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Stones in the Park (The)
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - Network Review written by and copyright: Paul Lewis (26th June 2012). |
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The Film
 The Stones in the Park (Granada, 1969) Recorded only a couple of days after the death of founder member Brian Jones, The Stones in the Park focuses on the Rolling Stones’ free concert in Hyde Park. Produced for Granada Television and directed by award-winning documentary filmmaker Leslie Woodhead, it is a mixture of concert film and documentary, with footage of the Stones performing their songs interspersed among interviews with Mick Jagger and members of the audience. For his part, Jagger expresses the idealistic philosophy underpinning the decision to deliver a free concert, stating that the performance was intended as a tribute to Jones and noting that as most of the money made from live performances goes to the promoters and managers of the venues or to the cost of publicizing the events, and so ‘It never occurred to me why people should pay [for this concert]. You don’t make any money, you know’. Verité-style footage of the crowds watching the concert and some of the events taking place on the periphery, including some interesting performance art and street theatre, is sprinkled throughout the documentary. We see members of the Hell’s Angels, the acting ‘policemen’ of the concert. ‘The Stones are real life people, not like The Beatles [….] They’re true to life’, one of the Hell’s Angels asserts. Of course, six months or so later, during the Stones’ free concert at the Altamont Speedway in California, the group would once again enlist the help of Hell’s Angels to police the audience, resulting in the death of an audience member. This event is often seen as a watershed, marking the end of an era. Norma Coates (2006) has said that ‘[a]s the story goes, the Stones danced a little too close to the devil, in the form of the Hell’s Angels, that fateful day. The Angels beat up a lot of people, and then killed a young black man, while Mick Jagger callously sang and danced along to “Sympathy for the Devil”. Thus the 1960s ended, along with the utopian promise of that decade and youth counterculture’ (58). The events of the free concert at the Altamont Speedway were documented in David and Albert Maysles’ extraordinary documentary Gimme Shelter (1969), which arguably is something of a companion piece to/mirror image of The Stones in the Park. As other commentators have noted, the Altamont concert led to a sea change in Jagger’s relationship with the press. As the spokesman of the band, here Jagger suggests that the free concert in Hyde Park is intended to bring people together and prove the young fans of popular music can get together peacefully. ‘A concert’s not just to hear the music as it really is. That’s for the studio to do’, he tells us; ‘When you do a concert, they come to see what you’re doing [….] and embrace each other and have a common feeling’. Midway through the performance, Jagger takes pride in noting that not one incident has been reported to the organizers. He asserts that ‘We managed to assure everyone that crowds that attend pop concerts attend because they want to listen to music’. In one of the interviews he gives here, he also suggests that the group don’t intend to annoy passers-by, stating that ‘There’s a lot of people that want to come and hear the music; there’s some people that don’t. To them it’s an extraneous event, like being in a village where there’s a fete. I may not like the fete, but it doesn’t stop me having a drink in the pub. I think English people, on a day like this, won’t be annoyed’. The narrator of the documentary, speaking in refined received pronunciation, also highlights the extent to which at this point in their careers, the Stones brought together disparate youth groups, offering a crossover appeal due to their outsider status: ‘The old mods, the older rockers, the newer hippies. The Stones have at one time or another led them all; now they are pulling them all together in the park’. All of these comments are, in light of what later happened at the Altamont Speedway concert, deeply ironic. Writing about the Maysles’ Gimme Shelter, Garry Mulholland (2010) highlights Jagger’s assertion, in a press conference delivered shortly before the Altamont performance, that the intention of delivering a free concert was to create ‘a sort of microcosmic society […] which sets the example to the rest of America as to how one can behave in large gatherings’ (np). Mulholland states that Gimme Shelter ‘succeeds in doing something to me that I’d never thought possible: it makes me feel sorry for Mick Jagger. Really, really fucking sorry for the guy. ‘Cos we can all have a dark laugh at that “microcosmic society” stuff he says at the press conference [….] [but] [w]ho amongst us hasn’t had a moment of unbelievable hubris, and how lucky we’re not so famous and adored and idolised that those moments lead to people dying? It’s no wonder that Jagger veered abruptly away from “spokesman of a generation” ambitions after Altamont, and has spent the last 40 years concentrating on making money out of the most efficient touring machine in musical history. I mean, what did he get for allowing himself to get carried away with all the flower children jive? In Gimme Shelter he gets a good kicking, frankly, and it’s some testament to him that he signed the necessary papers to allow the film’s release’ (ibid.). Nevertheless, it could be said that undercurrents of violence were there within the Stones’ music for many years: this documentary suggests as much by opening with the band’s performance of ‘Midnight Rambler’, a song inspired by the Boston Strangler and reputedly using part of Albert De Salvo’s confession to the police in its lyrics – although during the actual performance in Hyde Park this song was performed midway through the set. So The Stones in the Park is the beginning of the end of an era, both in terms of the old lineup of the Rolling Stones and the ethos that would lead to one of the most iconic events of the late 1960s. However, the consensus suggests that their performance here, their first live performance in two years, is pretty weak, which is a shame given Jagger’s loaded comment here that ‘We always enjoyed performing. It was our buzz. I always felt that The Beatles [….] it wasn’t their forte. Their forte was making records. Ours was concerts’. John Strausbaugh (2002) suggests that the Hyde Park concert ‘is a great example of how awful the Stones could be onstage. Effectively, they hadn’t played in front of an audience in two years, and they sounded like it’, but between this and 1972 ‘they hammered themselves into a great stage touring unit’ (60). The set includes versions of the following songs: ‘Midnight Rambler’ ‘Satisfaction’ ‘I’m Free’ ‘Eulogy’ ‘I’m Yours, She’s Mine’ ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ ‘Love in Vain’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’
Video
The concert was shot on 16mm film, so here it exhibits a heavy (and natural) grain structure. Detail is strong, and on the whole this is a very satisfying presentation of the documentary. The disc is encoded with the AVC MPEG-4 codec. The Stones in the Park runs for 55:34 mins and is presented in its original broadcast screen ratio of 1.37:1.
Audio
Audio is offered via either the original mono track (two-channel LPCM) or a Dolby Digital 5.1 surround remix. The mono track will be preferably for purists, and whilst the 5.1 surround remix makes good use of sound separation, it has a little less ‘body’ than the mono track. Both tracks are nice and clean.
Extras
The disc includes: - Performances of three extra songs, filmed during the Hyde Park performance but cut from the main documentary, are included as extras: ‘Mercy, Mercy’, ‘Stray Cat Blues’ and ‘No Expectations’ (28:24). A note preceding the clips tells us that the recordings of the last two performances are incomplete. Mute ‘B-roll’ footage of the audience is placed in between the performances of these songs. - A further version of the ‘Mercy, Mercy’ performance is included, this time given a new 5.1 surround sound mix (6:50). - A 1967 episode of World in Action (Granada) which focuses on Jagger’s arrest for the possession of drugs (26:43). - Mick Jagger’s press conference, recorded after he was released from prison in 1967 (4:07). - Silent news footage of the Stones from Border Television, 1964 (2:43). - An interview with Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts from the group’s 1971 tour of France (1:10).
Overall
 Whilst history hasn’t noted the Stones’ free concert in Hyde Park as the best of their live performances, this documentary is absolutely fascinating. It’s real time capsule. Footage of the concert is intercut with shots of the audience and verité-style footage of other goings-on in Hyde Park. It’s a masterclass in editing, the dynamism of the edits matching Jagger’s energy onstage. There are some bizarre moments: the androgynous Jagger, wearing a dress styled to make him look like a Romantic poet, tells the crowd to ‘cool it’ before – in memoriam of Brian Jones – reading from Shelley’s poem about Keats’ death, Adonaïs. It’s a moment that arguably smacks of affectation. Nevertheless, the documentary is an interesting and engaging watch which is topped off by a very good performance of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, the track which formed the focus of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 film One Plus One – a picture which drew parallels between the Stones’ brand of pop music and the social chaos of 1968.
This Blu-ray release shows that 16mm footage can look exceptional on the new HD format. The release also contains a good array of contextual material. References: Coates, Norma, 2006: ‘If anything, blame Woodstock. The Rolling Stones: Altamont, December 6, 1969’. In: Inglis, Ian (ed), 2006: Performance and Popular Music: History, Place and Time. London: Ashgate Publishing: 58-80 Mulholland, Gary, 2010: Popcorn: Fifty Years of Rock ‘n’ Roll Movies. London: Hachette UK Strausbaugh, John, 2002: Rock ‘Til You Drop: The Decline from Rebellion to Nostalgia. London: Verso For more information, please visit the homepage of Network Releasing. This review has been kindly sponsored by: 
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