Saturday, July 24, 2010

Bardot Hotel by Rob K: Best Rolling Stones song in 38 years

So I believed the hype, or was at least curious enough to check it out for myself. I bought the mid-priced version of the remastered Exile On Main Street, the one with the second disc of "unreleased outtakes", because it happens to be one of the most kickass/murky/richly atmospheric rock & roll albums ever made, as well as the last time the Rolling Stones put out something that was more about depth than gesture. I figured that there was a chance that there might be some more goodies in that well.

Reality: some decent groove-oriented tracks, some blah early versions of songs that were much better after they were finished, and several Frankenstein monsters where Jagger takes an old backing track, writes lyrics, overdubs vocals, and mixes said vocals ridiculously loud just to please his own ego. (When you have the kind of voice that sounds best when it's buried underneath a pile of loud guitars, that's hardly an effective strategy or a good listening experience.)

I see a clear agenda coming from rock's most famous London School Of Economics graduate: after decades of mediocrity, people may still love to go to Rolling Stones shows, but nobody cares about new Rolling Stones albums. However, if you shove some new songs onto a deluxe edition of one of your old, beloved classics, you might get more of a reception just because of the context. And some of the new/old songs aren't half bad, but they simply don't belong on the same street as Exile.

Which is a rather roundabout way of introducing another really cool video we shot a while back:

Here's my idea of what a good Exile On Main Street outtake would sound like. Rob K, Mark Abramson, Mary Kelley, and Debbie Hopkins serve up the most sensuously dirty, swampy, sexy midtempo groove imaginable while Rob delivers another hilarious, mystical, profane tall tale. The spirit of Keith is all over this one in the best possible way.

5 comments:

Davis Jones said...

I love Rob Kennedy from the Work Dogs doing his solo work. He shows up in towns across the world, and some provide documentary evidence!

He creates performance spontaneously. He invites and wins stellar musicians with reputations of their own and has amazing results. Without (or with one) rehearsal(s).

The showmanship of Frank Sinatra and the swagger of the Stones....

BTW, The band sitting on the sidelines Rob K mentions? They are the back up group from the last time he visited who include Bond Bergland on guitar (and his son on drums) from Factrix!

That would be Cole Palme's industrial band of the early eighties!

We have one song from that line-up on our youtube.com/earcandleproductions
site if you want to check that out. It is called Escape from New York.

That album (which you can find somewhere online (I am sure of it) chronicles his journey out of NYC, through the country (Bardot happened on this trip) on to Hawaii, where he now happily resides with his wife, Caki.

And ROCKS!

Substance McGravitas said...

That was really good.

J Neo Marvin said...

All right! The Substance McGravitas Seal Of Approval means a lot around here.

Speaking of bloggers, I ought to send this link to Alicublog, since Rob and Roy are old New York scum- rock buddies.

roy edroso said...

Workdogs -- that takes me back. This ensemble is very tasty; hope I get to see them live sometime.

J Neo Marvin said...

By the way, I ought to point out that "Bardot" is the correct spelling, not "Bardo". Rob told us himself. Wanted a little Tibetan-French crossover there, I guess.

The album Davis is referring to above is called The End Of The Earth. Well worth checking out.

We've got more of this up on our Youtube channel.