while Christina Aguilera’s appearance is superfluous at best and questionable at worst. And on ‘Live With Me’? Come on! Surely, Mick and Keith could have called on a few more worthy friends to help them out.
As I left the cinema, a blues fanatic friend asked, ‘Do you think the Stones will ever call up some of the old blues legends like Hubert Sumlin or Pinetop Perkins to make an album?’
‘Over our dead bodies,’ I retorted. It’s like we are on this never-ending crusade – and losing. A pity really because on the strength of one song alone in this film they could leave us with one killer blues album.
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