‘Exhibitionism’ offers satisfaction for fans – Rolling Stones plan to release new album this year

This news has been read 4956 times!

LONDON, April 5, (AP): It’s only rock ‘n’ roll — but it isn’t, is it?

The music business is about commerce as well as entertainment, and the Rolling Stones are one of its biggest multinational firms.

There’s plenty of both art and business in “Exhibitionism,” a vast exhibition that covers 20,000 square feet (1,850 square meters) of London’s Saatchi Gallery with five decades of Stones history.

The more than 500 artifacts, borrowed from the band’s archive and private collectors, include musical instruments, lyrics, sketches, film clips, outfits, posters, album artwork and stage designs. There is even a fake donkey. From entertaining to excess, the Stones rarely do things on a small scale.

“In the end, we had over 25,000 things to choose from,” said Australian rock promoter Tony Cochrane, the show’s executive producer.

“I knew the Rolling Stones had a warehouse where they had kept a lot of their personal artifacts, memorabilia, famous instruments and the like,” he said Monday, a day before the show’s public opening. “But no one could have known how enriched the collection was.”

The result is a treasure trove for fans, who can ogle everything from a marabou-feather cape Mick Jagger wore to sing “Sympathy for the Devil” to a Maton guitar owned by Keith Richards whose neck fell off during the recording of “Gimme Shelter” (the song ends with a barely audible clunk).

Even casual fans will likely be impressed by the exhibition’s attention to detail. It opens with a life-size recreation of an apartment the band members shared in 1962-63 in Chelsea, a then-raffish, now-affluent London neighborhood.

“It was a hovel,” Richards says on a recording, and the recreation captures the peeling wallpaper, mold-stained walls and unmade beds, the dirty dishes, empty beer bottles, broken eggshells and overflowing ashtrays. It even smells.

Exhibition curator Ileen Gallagher said the band members were “pretty astonished” by the result. “Although Mick said it wasn’t quite that messy.’”

Another room features a recreated recording studio, based on Olympic Studios in London, where visitors can watch footage of the band at work and listen to recordings of the Stones and their collaborators talking about the creative process.

The exhibition’s strength is the space it gives to the band’s creative partners, from backing vocalists and session players to the artists and designers who helped forge the Stones’ brand image and iconography.

Logo

A whole room is devoted to John Pasche’s lips-and-tongue Stones logo, inspired by a picture Jagger had seen of the Hindu goddess Kali. Another features the band’s huge-scale set designs, and a third showcases album-cover imagery by artists including 1960s photographer David Bailey and Andy Warhol, who designed the infamous zipper cover for “Sticky Fingers.”

“They’ve always managed to work with artists that have cultural significance,” said Gallagher. “That’s very important — and it’s very astute of them.”

And, of course, there is fashion. The Stones quickly left behind the matching checked jackets of the early 1960s to forge their own style, and the exhibition shows off many of Jagger’s more outrageous fashion statements, including the white dress he wore at the band’s 1969 Hyde Park concert and a pair of glittery 1970s jumpsuits.

Gallagher said the goal was to tell the Stones story “in a way that really brings in the cultural, artistic, historical influences of the band.”

After their dose of culture, most visitors will leave through the gift shop, a reminder that this exhibition is a savvy commercial enterprise. Fans can buy everything from coffee mug for 10 pounds ($14) to a Stones-branded table football game for 4,750 pounds ($6,800). There is even a tie-in with upmarket pottery firm Wedgwood, offering delicate tea cups and saucers carrying the exhibition’s less-than-delicate logo: the Stones lips emblazoned across on a bikini-wearing crotch.

A sign notes: “Over 250 years of history make Wedgwood a truly iconic English brand.” Much like the Stones themselves.

“Exhibitionism” runs to Sept 4, with an international tour planned to follow the London run.

Here are some key things to see at “Exhibitionism,” the British band’s massive exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery that opened Tuesday:

Edith Grove

Shortly after the Stones got together as a band in 1962, founding member Brian Jones moved into an apartment in west London with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and James Phelge. The apartment, at 102 Edith Grove, was notorious for being a mess, with clothes and dirty dishes strewn about the place.

The exhibition has recreated the scene with incredible detail, right down to the old empty bottles, a kitchen sink filled with pots and pans, and plenty of old Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records ready to be heard by an aspiring band that was, at the time, making only a few dollars per gig.

Olympic Studios

Behind a wall of glass is a recreation of the studio where the Rolling Stones recorded their first single, “Come On,” and many of their hits in the 1960s.

There are several instruments scattered around the floor, and a portion of “Sympathy for the Devil” — a 1968 Jean-Luc Godard film that shows the song’s creation — plays on a screen in the background.

Also:

LONDON: The Rolling Stones are planning to release a new album, possibly this year, guitarist Ronnie Wood said Monday.

The British rockers last released a studio album in 2005, but Wood said they have been in the studio and recorded some new material and some blues covers.

“We went in to cut some new songs, which we did,” the 68-year-old Wood said. “But we got on a blues streak. We cut 11 blues in two days.

“They are extremely great cover versions of Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter, among other blues people. But they really sound authentic.”

When asked when the new material would be released, Wood said only: “This year.”

“When we heard them back after not hearing them for a couple of months, we were, ‘Who’s that? It’s you,’” Wood said. “It sounded so authentic.”

The Rolling Stones, which started as a blues band in 1962, just wrapped a tour of Latin America with a free show in Cuba on March 25.

This news has been read 4956 times!