Good Month
12 minutes ago
Monday, 26 April 2010
REpost - Ornette Coleman & the Grateful Dead live 23rd February 1993 (Oakland Coliseum)
Here you can get Ornette Coleman sitting in with the Grateful Dead at the 'Mardi-Gras' gig from the 23rd of February 1993 at the Oakland Colisseum.
Tracks are 'Space - The Other One - Stella Blue - Turn On Your Lovelight & Brokedown Palace'.
Again it would have been interesting to have heard them playing with each other in the seventies when both Ornette and the Dead were exploring new sonic boundaries.
Ornette's son Denardo is also sitting in on percussion in this set.
(Another gig of Ornette and the Dead playing together from later in the year can be found here.
David Murray live with the Grateful Dead at Madison Square Garden on September 22nd 1993 can be found here. Use search engine at top for much more Grateful Dead live material on this blog.)
Genesis - Supper's Ready
"There's Winston Churchill dressed in drag,
he used to be a British flag, plastic bag, what a drag"
Genesis - I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)
"Me I'm just a lawnmower
you can tell by the way I walk"
رسالة جلعاد شاليط جديد Gilad Shalit letter
Mr Shalit appeared healthy in a video released in October
How accurate are lie detectors?
Lie-detector tests aren't completely worthless. How's that for an endorsement?
The polygraph, the most common lie-detection instrument, works on the assumption that the body reacts involuntarily to the stress of lying. It measures reactions such as changes in skin conductance, pulse rate, blood pressure, and breathing while the subject is asked a series of questions. The questioning process can take several forms. One early version was the "relevant-irrelevant" technique, which mixed queries like "Did you murder [name of victim]?" in with stuff like "Is today Tuesday?" Lies in response to the relevant questions would supposedly make the needles jump. The problem with this approach was that in such a context even an unfounded accusatory question could be stressful, producing a false positive.
The "comparison question" technique tries to get around this problem by making all the queries accusatory. In a sex-crime investigation, for instance, a suspect might be asked embarrassing control questions such as "Have you ever committed a sexual act you were ashamed of?" along with questions pertaining more directly to the case. The idea, which has a certain devious ingenuity, is that the innocent will show a greater response to the control questions (either because they're lying or simply flustered), whereas the guilty will show a greater response to the pertinent questions (which for them are more consequential).
The "guilty knowledge" testing method tries to discover whether a subject is privy to inside info about a case — things that only someone involved would know about. For example, suspects might be shown assorted photos of guns to see how they respond to the one that happens to show the murder weapon.
Besides investigation of crimes and the like, the other big use for polygraphs is general screening by employers looking to weed out iffy job applicants or catch workers in otherwise undetected wrongdoing. Pre-employment screening is common in law enforcement: one study found nearly two-thirds of agencies administered polygraph exams to applicants and rejected about 25 percent based on polygraph results alone.
Do the tests work? Depends how you define work. Probably the most comprehensive look at polygraph accuracy is a 2003 report from the National Academy of Sciences. After examining 57 polygraph studies the NAS concluded: "In populations of examinees such as those represented in the polygraph research literature, untrained in countermeasures, specific-incident polygraph tests can discriminate lying from truth telling at rates well above chance, though well below perfection." Their analysis of the 30 most recent polygraph data sets showed an overall accuracy of 85 percent, and an analysis of seven field studies involving specific incidents showed a median accuracy of 89 percent.
For screening purposes, though, the NAS found polygraph tests had too high a margin of error to be genuinely informative. If you made your criteria loose enough to catch most of the bad guys, you were overwhelmed with false positives; if you raised the bar enough to thin out the false positives, you missed too many bad guys.
And what about those countermeasures the NAS mentioned? Yeah, that's a problem too. Because polygraph tests rely on physical reactions, if you can control or mask your reactions at key moments in the questioning, you may be able to throw off the readings enough to produce an inconclusive result. Countermeasure techniques are surprisingly simple: they include discreet physical motions like pressing your toes against the floor or biting your tongue and mental tasks like silently counting backwards from 1,000 by sevens. The goal is to increase your baseline stress level enough to hide any revealing spikes.
If polygraphs are so fallible, why use them at all? In part because testing can intimidate people into confessing, deter bad behavior, and create an impression (however misleading) of vigilance. In other words: security theater. Heeding the NAS report, in 2006 the U.S. Department of Energy stopped blanket screening of its existing and prospective employees. Polygraph tests are now saved for specified instances — say, if someone fails to report a relationship with a foreign power.
Advocates of lie-detector tests foresee the day when technological advances will improve accuracy to the point where test results could be admitted as evidence. Much attention has been paid in recent years to functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. In its simplest form, fMRI lie detection works by scanning your brain to find out which areas are most active while you're being grilled; supposedly lying and truth-telling cause different areas to light up. No doubt due to the impracticality of using multimillion-dollar machines for everyday criminal interrogations, there haven't been many large-scale studies of fMRI accuracy. But the ones I've found show an accuracy rate of 76 to 92 percent — to be generous, about the same as you get with old-fashioned equipment at a fraction of the cost.
Cecil Adams @'The Straight Dope'
Naked Lunch in Mexico City
A man looks out from a window at the Krikas Bar in Mexico City's Roma neighborhood, Wednesday, April 14, 2010. During the 1950's this locale used to be the Bounty Bar and upstairs, famed beat writer William Burroughs shot his wife in the head by mistake during a game of William Tell gone awry. (Alexandre Meneghini, Associated Press / April 13, 2010)
Mexico City was a magnet in the 1950s for some of America's greatest Beat Generation writers — Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and others.
Many of their old haunts in Mexico's capital have now faded. But fans of the Beats can still find traces of their sojourns here — in cafes and cantinas, along boulevards and even at the site of an infamous killing.
The Beats came to Mexico City seeking a refuge from mainstream America in what they saw as a magical and alien land south of the border. They were searching for enlightenment, and sometimes fleeing criminal cases. Their stomping ground was the Roma district, a once-wealthy neighborhood of mansions that was in decline by the time Kerouac and Burroughs lived there.
In recent years, Roma has enjoyed a mild rebirth and is now filled with pretty parks, hidden cafes, galleries and upscale restaurants. But it still has a bohemian, down-at-the-heels side with working-class eateries, tortillerias, cheap hotels and repair shops. Most Beat landmarks are in Roma, within walking distance of one another.
First stop for any Beat pilgrim would be an anonymous building at Monterrey 122 on the busy corner of Chihuahua Street. It's a dingy apartment block with cheap taco and enchilada restaurants on the ground floor, but it has a notorious past: During a night of drinking in 1951, Burroughs, the Beat godfather, shot his wife dead in an upstairs flat in a game of William Tell gone awry.
Burroughs, the author of "Naked Lunch," "Junky" and "Queer," had placed a glass on Joan Vollmer's head and fired his pistol, only to hit her head by mistake. He was imprisoned for 13 days before being granted bail. He was eventually convicted of negligent homicide and given a two-year suspended sentence. He later wrote that without Vollmer's death he would never have become a writer.
The apartment where Burroughs shot Vollmer was located above the legendary Bounty bar, where expat Beat writers drank till dawn. Now the Bounty is an unassuming cantina called Krika's, where locals eat cheap meals largely unaware of what happened above their heads more than a half-century ago.
"Every now and then I see tourists standing outside looking at the building, wondering if it could really be the place where it all happened," said Huberto Suarez, owner of Krika's. "There are no statues or plaques, so I tell them that this is it."
Even more anonymous is Jose Alvarado 37, a rundown white building on a tiny side street across from the Plaza Insurgentes shopping mall and a Sears outlet. Its black metal door is uninviting and the neighboring building bears a large yellow sign that reads: "Housing yes! Evictions no!"
This was Burroughs' first address in Mexico City — Cerrada de Medellin 37 at the time — after fleeing a drug possession case in the United States. He was there when Kerouac and his buddy Neal Cassady showed up in 1950 on their famous road trip to Mexico. Cassady was characterized as Dean Moriarity in Kerouac's Beat classic "On the Road." Kerouac later penned the poem, "Cerrada de Medellin Blues."
While Kerouac was inspired by Mexico's indigenous culture and spiritual Mayan roots, Burroughs' reasons for living in Mexico City from 1949 to 1952 were more practical, at least at first: It was a place to avoid the law, live cheaply and satisfy his vices.
"I liked Mexico City from the first day of my first visit there," Burroughs wrote in the introduction to "Queer." "In 1949, it was a cheap place to live, with a large foreign colony, fabulous whorehouses and restaurants, cockfights and bullfights, and every conceivable diversion. A single man could live well there for two dollars a day."
A 10-minute walk from Cerrada de Medellin is the former site of the Beats' informal Mexico City headquarters, Orizaba 210. The original building here was demolished and replaced by a red-brick apartment block. Occasionally a lone tourist guide shows up with a handful of travelers, staring at it forlornly before pointing to the neighboring building which he says used to be its twin.
In the 1950s, Kerouac, Burroughs, Cassady, poet Gregory Corso and Ginsberg — whose poem "Howl" launched the Beat movement — all stayed at Orizaba 210. It was there in a rooftop grotto that Kerouac wrote parts of "Mexico City Blues" and his short novel "Tristessa." Heroin-haunted Burroughs wrote much of "Queer" inside its walls.
An obligatory stop on any Beat tour is Plaza Luis Cabrera, on Orizaba at Zacatecas Street, an attractive cafe-ringed plaza with trees and a fountain. In the 1950s it was a favorite hangout for Beat writers talking nirvana in a haze of marijuana, heroin and alcohol.
One night, after taking peyote with Burroughs, Kerouac ran to Plaza Luis Cabrera at midnight and lay in the grass to experience the hallucinogen, writes Jorge Garcia-Robles, who documented the two authors' time in Mexico City in his book "Burroughs y Kerouac: dos forasteros perdidos en Mexico."
Kerouac also ended up at the plaza at the end of a rain-soaked walk while high on morphine. Describing the walk in "Tristessa," he called Plaza Luis Cabrera "a magnificent fountain and pool in a green park at a round O-turn in residential splendid shape of stone and glass and old grills and scrolly worly lovely majesties."
Kerouac's surreal stroll that night started in a crime-filled downtown neighborhood, probably La Lagunilla, where he passed a street lined with hundreds of "crooking finger" whores waiting in front of their "crib cells where Big Mamacita sits." He also passed Plaza Garibaldi — the legendary home of Mexico's Mariachis — where musicians strum guitars for pesos and drunks stagger out of bars.
He continued past the Palacio de Bellas Artes — an Art Nouveau gem known for murals by Diego Rivera — and down San Juan de Letran street, now part of a thoroughfare called the Eje Central. He described walking 15 blocks down San Juan de Letran, where he let out a morphine-and-alcohol yell of "You're nuts!" to the crowd on the street. When he eventually reached Roma, he headed down the boulevard Alvaro Obregon, where the median is studded with statues and trees.
Visitors seeking to walk in Kerouac's footsteps will be relatively safe in Plaza Garibaldi, and Alvaro Obregon has bookstores and markets selling arts and crafts. On Sundays, a large street market at the corner of Cuauhtemoc Avenue sells everything from pirated movies and DVDs, to food, clothing and even guacamole made fresh from avocados on the spot. But La Lagunilla lies next to Mexico City's notorious Tepito district, and is still considered a risky place for unwary tourists.
Garcia-Robles writes that it was on the banks of the lake in massive Chapultepec Park — Mexico City's equivalent of New York's Central Park — that Kerouac suggested to Burroughs that he name his novel "Naked Lunch."
A fitting end for any Beat journey through Mexico City is the Panteon Americano cemetery in the city's north, near the Tacuba Metro station.
At the very back of the cemetery, on a rough concrete wall lined with rows of anonymous, crudely made niches, the cemetery puts the remains of people whose families didn't continue paying the rent on their graves.
Among these last resting places of the forgotten or poor, one small niche has a name inscribed on it.
It reads: "Joan Vollmer Burroughs, Loudonville, New York, 1923, Mexico D.F. Sept. 1951."
The niche is unadorned by flowers or any mementos honoring the role she played in an extraordinary moment in American literature.
The largely unvisited stone square is the only named marker to the Beats' passage through Mexico's capital — but perhaps the anti-establishment Beats would have wanted it that way.
Many of their old haunts in Mexico's capital have now faded. But fans of the Beats can still find traces of their sojourns here — in cafes and cantinas, along boulevards and even at the site of an infamous killing.
The Beats came to Mexico City seeking a refuge from mainstream America in what they saw as a magical and alien land south of the border. They were searching for enlightenment, and sometimes fleeing criminal cases. Their stomping ground was the Roma district, a once-wealthy neighborhood of mansions that was in decline by the time Kerouac and Burroughs lived there.
In recent years, Roma has enjoyed a mild rebirth and is now filled with pretty parks, hidden cafes, galleries and upscale restaurants. But it still has a bohemian, down-at-the-heels side with working-class eateries, tortillerias, cheap hotels and repair shops. Most Beat landmarks are in Roma, within walking distance of one another.
First stop for any Beat pilgrim would be an anonymous building at Monterrey 122 on the busy corner of Chihuahua Street. It's a dingy apartment block with cheap taco and enchilada restaurants on the ground floor, but it has a notorious past: During a night of drinking in 1951, Burroughs, the Beat godfather, shot his wife dead in an upstairs flat in a game of William Tell gone awry.
Burroughs, the author of "Naked Lunch," "Junky" and "Queer," had placed a glass on Joan Vollmer's head and fired his pistol, only to hit her head by mistake. He was imprisoned for 13 days before being granted bail. He was eventually convicted of negligent homicide and given a two-year suspended sentence. He later wrote that without Vollmer's death he would never have become a writer.
The apartment where Burroughs shot Vollmer was located above the legendary Bounty bar, where expat Beat writers drank till dawn. Now the Bounty is an unassuming cantina called Krika's, where locals eat cheap meals largely unaware of what happened above their heads more than a half-century ago.
"Every now and then I see tourists standing outside looking at the building, wondering if it could really be the place where it all happened," said Huberto Suarez, owner of Krika's. "There are no statues or plaques, so I tell them that this is it."
Even more anonymous is Jose Alvarado 37, a rundown white building on a tiny side street across from the Plaza Insurgentes shopping mall and a Sears outlet. Its black metal door is uninviting and the neighboring building bears a large yellow sign that reads: "Housing yes! Evictions no!"
This was Burroughs' first address in Mexico City — Cerrada de Medellin 37 at the time — after fleeing a drug possession case in the United States. He was there when Kerouac and his buddy Neal Cassady showed up in 1950 on their famous road trip to Mexico. Cassady was characterized as Dean Moriarity in Kerouac's Beat classic "On the Road." Kerouac later penned the poem, "Cerrada de Medellin Blues."
While Kerouac was inspired by Mexico's indigenous culture and spiritual Mayan roots, Burroughs' reasons for living in Mexico City from 1949 to 1952 were more practical, at least at first: It was a place to avoid the law, live cheaply and satisfy his vices.
"I liked Mexico City from the first day of my first visit there," Burroughs wrote in the introduction to "Queer." "In 1949, it was a cheap place to live, with a large foreign colony, fabulous whorehouses and restaurants, cockfights and bullfights, and every conceivable diversion. A single man could live well there for two dollars a day."
A 10-minute walk from Cerrada de Medellin is the former site of the Beats' informal Mexico City headquarters, Orizaba 210. The original building here was demolished and replaced by a red-brick apartment block. Occasionally a lone tourist guide shows up with a handful of travelers, staring at it forlornly before pointing to the neighboring building which he says used to be its twin.
In the 1950s, Kerouac, Burroughs, Cassady, poet Gregory Corso and Ginsberg — whose poem "Howl" launched the Beat movement — all stayed at Orizaba 210. It was there in a rooftop grotto that Kerouac wrote parts of "Mexico City Blues" and his short novel "Tristessa." Heroin-haunted Burroughs wrote much of "Queer" inside its walls.
An obligatory stop on any Beat tour is Plaza Luis Cabrera, on Orizaba at Zacatecas Street, an attractive cafe-ringed plaza with trees and a fountain. In the 1950s it was a favorite hangout for Beat writers talking nirvana in a haze of marijuana, heroin and alcohol.
One night, after taking peyote with Burroughs, Kerouac ran to Plaza Luis Cabrera at midnight and lay in the grass to experience the hallucinogen, writes Jorge Garcia-Robles, who documented the two authors' time in Mexico City in his book "Burroughs y Kerouac: dos forasteros perdidos en Mexico."
Kerouac also ended up at the plaza at the end of a rain-soaked walk while high on morphine. Describing the walk in "Tristessa," he called Plaza Luis Cabrera "a magnificent fountain and pool in a green park at a round O-turn in residential splendid shape of stone and glass and old grills and scrolly worly lovely majesties."
Kerouac's surreal stroll that night started in a crime-filled downtown neighborhood, probably La Lagunilla, where he passed a street lined with hundreds of "crooking finger" whores waiting in front of their "crib cells where Big Mamacita sits." He also passed Plaza Garibaldi — the legendary home of Mexico's Mariachis — where musicians strum guitars for pesos and drunks stagger out of bars.
He continued past the Palacio de Bellas Artes — an Art Nouveau gem known for murals by Diego Rivera — and down San Juan de Letran street, now part of a thoroughfare called the Eje Central. He described walking 15 blocks down San Juan de Letran, where he let out a morphine-and-alcohol yell of "You're nuts!" to the crowd on the street. When he eventually reached Roma, he headed down the boulevard Alvaro Obregon, where the median is studded with statues and trees.
Visitors seeking to walk in Kerouac's footsteps will be relatively safe in Plaza Garibaldi, and Alvaro Obregon has bookstores and markets selling arts and crafts. On Sundays, a large street market at the corner of Cuauhtemoc Avenue sells everything from pirated movies and DVDs, to food, clothing and even guacamole made fresh from avocados on the spot. But La Lagunilla lies next to Mexico City's notorious Tepito district, and is still considered a risky place for unwary tourists.
Garcia-Robles writes that it was on the banks of the lake in massive Chapultepec Park — Mexico City's equivalent of New York's Central Park — that Kerouac suggested to Burroughs that he name his novel "Naked Lunch."
A fitting end for any Beat journey through Mexico City is the Panteon Americano cemetery in the city's north, near the Tacuba Metro station.
At the very back of the cemetery, on a rough concrete wall lined with rows of anonymous, crudely made niches, the cemetery puts the remains of people whose families didn't continue paying the rent on their graves.
Among these last resting places of the forgotten or poor, one small niche has a name inscribed on it.
It reads: "Joan Vollmer Burroughs, Loudonville, New York, 1923, Mexico D.F. Sept. 1951."
The niche is unadorned by flowers or any mementos honoring the role she played in an extraordinary moment in American literature.
The largely unvisited stone square is the only named marker to the Beats' passage through Mexico's capital — but perhaps the anti-establishment Beats would have wanted it that way.
David W. Kook @'Chicago Tribune'
'The Stones and the true story of Exile on Main St' by Sean O'Hagen
The Stones and their entourage at Villa Nellcote, France, 1971 The Rolling Stones, Gram Parsons and Anita Pallenberg at Villa Nellcote, France, 1971. One of a series of evocative shots taken by photographer Dominique Tarle. Photograph: Dominique Tarle
There is a great moment in Stones in Exile, a new documentary about the making of Exile on Main St in 1971, when Keith Richards defines the essential difference in temperament between Mick Jagger and himself. "Mick needs to know what he's going to do tomorrow," says Richards, his voice slurring into a laugh. "Me, I'm just happy to wake up and see who's hanging around. Mick's rock, I'm roll." On Exile on Main St, though, Jagger, for once, rolled with Richards. So, too, did everyone else involved, from Jimmy Miller, the producer, to Marshall Chess, the young Atlantic Records executive, to the rest of the group and their extended retinue of session players, studio technicians and hangers-on. Once the decision had been made to record the album in the basement of Villa Nellcôte, Richards's rented house in the south of France, the working schedule was dictated by the irregular hours kept by the group's wayward guitarist, who also had a singularly dogged approach to composing songs. "A lot of Exile was done how Keith works," confirms Charlie Watts in the documentary, "which is, play it 20 times, marinade, play it another 20 times. He knows what he likes, but he's very loose." Without a trace of irony, Watts adds, "Keith's a very bohemian and eccentric person, he really is." Exile on Main St is so emphatically stamped with Keith Richards's rock'n'roll signature that it could just as easily have been called "Torn and Frayed" after one of the two gloriously ragged songs that he wrote the lyrics for. The title alone sums up his gypsy demeanour, his elegantly wasted look. Or they could simply have called it "Happy", after another track that was actually recorded in a single take when Richards woke up one morning – or evening – and gathered up the only other people who were awake, saxophonist Bobby Keys and producer Jimmy Miller, who was drafted in to play drums in place of the absent Watts. The whole record was, says Keys, a good ol' boy from Texas, "about as unrehearsed as a hiccup". Perhaps because he was not the controlling presence on Exile on Main St, which has often been voted the greatest rock'n'roll record ever by music critics, it is not necessarily one of Mick Jagger's favourite Rolling Stones albums. He once described it as sounding "lousy" with "no concerted effort of intention", adding "at the time, Jimmy Miller was not functioning properly. I had to finish the whole record myself, because otherwise there were just these drunks and junkies." Jagger may have been miffed that his vocals are sometimes swallowed up in the soupy mix but he sings with real passion throughout and seems galvanised by the raw rock'n'roll the group are making. If anyone should need a reminder that no one before or since has sounded as louche and limber, so raggedly majestic, they should watch the Stones playing "Loving Cup" live on their subsequent American tour. Footage of that performance is a highlight of the documentary, produced by the Oscar -winning film-maker John Battsek, which will be premiered at the Cannes film festival before screening on the BBC later in May. Despite his former reservations, Jagger has gotten behind the planned reissue of the album, too, which comes in a deluxe package containing 10 previously unheard bonus tracks, some of which are alternative takes of familiar songs while others sound suspiciously like they have only recently had new vocals added. No one in the Stones' camp is coming clean as to whether this is the case or not. For the purists among us, though, the original version of Exile on Main St, in all its ragged, full-on, rock'n'roll swagger, is all we need. "This is just a tree of life," said Tom Waits, when he selected it as one of his all-time favourite records a few years back. "This record is a watering hole." On the documentary, Caleb Followill from Kings of Leon is taken aback to discover the album was recorded in France. "I literally thought they were in Memphis, going out every night eating barbecue and partying." Which is exactly what it sounds like. The creation of Exile on Main St, like so many early chapters in the Rolling Stones story, is shrouded in myth and blurred by conflicting anecdotal evidence. The American journalist Robert Greenfield, who was present briefly during the recording, wrote an entire book about — and named after — the album. Its subtitle is "A Season in Hell With the Rolling Stones". The book paints an often lurid portrait of Richards and his then partner, Anita Pallenberg. Greenfield places the couple at the centre of a spiral of sustained hard drug abuse and wilfully amoral behaviour. Among the rumours he airs, but does not confirm or refute, is the one about Pallenberg encouraging an employee's young daughter to inject heroin for the first time. Another has Jagger bedding Pallenberg while Richards has nodded out on heroin, thus reigniting an affair they were rumoured to have had while filming Performance under the direction of Nic Roeg in 1968. Needless to say, the documentary, which has Jagger's controlling presence written all over it, does not dwell on such unsavoury and unsubstantiated matters. The French photographer Dominique Tarle, who chronicled the making of the album in a series of wonderfully evocative shots, and who was Greenfield's entrée into the Stones' milieu, had this to say about the book when I spoke to him in Paris last week: "I read only eight pages and I really felt sick. First of all, how can he not write about the music? And all this stuff about a season in hell with the Rolling Stones? No, no, it was anything but that. We were all young and it was a time of great freedom and energy and creativity. For me, it was a kind of rock'n'roll heaven." Perhaps, though, it was both. Tommy Weber, who is described as "a racing driver, drug runner and adventurer" in the documentary, and as "a fabulous character straight out of F Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night" by Greenfield, was one of Richards's inner circle at Nellcôte. His son, Jake, now a Hollywood actor, was just eight when he witnessed the decadence around the Rolling Stones first-hand. In Stones in Exile, he says, "There was cocaine, a lot of joints. If you're living a decadent life, there is always darkness there. But, at this point, this was the moment of grace. This was before the darkness, the sunrise before the sunset." Bobby Keys, as ever, is more blunt. "Hell, yeah, there was some pot around, there was some whiskey bottles around, there was scantily clad women. Hell, it was rock'n'roll!" Others experienced more mundane but no less pressing problems. Both Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman missed home and some of their own creature comforts. "I hated leaving England," Wyman reminisces. "You had to import Bird's custard, Branston pickle and piccalilli... you had to buy PG Tips and then deal with the French milk." The Rolling Stones pitched up in the south of France in the spring of 1971 as reluctant tax exiles fleeing the Labour government's punitive 93% tax on high earners. The group had just extricated themselves, at some cost, from a misguided management deal with the infamous Allen Klein, who was still claiming he owned their publishing rights. In the public eye, though, the Stones were still the rock group that most defined the outlaw rock'n'roll lifestyle, their bad reputation built on an already colourful past that included high-profile drug busts, the death by drowning of Brian Jones, one of their founding members, the near death by overdose of Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger's former girlfriend, and the murder of a fan by Hell's Angels, who had been hired by the group's management to provide security at 1969's ill-fated Altamont festival. Altamont was viewed by many contemporary observers as the symbolic death of the 60s dream of a burgeoning counterculture; by others as an inevitable result of the Stones' hubris and arrogance. Through it all, though, the Stones' music had echoed their turbulent lifestyle and soundtracked the tumultuous times, from the upfront sexual bravado of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" in 1965, through the apocalyptic swirl of "Gimme Shelter" in 1969, to the swagger of "Brown Sugar" in 1971. Sticky Fingers, the group's ninth album, nestled at the top of the British and US pop charts as the Stones, their families and extended entourage decamped to France to begin their exile. Richards sensed that the reason for their flight from Britain was not just to do with their dire financial predicament. "There was a feeling you were being edged out of your own country by the British government," he remembers. "They couldn't ignore that we were a force to be reckoned with." Having searched the coastline and hills around the town of Villefranche-sur-Mer for a suitable recording space, the Stones then opted to start working in the cavernous, multi-roomed basement of Nellcôte, with their mobile recording studio parked outside in the driveway. The house had once been occupied by the Nazis, and in a recent interview Richards describes working there as "like trying to make a record in the Führerbunker. It was that sort of feeling… very Germanic down there – swastikas on the staircase… Upstairs, it was fantastic. Like Versailles. But down there… it was Dante's Inferno." In the often intense heat of the dank basement, the group struggled to get started. Musicians set up their instruments in adjoining rooms, with Bill Wyman having to play his bass in one space while his amplifiers stood in a hallway. Initially, they were hampered by guitars going out of tune due to the humidity. Basic communication, too, was a problem, with Jimmy Miller continually having to run from the mobile studio to the basement to deliver his instructions. Then, a few weeks in, Mick Jagger announced that he was going to marry Bianca Pérez Morena de Macias, a Nicaraguan-born model, in nearby St Tropez. The international press and a clutch of the world's most famous pop stars jetted in for the very public wedding ceremony. As Jagger and his bride departed on honeymoon, the celebrations continued for a week at Villa Nellcôte. A week after they stopped, Gram Parsons, the country-rock singer who had bonded with Richards in Los Angeles a few years before over their shared love for Merle Haggard and heroin, arrived with his wife, Gretchen. The couple stayed for a month before they were diplomatically asked to leave by a Stones minion. "The atmosphere kept changing but the party kept going," says Tarle, laughing. Interestingly, the Stones in Exile documentary does not even mention Parsons, whose closeness to Richards rattled the possessive Jagger. "Keith and Gram were intimate like brothers," says Tarle, "especially musically. The idea was floating around that Gram would produce a Gram Parsons album for the newly formed Rolling Stones Records. Mick, I think, was a little afraid because that would mean that Gram and Keith might even tour together to promote it. And if there is no room for Mick, there is no room also for the Rolling Stones. So, yes, there was tension. You could feel it and I captured it on Mick's face in some of my pictures." The music the Stones made in Nellcôte reflected those tensions, as well as the sense of exile and uncertainty that hung heavily over the group, and the continuing encroachment of heroin on the lives of Richards and Pallenberg, and on the lives of some of those who entered their orbit. Speaking recently, Richards protested that he was not the only drug user in the group. "At the time, Mick was taking everything. Charlie was hitting the brandy like a motherfucker. The least of our concerns was what we ingested. These sorts of questions [about drugs] are predicated on what came a few years later when… I would play the game. 'Oh, you want that Keith Richards? I'll give you the baddest mother you've ever seen.'" By October, though, heroin use seems to have been a constant in the lives of Richards and Pallenberg. "I walked into the living room one day and this guy had a big bag of smack," Pallenberg remembers, "and everything just disintegrated." Perhaps it was telling that when Richards bought himself a speedboat, he called it Mandrax. Heroin brought with it the usual problems of supply and demand, and the usual retinue of shady characters and criminals, both local and from nearby Marseille. Villa Nellcôte was such an open house that, one day in September, burglars walked out of the front gate with nine of Richards's guitars, Bobby Keys's saxophone and Bill Wyman's bass in broad daylight while the occupants were watching television in the living room. "That's how loose and stupid it was out there," says Wyman. The crime was reputedly carried out by dealers from Marseille who were owed money by Richards. The nocturnal goings-on at Nellcôte were also starting to attract the attention of the local populace and the increasingly suspicious police force. "The music was so loud, really, really loud," Pallenberg remembers. "Sometimes I went to Villefranche during the day and you could hear the music there. And it went on all night." Whatever the truth of the rumour about Pallenberg encouraging the teenage daughter of the resident chef to try heroin, the police eventually raided Nellcôte and, in 1973, both she and Richards were charged with possession of heroin and intent to traffic. The resulting guilty verdict meant that Richards was banned from entering France for two years, and thus the Stones could not play concerts there. As summer turned to autumn, people started drifting away from Nellcôte and, in November 1971, Richards and Pallenberg followed suit. The album was eventually finished in Sunset Sound studios in Los Angeles. In the documentary, Jagger reveals that some of the lyrics were written at the last minute, including the album's first single, "Tumbling Dice", which was composed "after I sat down with the housekeeper and talked about gambling". The words to another gambling song, the frenetic "Casino Boogie", were created by Jagger and Richards in the cut-up mode made famous by William Burroughs, which gives a lie to the notion that the line about "kissing cunt in Cannes" refers to an episode in Jagger's notoriously promiscuous sex life. Jagger also denied recently that "Soul Survivor" was about his relationship with Keith Richards during the making of Exile. On it, he sings the line, "You're gonna be the death of me". In places, Exile on Main St does indeed sound, in the best possible way, like an album made by a bunch of drunks and junkies who were somehow firing on all engines. Jim Price and Bobby Keys's horns are an integral part of the dirty sound, as is Nicky Hopkins's rolling piano. Songs such as the galloping opener, "Rocks Off", surely about the effects of a heroin hit, and "All Down the Line" are messily powerful, with vocals fading in and out of focus and the group kicking up a storm underneath. "Tumbling Dice" features one of the greatest opening gear changes in rock'n'roll and a swagger that carries all before it. In one way, the double album, housed in Robert Frank's contact sheet-style cover, is Keith Richards's swan song of sorts, a final blast of rock'n'roll energy before he descended into a protracted heroin addiction that would often make him seem – and sound – disconnected from the rest of the group during live shows. After Exile, Jagger carried the weight and, despite some great moments on subsequent albums including Goat's Head Soup and Black and Blue, the Stones would never sound so sexy, so raucous and abandoned, so low-down and dirty. Neither, though, would anyone else. By the time punk came and went and indie rock had taken hold, the mix of sexiness and sassiness that the Stones at their best epitomised had disappeared entirely from rock music. So had the kind of survival instinct that the group drew on when the going got tough. "The Stones really felt like exiles," Richards says. "It was us against the world now. So, fuck you! That was the attitude." You can still hear it, loud and clear, on this messy, inchoate, rock'n'roll masterpiece; the Rolling Stones in excelsis.
COMING TO A RECORD SHOP NEAR YOU SOON – THE NEWLY AUTHORISED VERSION OF THE ROLLING STONES' BIBLE
You don't remain one of the music industry's most lucrative concerns after nearly 50 years in the business by being wasteful and the Rolling Stones are rarely profligate as far as recorded material is concerned. So while a quick internet search will reveal the usual array of bootleg out-takes and alternative versions, thus far, repeated reissues of the band's back catalogue have rarely offered more than remastering existing material and adding fancy artwork. This is one of the reasons this month's version of 1972's Exile on Main St, released on 17 May, is news and probably why it was held back from last year's unremarkable repackaging of their 70s output. Most of the fresh songs contained among its 10 extra tracks are genuinely unheard, lost-to-the-mists-of-time rarities. There's been some tinkering, though, with Jagger finishing the lyrics and lead vocals to "Following the River", as well as adding the odd vocal flourish to other tunes. "Keith put guitar on one or two," Jagger told Rolling Stone magazine recently, although Richards himself declared: "I really wanted to leave them pretty much as they were. I didn't want to interfere with the Bible." The impressively slouchy blues of "Plundered my Soul" has already been aired, gaining a limited release last weekend in support of international Record Store Day. "Good Time Women" is an excellent early incarnation of "Tumbling Dice" that has been knocking about online for a while, albeit in less polished form. Like much of Exile, it dates from the sessions for 1971's Sticky Fingers, although another new track "I'm Not Signifying" originates from the notoriously drug-addled sessions at Nellcôte in the south of France. There's a further treat included in the £99.99 deluxe box set version, something that adds to the sense that the Exile reissue is a sign that the Stones may be catching up with their peers and beginning to direct their own mythology more firmly, in the manner of, say, Bob Dylan with his recent flurry of official bootlegs and documentaries. Among the commemorative hardback book and postcards is 10 minutes of footage from the infamous Cocksucker Blues documentary, shot on the band's particularly debauched 1972 US tour in support of Exile. Inevitably, the edit features Keith hurling a television off a hotel balcony and Mick ordering room service, rather than the infamous sex and drugs scenes that prompted the band to halt the film's full release. (The entire 93-minute version can still only be shown in the presence of the now 85-year-old director Robert Frank.) Frank's film is named after another lost Stones track, their final single for Decca, rejected by the label because of its title. It made one brief appearance on a German compilation and hasn't been heard since. Apart from on the web, of course. [Gareth Grundy]
COMING TO A RECORD SHOP NEAR YOU SOON – THE NEWLY AUTHORISED VERSION OF THE ROLLING STONES' BIBLE
You don't remain one of the music industry's most lucrative concerns after nearly 50 years in the business by being wasteful and the Rolling Stones are rarely profligate as far as recorded material is concerned. So while a quick internet search will reveal the usual array of bootleg out-takes and alternative versions, thus far, repeated reissues of the band's back catalogue have rarely offered more than remastering existing material and adding fancy artwork. This is one of the reasons this month's version of 1972's Exile on Main St, released on 17 May, is news and probably why it was held back from last year's unremarkable repackaging of their 70s output. Most of the fresh songs contained among its 10 extra tracks are genuinely unheard, lost-to-the-mists-of-time rarities. There's been some tinkering, though, with Jagger finishing the lyrics and lead vocals to "Following the River", as well as adding the odd vocal flourish to other tunes. "Keith put guitar on one or two," Jagger told Rolling Stone magazine recently, although Richards himself declared: "I really wanted to leave them pretty much as they were. I didn't want to interfere with the Bible." The impressively slouchy blues of "Plundered my Soul" has already been aired, gaining a limited release last weekend in support of international Record Store Day. "Good Time Women" is an excellent early incarnation of "Tumbling Dice" that has been knocking about online for a while, albeit in less polished form. Like much of Exile, it dates from the sessions for 1971's Sticky Fingers, although another new track "I'm Not Signifying" originates from the notoriously drug-addled sessions at Nellcôte in the south of France. There's a further treat included in the £99.99 deluxe box set version, something that adds to the sense that the Exile reissue is a sign that the Stones may be catching up with their peers and beginning to direct their own mythology more firmly, in the manner of, say, Bob Dylan with his recent flurry of official bootlegs and documentaries. Among the commemorative hardback book and postcards is 10 minutes of footage from the infamous Cocksucker Blues documentary, shot on the band's particularly debauched 1972 US tour in support of Exile. Inevitably, the edit features Keith hurling a television off a hotel balcony and Mick ordering room service, rather than the infamous sex and drugs scenes that prompted the band to halt the film's full release. (The entire 93-minute version can still only be shown in the presence of the now 85-year-old director Robert Frank.) Frank's film is named after another lost Stones track, their final single for Decca, rejected by the label because of its title. It made one brief appearance on a German compilation and hasn't been heard since. Apart from on the web, of course. [Gareth Grundy]
'Exile On Main Street Blues'
(Unreleased track)
johannhari101 The Pope calls British memo joking about him "offensive." You know what I find offensive? RAPING CHILDREN. THOUSANDS. FOR YEARS
johannhari101 I really find it vile to suggest criticising the mass rape of the children of Catholics & Vatican cover-up is bigoted against Catholics.
johannhari101 I really find it vile to suggest criticising the mass rape of the children of Catholics & Vatican cover-up is bigoted against Catholics.
Flirt with Clegg and you will end up married to Cameron
The Liberal Democrat leader also made it explicit for the first time that electoral reform would be an unavoidable precondition of any coalition government as he insisted that Labour will have forfeited the right to govern if it comes third.
Labour tonight claimed Clegg had blundered by prematurely setting out new, detailed conditions on what would happen if there is no clear winner in the general election – claiming he looked arrogant and self-interested.
Lord Mandelson, Labour's election strategist, immediately warned in a campaign memo that "voters who flirt with Nick Clegg are likely to end up married to David Cameron". He said Clegg "had made clear his hostility to Labour and his preference to side with the Tories in a coalition if this arises. In other words, vote Nick and get Dave and George – not a nice prospect for people with progressive values."
The latest tracking poll from YouGov in the Sun suggests that Labour remains in third place, but the Conservatives are not drawing away from Liberal Democrats. The poll shows the Conservatives on 34 points (no change), the Liberal Democrats on 30 (up 1) and Labour on 28 (down 1).
The Lib Dems insisted that Clegg's remarks were being over-interpreted, and he was merely rejecting the constitutional assumption that the prime minister in the event of a hung parliament would always have the first opportunity to try to form a minority government.
Clegg said he would not prop up Labour if it came third in the vote yet secured the most seats. He said: "It seems to me that it's just preposterous, the idea that if a party comes third in terms of the number of votes, it still has somehow the right to carry on squatting in No 10 and continue to lay claim to having the prime minister of the country.
"What I'm saying here is pointing at a very, very irrational possible outcome of our potty electoral system, which is that a party that has spectacularly lost the election because fewer people are voting for it than any other party, could nonetheless according to constitutional tradition and convention still lay claim to providing the prime minister of the country."
With the campaign entering its final full week, Clegg may feel he needed to send out an anti-Brown message as polling suggested the Tory leader, David Cameron, was gaining traction with his warning that if voters back Clegg, they will end up with Brown in No 10.
Clegg also spoke for the first time about the possibility of sitting in cabinet with rival parties after the general election.
Liberal Democrat officials insisted their leader was not demanding Brown's head as the price of co-operating with Labour in the event of a hung parliament. But Clegg said Cameron and Brown would be vulnerable within their parties if they failed to secure an overall majority.
With characteristic frankness, the home secretary, Alan Johnson, said: "Look, it doesn't take a genius to think that if you are third in the popular vote, then … you are not best-placed to deal with it. We want to be first in the popular vote. We are going out over the next 11 days – and there are an awful lot of uncommitted voters."
Johnson said he was open to backing a more proportional voting system, closer to what Clegg wants, but another Labour electoral reformer, Peter Hain, told the Guardian that proportional systems break the link with constituencies and so make it more difficult to sack corrupt MPs.
Mandelson claimed in his campaign letter "as much as a third of the electorate are undecided. The challenges facing the country require a workhorse at the helm, not a couple of show ponies."
Liberal Democrats and Conservatives today ridiculed a request by Labour to broadcasters to focus more on policy analysis. The opposition parties claimed the appeal revealed Labour's unease at Brown's weak performances in the leadership debates.
Brown will try to cut through what he regards as the media's refusal to focus on policy by making three set-piece speeches this week on health, families and crime.
His speeches will put more emphasis on fairness and equality, rather than discussions on if it is right to withdraw £6bn from the economy this year. Appearing without a tie, and offering more pugilistic rhetoric than before, he said: "The Tory motto is not 'God helps people who help themselves', but 'God helps those whom he has already helped'."
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