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Date Posted:08:55:24 05/12/10 Wed Author: Helen Subject: Aftermath: sad girly king Jones was no Sid Barrett
I agree, Brian Jones was no Sid Barrett. Sid Barrett wrote and sang strange, and strangely moving, songs, and he got them put on records, a very imporant thing to do, if you want other people to hear them.
The choice of adjectives used to describe Brian Jones is telling. He's not a golden prince, he's a girly king. (Ick.)Dreamy. Brian makes girls and girly men dreamy, but was Brian Jones dreamy? It's not a word that comes to my mind when I think of him. Perhaps he made a lot of plans for things that he was going to do , but he never did them. There's probably a word for that. Idler. Dabbler. Underachiever. "Interested in the process, not the product"...one kind way to put it. (Isn't he a bit like you and me?)
"The difference between the artist and the neurotic is that the artist completes his work." However, some people complete work, and they are not artists, they are just hacks.
I applaud these people for putting on their play. I suspect they are hacks, not artists, but, not having seen the play, I have insufficient information, to put it mildly.
However, I can say, the review makes me cringe for Brian. What a surprise.
"...There have been far slicker and smoother jukebox shows than “Aftermath,” the blunt, rough and deliciously caustic new storefront musical from writer-director Ronan Marra that tells the sad, true-life story of one Brian Jones — dreamy, girly king of the mystical instrument, a sensitive fashion plate surrounded by harder edged rockers, a brilliant multi-instrumentalist who was dead by the age of 27, and the original leader of a little British rock band called The Rolling Stones.
...The success of the Stones has always flowed from the fusion of a fascinating blend of femme flamboyance (personified by the flashy and ambitious Jagger) and street-cred rock machismo (Richards, who had the guts and chops to diffuse the Jaggereseque). So where did the outsider Jones fit into the hegemonic dominance of rock's yin and yang? Was Jagger mostly horrified at the presence of an intensified version of himself? Did Jones' ambitions of acting and stardom just drive Richards deeper and deeper into the musical essentialism necessary to the Stones' success? Or, like so many rock stories, was it really all about the drugs and the jealousy and the pressure?
Marra has forged clever little scenes that get at all those issues with a series of glancing blows. In a delicious take-down of the inability of the U.S. media to deal with the arrival of rock 'n' roll, you see the Stones squirming through interviews, Jagger secretly loving it all. You see Jones escaping to play sitar with that mystical fellow traveler George Harrison (amusingly played by Andrew Yearick) and you see a girl, Anita Pallenberg (the excellent Simone Roos) driving the boys apart, living the life and paying the price.
“Aftermath” is sufficiently clear-eyed not to paint Jones as the unsung genius, the Stones' equivalent of Syd Barrett (the hero of Tom Stoppard's “Rock 'N' Roll”). But “Aftermath” is really about the formative years of a band that brilliantly exploited cultural collisions and appropriations, driving through cracks, covering bases and rocking on as cultures changed, communism fell and the rewards got bigger and bigger...
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