It hurts him to think that

All at once the gates of Sleep were thrown wide open and my waking ears took in the purr of a cat anxious to break her fast. I had awoken from a dream involving my wife. Oh, and Piper too. I am unsure which part of it was the most distressing: my wife rejecting me in some way that I cannot recall or Piper joining a gang of miscreant cats that caused mayhem throughout the neighborhood. When I was told that Piper had joined the gang of felines reprobates, my dream cut to a crawl space underneath the house that the dream took place in and arrayed on the dirt were several cats with my beloved Pipey in the middle. Despite the nightmarish quality of this stress dream, as a friend called it, the morning went rather well.

Still, Wednesday proved to be something of an odd day. 

Later that afternoon I listened to a podcast in which two women talked about cleanliness vs. clutter. There was something positively eerie about one of them remarking that her apartment is rife with clutter and that it doesn't bother her one iota. It was something that could have come directly from the mouth of my my wife. Indeed, something very similar did. Probably more than once. The conversation just struck a little close to home as this very subject was a major factor in the dissolution of my marriage.

And then that night I went to my wife's favorite tavern, Mickey's. Not once but twice. Thankfully I didn't run into her. My first appearance there was to meet up with some folks for a drink before going to the cinema while the second was an after-movie nightcap. We saw Rolling Stones - At the Max.

I knew one of the people I met at Mickey's and found the rest of the folks to be splendid company. They were all music nerds of varying degrees who had all seen the Stones live and were endowed with great senses of humor. I was hoping that "Midnight Rambler" was in the film and even sang to one of my companions:

Well, you heard about the Madison

Bucky, it's not one of those  

The woman who drove us to the theater had a fancy, newish car. At one point we were asked what we wanted to listen to and I told Alexa or Siri or whomever lived in the dashboard that I wanted to hear "Monkey Man" by the Stones. My request was met by silence as the dang computer didn't play it at first and so I felt a bit like Dave Bowman.

I cleared my throat and a second, more authoritative try proved more fruitful as the opening tinkling of the ivories came through the speakers. It was my first successful attempt at getting a car to obey me by voice command. I felt confident that the vehicle would let me back in after the movie.

Rolling Stones - At the Max was a blast despite the glaring omission of "Midnight Rambler". There's something a bit unsettling about a giant Keith Richards strumming away before you. I thought it was a bit funny to see those guys looking like leviathans on the screen while knowing full well that Christina Aguilera was quite a bit taller than they were. Or Mick Jagger, anyway. (Thank you Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.) But what can you expect? The guys in the Stones grew up in post-war England, raised on a diet of rationed powdered eggs and potatoes.

Jagger was a bundle of energy and he ran around the enormous stage set throughout. After the show, some of my cinema companions theorized that his moves were inspired by Bowie's. The giant inflatable women that came out for "Honky Tonk Women" were hilarious. One sat with legs crossed, a huge cigarette dangling from one her ginormous hands while the other woman sat there with legs splayed open. While Jagger hoofed it from one end of the stage to the other, Richards and Wood spun and kicked and skipped around the main stage area. Bill Wyman, however, was having none of that and stood still in largely the same spot throughout.

The performance was shot in 1989/90 on the Steel Wheels tour and so many things reeked of the 1980s that I just had to laugh, not the least of which was Chuck Leavell's shirt. However, Bill Wyman wore a blue dress shirt and, um, colorful vest. Furthermore, he sported a mullet and played a Steinberger.

The giant IMAX image was marvelous and the sound fantastic. The experience was loud and the band so in your face that I nearly started clapping after the first song, "Start Me Up", had finished.

A grand time was had by all. 

Turn the Page - Exile On Main St.: A Season in Hell With the Rolling Stones

Very late in his book, author Robert Greenfield admonishes readers that he is going to refrain from a detailed look at The Rolling Stones album which gives his tome its name. This, he contends, is the realm of the "rock critic" and not the "rock writer" which he almost arrogantly labels himself. Indeed, Greenfield seems intent on avoiding music as much as possible in this book, which is more voyeurism than writing on rock. In addition to turning his nose up at the thoughtful consideration of some of the best music ever recorded by The Rolling Stones (and perhaps in rock history), he also eschews a broad history of the band and instead focuses on the period of June-July 1971. During this time, the members of the group took up residency in the south of France to avoid paying exorbitant income taxes in the UK. The Stones convened at guitarist Keith Richards' new home, Villa Nellcôte, a mansion built in the 19th century, to record their next album after the immensely successful Sticky Fingers.

What the reader gets here is a series of half-remembered anecdotes from 30+ years on in Greenfield's indelible style that is part braggadocio and part hyperbolic grandiosity. Richards is cast as both hero and anti-hero as he lords over recording sessions where nothing ever seems to get recorded, as well as a revolving court of hangers-on seeking to bask in his heroin-fueled glow. The story details the steady flow of drugs that poured into the mansion as well as Richards' brushes with the French authorities. Reading this book, one might well wonder how any music was recorded at all. Greenfield isn't particularly interested in this. After telling us a never-ending stream of tales of hedonism and demonstrating how they impeded the recording process, Greenfield suddenly informs the reader that the band has a clutch of songs that need to be mixed.

The Stones' lead guitarist at this time was Mick Taylor and he described the events thusly: "I think it was a bunch of stoned musicians cooped up in a basement, trying to make a record." This sober assessment is countered early in the book with Greenfield's analogies to bedrock stories of Western culture. First he tells us that a passion play is to unfold; then Richards and company are the equivalent of Dante descending from one Circle of Hell to the next. This annoyance is exacerbated by Greenfield's habit of invoking lyrics from Rolling Stones songs. While I don't mean for this review to merely be a list of criticisms piled Pelion upon Ossa, I have to mention his puerile digs at other authors. For instance, Stephen Davis wrote Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-Year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones and Greenfield chides him for mistaking Stephen Stills for Gram Parsons in one incident and then brags, "Next time you want to check a fact about the Stones, please feel free to call me in the office."

This bit of Rolling Stones history became rock mythology long ago and Greenfield seeks to write the most comprehensive version of the tale. He certainly takes to his task with aplomb by reading every book on the topic and conducting interviews with participants involved in the milieu of drugs, sex, and rock'n'roll. Unfortunately he mostly displaces his story from any larger context. Thusly almost nothing is devoted to connect the events of that summer to the songs which appeared on Exile on Main Street. And, except for a few cursory paragraphs at the beginning, he also avoids commenting on how the story he tells relates to the state of rock music in 1971 or of the larger contexts of American or English culture at the time. What's left is just debauchery.