Rolling Stones: Big Cocksucker Blues

what is it?

The Stones made a documentary of their 1972 American tour that was subsequently shelved. The film itself consists of some really rough quality 16mm images, and earlier bootlegged VHS tapes of it were so poor that you could rarely make out what was being shown or said. Some company called 4reel productions produced a two disc set called Big Cocksucker Blues, and the film has gotten a pretty good rendering onto dvd.

The "big" in the title is that you get an extra disc, with some interesting ephemera from the Taylor era:

1) "Satisfaction", "Jack Flash" and half of "Carol "from a Savoy theater show. Single camera from the balcony. Image is good but usually static and distant...Sound is good but vocals a little two hot.

2 ) The Rolling Stones in Australia...an interesting documentary and nice counterpoint to cocksucker. Canny Australian media crew subjects STP invasion to a fairly rigorous expose.

3) 5 PROMOS:" angie, silver train, dancin with mr. d, till the next goodbye. aint to proud to bed...all lipsynch play acting to the music on these...some remarkably ridiculous wardrobe for Jagger. I read on some other page that these were created in association with Don Kirshner's Rock Concert

4 ) a camera man up on the stage for bits and pieces of "brown sugar" sound is pretty raggedy

5 ) David Frost..."you can't always get"...Jagger sings live over the canned track while all else play act ridiculously

6 ) 2 interviews with mick Jagger one...black and white...is really only a fragment...and this is a shame because it's pretty fascinating. Jagger is placed before the press conference cameras like some sort of pied piper for hippie liberalism. He accepts and rejects the whole affair with a very honest grace...The second is dismal, the interview is an idiot- Jagger struggles and fails to make something of the occasion

how is it?

...Always been a little more interested in misbehavior rather than music. I put the word "illegal" in the title of this blog because I plan to put some thought into breaking the law as it's related to good old fashioned rock and roll...One sense is what we have here: the Stones in their mythological glory years...doing things in front of a home movie camera that, afterwords, they didn't want people to see, because they didn't want to assist people who were trying to lock them up...the rebellion of summer of love idealism was dead...Here you have the rebellion of rock stars turning their private world into a continuous party. You almost get this, but not exactly. Because oftentimes, all that really seems to be going on is a sense of confined boredom and vague confusion.

Honestly, I'm too poor of a writer to do this thing justice...some guy named John Dougan over at Perfect Sound Forever has nailed a superb introduction for this movie for both the uninitiated and the aficionado

The average person is going to drift away due to the hazy quality of its image and sound and its lack of any real narrative. Precisely the things that make it so enjoyable, really. Its sort of something you can have on in the background and look up at occasionally.

With this disc we can start talking about another sense of illegal; the sense that unofficial recordings of musical artists are in some way illegal...A disc like this has an illegal aura about it because those who made it aren't the ones selling it. There is a pretty fair demand for it, but whomever owns the rights hasn't yet gone to the trouble of knocking it out for an official release. It's easy to understand why: for the Rolling Stones empire, there's far more money to be made with other things...People will have to wait for their demise and Anthology box set before anything from Cocksucker Blues becomes official Stones product.

When a disc image of the recently released ",Shine a Light" is uploaded and downloaded, I would assume that both uploader and downloader are pretty much breaking the law in most countries. Neither of them is necessarily seeing a profit; money is not necessarily changing hands- money is not necessarily being diverted from the creator of the video...Of course in some cases it is: for instance, web pages that facilitate file sharing acquire advertising income which would not exist but for the popularity of the files.

How all this affects the actual sales of the "Shine a Light" DVD can never be definitely known. Some, conceivably, will not buy the disc because they have downloaded it. Some, conceivably, will buy it because they have downloaded it. Until recordable blueray becomes more widespread...or the distinction between the TV and the PC becomes a little less formidable...there is still some value and convenience to the officially published optical discs.

A pretty complex situation. Figuring out whether somebody selling or uploading Cocksucker Blues is taking money away from anybody involved in creating it...that's even more so.

Last thing I wonder, does CB exist in better quality that the 4reel edition?...If you are out there and have multiple versions to compare, I'd like to know. A print of CB was shown at the Tate Modern as recently as 2004...It will be interesting to see what will be done with it when someone finally loads it into a hundred thousand dollar computer editing suite and start tweaking for detail. Its one of those things that, if you clean it up too much, you'd be destroying what it is...

For Robert Frank, generally, Microcinema has put together DVDs of his film work. Pull My Daisy has found its way onto Google Video HERE.