Smell the magic
Finally, a Stones live album with blood and guts reveals them in their prime. By David Fricke.
The Rolling Stones ★★★★ Live At The El Mocambo ROLLING STONES/UME. CD/DL/LP
“IT’S LIKE the movies,” guitarist Keith Richards said in 2002, summing up The Rolling Stones’ history in live albums to that point: mostly routine souvenirs doctored with overdubs and crowd noise, even on the 1969-tour landmark, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out. “Everybody’s getting splattered, blood and bones flying about. But it all just sits there on the screen. You can’t smell it or taste it.”
A notable exception: the four blues and early rock’n’roll covers on side three of 1977’s
Love You Live, pulled from two club shows on March 4 and 5 of that year at Toronto’s El Mocambo Tavern. In that short window, the Stones jammed their hockey-rink might into the exuberant crush of a 1963 date at the
Station Hotel as if it was their last chance at the dance – which wasn’t far from the truth. When the Stones took to the stage, Richards was facing seven years in a Canadian jail after his arrest on drug charges a few days earlier. (He was eventually found guilty and given a suspended sentence.) Forty-five years later, Live At The El
Mocambo – the whole of March 5 with some one-off songs from the previous night – is the Love You Live we deserved at the time. The Stones careen through a breakneck roulette of that decade’s hits, rare-for the-era retrospect (Route 66, the opening track on their 1964 debut LP; a first-in-ages jolt of Let’s Spend The Night Together) and the underrated R&B experiments on 1976’s Black
And Blue. The fidelity is claustrophobic and reverb-heavy – and the closest a Stones concert album has come to the Frenchbasement tumult of Exile On Main St. The collective fray in Honky Tonk Women, All Down The Line and Dance Little Sister – Mick Jagger railing at the edge of his range through the feral ballet of Richards and Ron Wood’s guitars; sideman Billy Preston channelling Johnnie Johnson and Ian Stewart at the piano – sounds like the Stones are still there.
The immediate future is in the house as well. In addition to the Chess Records homage excerpted for Love
You Live, the Stones unearth Big Maceo Merriweather’s Worried Life Blues, a Chicago nugget from 1941 that Richards and Wood kept for their 1979 setlists with the New Barbarians. And the Black And Blue numbers – a jubilant thrashing of Hand Of Fate, the kinetic take on Philly-soul balladry in Fool To Cry – remind you how that album, basically a series of auditions for guitar players until the Stones settled on Wood, points so clearly to the assured funk and dance music on Some
Girls and Tattoo You.
The Stones have never stopped being a club band, going to the small rooms for warm-up gigs and keeping the B stage in their stadium spectacles. But here’s some blood and guts from Toronto in the prime-time 1970s. And it doesn’t just sit there.
ASTOR PIAZZOLLA was a prodigy on the bandoneon, or button accordion. Born in Argentina in 1921 of Italian immigrant parents, he grew up in Greenwich Village and Little Italy, New York, took up the instrument aged eight and composed his first tango aged 11. At 14, he was spotted by tango legend Carlos Gardel, who invited him to tour with his orchestra. Piazzolla was crushed when his father refused permission. Shortly afterwards, the whole Gardel touring party perished in a plane crash. Astor would later joke that, had his father let him go, he’d be playing the harp.
At 17, Piazzolla moved to Buenos Aires and studied under Argentinian classical composer Alberto Ginastera, who taught him orchestration. His Octeto Buenos Aires, formed in 1955, was effectively a chamber orchestra with added bandoneons, but it improvised like a jazz ensemble. This blend of tango, jazz and classical music was dubbed ‘nuevo tango’ and proved controversial to the point of Piazzolla receiving death threats for daring to tamper with the form. Undaunted, he would experiment with tango for the rest of his life.
Now Nonesuch Records release a 3-LP/3-CD box set, Astor Piazzolla: The American Clavé Recordings ★★★★, gathering a trio of albums originally issued in the 1980s: Tango: Zero Hour, La Camorra, and The Rough Dancer And The Cyclical Night (Tango Apasionado), the first time they have been available on vinyl since their initial release on American Clavé, the label founded by producer Kip Hanrahan, who writes in the sleevenotes: “I’m not sure whether Astor really loved or hated the tango. I think he loved the music his father surrounded the family with, the sound of what they’d left behind in Argentina… It was the audible identity that made them different from the Italian and Jewish families on the Lower East Side of New York. When I listen to Astor, I’m listening to the music of a turbulent, complex, restless, brilliant man rearranging the vocabulary of his father’s dreams.”
That impulse to keep challenging stylistic assumptions, constantly tweaking the levels of traditionalism in the form, makes his work rewarding. It ranges from torch songs on rain-lashed streets (check the glorious Five Tango Sensations, commissioned by the Kronos Quartet and released in 1991), to lusty carnivals where cultures clash and passions flare. His music can be cerebral, carnal, playful or intense by turns.
Consequently, these albums have markedly different textures. Tango:
Zero Hour was recorded with his New Tango Quintet; bandoneon plus guitar, violin, piano and bass. At the
time, 1986, Piazzolla declared it “the greatest record I’ve made in my entire life. We gave our souls to [it].” 1989’s La Camorra, the most classical of the three, was Piazzolla’s last recording with the Quintet. Hanrahan recalls multiple occasions when he’d be fired by this truculent perfectionist, after a flaming row about some aspect of the work, only to have him call early next morning: “Kip, I was thinking…” The Rough Dancer And The Cyclical Night
(Tango Apasionado) grew from music for a theatre piece and was constructed by Hanrahan in a way that echoed Teo Macero’s work with Miles Davis, editing and remixing sections of music to create something longer and more narrative, with repeating themes and rough edges. “Imagine a Borges whorehouse,” Piazzolla instructed. Shortly after it was completed, Piazzolla suffered a stroke and went into a coma from which he never recovered. He died two years later in 1992, aged 71.
Lavish presentation – Piazzolla’s stern gaze out front – and excellent essays by Hanrahan and journalist Fernando González make, on the 30th anniversary of his death, a fine memorial to a unique, complex artist who threw everything into his work and put it before everything else.
“Astor had an impulse to keep challenging stylistic assumptions.”