Ladies and Gentlemen a New Blog Post

In my last post I mentioned that I had just seen Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones in the theater, and that is, in fact, exactly what I did.

The Rolling Stones are one of my all time favorite bands. They have, in my opinion, put out some of the best rock n’ roll ever made. They have released a great deal of fantastic albums, including one of the best streaks of consecutive flawless albums. The streak I’m referring to is the one that included Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street. Those four albums are nearly untouchable.

Now getting back on track, Ladies and Gentlemen was a recording the Stones made during their 1972 North American tour after the release of Exile on Main Street. Ladies and gentlemen was recorded during four shows in Ft. Worth and Houston Texas. It was shown in theaters but never really released, Bootleg DVDs are pretty common, and I had watched it before it had been re-shown in theaters.

The concert itself is fantastic. In 1972 the Stones were in their prime and it’s apparent in the concert. I remember the first time I watched it a few years ago, on a bootlegged copy I managed to get my hands on. I was literally blown away. The level of energy is astounding. As far as video recordings of live concerts go I think it’s the best I’ve seen. If I was making a top five list of dream concerts I would have liked to attend, I’m pretty sure it would have made it on.

The track list is as follows: Brown Sugar, Bitch, Gimmie Shelter, Dead Flowers, Happy, Tumbling Dice, Love in Vain, Sweet Virgina, You Can’t Always Get What You Want, All Down The Line, Midnight Rambler, Bye Bye Johnny, Rip This Joint, Jumping Jack Flash, and Street Fighting Man. Anyone who is a fan of the Rolling Stones would probably recognize that this track list would make a pretty good best of compilation. Except maybe Bye Bye Johnny, which is a Chuck Berry song, but if you’re a fan of the Stones you’d know they did their fair share of Berry covers on their earlier albums. You’d probably also remember that they were pretty good covers.

Visually the new release looked great, they really brought out a great deal of detail that wasn’t really visible on the bootleg I saw. It really looked great. The audio was also very good, if there was one complaint that I had it was how they fixed up Keith’s vocals on Happy. It sounded to me like they took the vocals from the album recording and spliced them over the video. That was a bit of a disappointment for me because I really like the audio from the bootleg and felt if they have left it, it would have been a more accurate testament to how great the world's greatest rock-n-roll band really was.

This is kind of all over the place and I apologize for that. I’m trying o make it as little like a review as possible just because I feel funny about doing reviews and I’d prefer just to talk about it even if, while talking about it I just say how much I like it.