C***SUCKER BLUES…..One last Stones note (see below). I rented the Robert Frank film C***Sucker Blues last year and was fully and completely underwhelmed. THIS was what was supposed to be so subversive and shocking? Long, drawn-out, unedited scenes of the Stones lounging around in mansions? A soundless shot of some dude’s butt as he shags a groupie on an airplane? That was about as good as it got; there were a couple of decent live songs but I turned the thing off with about 15 minutes left – I was bored out of my mind. Cinema verite never looked so pretentious and sycophantic. Then just this month I downloaded the legendary, subversive, shocking song “CS Blues” -- the long version -- and have had a similar reaction. It’s definitely not bad, but I can see why it wasn’t officially released – a bluesy, tossed-off throwaway demo, pretty much. There’s got to be some quality lost Stones tracks floating around on bootlegs, since there are only about 50,000 different Stones boots (Clinton Heylin, in his book Bootleg, had the Stones pegged as one of the 3 most bootlegged artitsts of all time – the others were Dylan and The Beatles), but as someone who’s only really checked out the legitimate releases, I don’t really know. Any suggestions?

posted by Jay H. at 10:33 AM