Month: April 2021

Lucky Ronnie!

Ronnie got the bad news of his second cancer diagnosis in lockdown. He was told he had the aggerssive small-cell variant of the disease. It is so-called as the cancerous cells appear as a different size and shape under a microscope. This type commonly arises in the lung but can affect areas such as the prostate, pancreas, bladder or lymph nodes.

So Ronnie fought it during the last lockdown. And much to our huge relieve, he came out with an all clear!

Dear Ronnie! All our best wishes to you, your family and the whole band! Stay well and take care!

“All I can do is stay positive in my attitude, be strong and fight it, and the rest is up to my higher power,” he said. “I came through with the all-clear.“

BBC.com: “Ronnie Wood: Rolling Stones guitarist given all-clear after second cancer diagnosis”
thesun.co.uk: “SECRET BATTLE Rolling Stones’ Ronnie Wood, 73, reveals he fought cancer for a second time during lockdown”

Ronnie told The Sun that he and the other Stones — Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, both 77, and Charlie Watts, 79 — are “ready to go” with the rest of their No Filter Tour, which began in autumn 2017, once Covid restrictions are lifted.
(thesun.co.uk)

Also in this context, Ronnie will release a new signed, limited-edition print in support of Turn Up For Recovery, the charitable movement established to spread awareness of abstinence-based recovery through music founded by Melia Clapton.

The second album I got to seriously listen to was this: Sticky Fingers!

First was Let It Bleed. That’s the effect of beeing born after 1950, hehehe. But no problem, I quickly cached up on the older albums! 🙂

So tomorrow is the day! Let’s see, what’s behind the 50th Aniversary Collection! Check it out tomorrow…

UPDATE  April23, 2021 – Ok, well, as you can see, that announcement was about some merch added to the Stones’ shop:

And now, they have a remastered version of that iconic album out:

Mick and Niftygateway.com collaborate in a charity project:

An audio-visual collaboration between Mick Jagger & 3D artist Extraweg. Available to buy as a collectible 1 of 1 digital artwork (NFT) via a 24-hour auction on Nifty Gateway. Featuring a custom loop of ‘Eazy Sleazy’ – Mick’s lockdown-inspired track with Dave Grohl.

All profits from this sale will be going to charity, split between Back Up, Music Venue Trust & NIVA. A percentage will also be going to environmental causes.

The auction will take place on Nifty Gateway and begin at 1pm EST / 10am PST / 6pm BST Thursday April 15th. It will run for 24 hours and end at 1pm EST / 10am PST / 6pm BST Friday April 16th.

Head to the Nifty Gateway sales page here.

100% of the proceeds are being divvied up between Music Venue Trust, a UK registered charity which acts to protect, secure and improve grassroots music venues, Back-up, which provides financial support to entertainment technology industry professionals who are seriously ill or injured or to their surviving family members, and National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), an organization working to preserve and nurture the ecosystem of independent live performance venues and promoters throughout the United States. A portion of proceeds will also be going to environmental causes.

Although the No Filter USA/CA Tour 2020 of The Rolling Stones had to be postponed, Mick still expects the band to complete that leg of the tour!

BBC had done an interview with Mick in order to get more details about his new collaboration with Dave Grohl and the new song, Eazy Sleazy.

So 6 Music News’ Matt Everitt speaks to Mick Jagger about his new song with Dave Grohl, life in lockdown and more (like the reason why he did not finish his autobiography). And of course, Mick tells nice details about this song and how it came about, his life during lockdown, still, dring the interview, some remarkable word can be heard when the subject switched to the postponed tour and plans to fulfill the plans for that tour in 2020.

Go check out this interview and hear Mick talk to 6 Music News’ Matt Everitt for yourself – it’s an 11:42 minutes interview really worth listening! 🙂

Mick says, that he definitely would go on tour again if there’s any possibillity; and then adds that, too, they just *have* to, because they had signed (the contracts) to so this tour and tickets were sold – some had given them back, others didn’t – and that they wouldn’t be able to do that exact tour because it wouldn’t be the exact tme, but they (the band) were pretty much committed to do this tour and that he hopes by the end of summer or begin of autumn things would return to be somewhere near normal so that the tour could happen.

Mick:

The Stones will definitely continue and remain committed to completing their American tour that was postponed by Covid. Hopefully things will somewhere near normal by the end of the summer, let’s hope, anyway!

And when asked what’s he preparing for these days, he said:

Improve guitar playing. Practice mouth organ. Do more dancing.
Get ready for tour!!!

Mick’s got a new song out!

Written by Mick (vc, gt), co-produced by Dave Grohl (gt, b, dr), mixed by Mark “Spike” Stent – it’s  real punky rocker with sharp lyrics. ENJOY!

More details and interviews:

Mick Jagger Has Some Thoughts on the Pandemic, Anti-Vaxxers, and Conspiracy Theories (rollingstone.com)

Mick Jagger Shares the Origins of New Dave Grohl Collaboration “Eazy Sleazy”: Stream (consequence.net)

The Rolling Stones tongue is a LOGO at it’s best!

And it’s incredibly stron. Rnking among the top  well known logos of any kind of brand, enterprise, name or product, the tongue logo is the definite trade mark of this rock’n’roll band we like to call the greatest.

And as design i concerned – this one is just one of the genious moments, where time and idea fall into a very maching place.

I am very fond of the interview of John Pasche, who created the logo in 1970, where he tells us first hands about the how’s and who’s when this logo was created. Mick Jagger’s lips were involved, as were the stricing tongue of indian mothergodess Kali. So please have a loog and listen to this 8 minutes talk with John Pasche:

See also: NYtimes.com: How the ‘Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World’ Got Its Logo

In this context, our friend Jason sent in this nice text and picture:

Fifty years ago, the most famous, wordless logo in Rock n Roll was publicly unveiled: the tongue and lips design for the Rolling Stones. By the 1970s, the Stones were anxious to get out from under the thumb of manager/mogul Allen Klein. The band created their own pet label, Rolling Stones Records, for the release of their own albums, initially manufactured and distributed through Atlantic Records. And featured prominently on the actual labels and packaging was this new logo created by graphic artist John Pasche and further stylized by Craig Braun. There is likely no way to tabulate how many products this worldwide icon has been slapped on. As you may know, I have dozens, hundreds of shirts, posters, cups, caps, etc emblazoned with the image inspired by Mick Jagger’s mouth (or possibly the tongue of the Hindu goddess Kali, depends on the story you believe.) The first album released by RS Records in April 1971, was “Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka” a worldbeat recording curated by the late Stones guitarist. The follow-up would be a monumental landmark of Rock history. Stay tuned!

Well, I for one didn’t know about Jason’s collection, but it sounds as if there’s a collection worth to see. I also liked that picture he sent in:

Wicked As It Seems, played live

That’s on 7” red colored vinyl with Wicked As It Seems and Gimme Shelter, played live. Collectors info: that item starts on June 12 as part of the Record Store Day’s drops…

During the easter days, I visited that online exhibition and here’s my review.

Feel free to add your comments below!

What a great museum this is! It’s colorful (I especially liked the entrance!), and has a nice modern swing to it.  They also have some other really interesting exhibitions running at the moment, like the exciting “Memphis Design”, founded in 1980 by Italian designer Ettore Sottsass. So this museum is about cassical, modern  and contempoary art and design.

As I was keen on the Stones stuff, I just entered the exhibition without bearing this in mind. And that would later proof to be of importance to me. But let’s see first things first.

After browsing through the exhibition for about 2 hours, I think I have sen all the stuff that they present there. But still, I had the feeling that I missed something. So there’s a lot of things to watch and the 360° panoramas are a fun to see and use. The moves forward and backward are clearly marked, so you always find the way to go on or go back to somehing you want to investigate a bit further.

As the ticket is cheap, I have nothing to complain here. Of course, I spent more time on things of great interest to me (like the Edith Grove installation and guitars) and went by a bit quicker at others (like the stage-costumes).

What puzzled me after some while was the lack of more information, extra pictures or videos when checking out details. The background music consisted of 4 or 5 songs, starting with SFTD, so that came quickly to an end when I was about 20% through the rooms of the exhibition, it started again at the beginning. I have to admit, that I stopped it from then on and asked myself why they didn’t add more songs to the list. Maybe they didn’t get the rights?

The exhibition displays on two floors of the museum – that of some relief to me when I first thought “Oh my, was it that already?“. So there were 50% more rooms to explore – nice!!

Well, anyway, I rolled on through the rooms. And again, I missed more details, like for instance comments from band members (just think about that nice talk between Mick and Keith about living in Edith Grove) or of some contemporary witnesses. Then, I also discovered some mistake (or flaw): when showing Keith’s guitars, one important item of course is his hand painted black Gibson Les Paul, which also was featured in the exhibition. However, as much as I looked, zoomed back and forth, I could not find any of that color added by Keith on that guitar on display, although the corresponding text told the story. Strange.

I was always happy to find the icons for videos at some (not all) of the exhibits. In most cases, it was the director of the museum, ANDREAS BLÜHM, telling some details in 2 or 3 sentences. Sure enough, there was nothing new for me information wise.

It was not long after this that it slowly dawned on me what my little problem with this exhibition was: I was somehow expecting something like a visualized documentary about the Stones, with loads of videos, additional pictures and spoken texts and more music. Yup, that would have been fantastic.

I am a Stones fan since many years and have some 3.5 meters (~12 feet) of Stones bibliography at home. Thus, my expectations here were simply too high.

You see, the average visitor of the Groningen museum is interested in art and design. That’s exactly the reason why you see a lot of artwork and design in this Stones exhibition – like very nice displays and well documented items showing custumes, covers, the Stones-tounge and stage design. So this exhibition is just more directed to art and design fans than to fans of the band or the music.

In a nutshell, I really enjoyed that exhibition, although I was a little bit disappointed. But that meant to be unfair to this exhibition, that’s what I have learned from this. I encourage you dearly to buy a ticket and have a look for yourself. Two hours will fly by like 20 minutes, I tell ya! 😉

I will definitely visit this exhibition in person as soon as possible!

OK, so far my 2 cts. worth. Did you see it already? What was your experience?

Our dear and beloved Keith just has hit Twitter with a very nice message.

You see Keith in a studio, all in B/W and he’s playing one of his favourite half acoustic Gibson guitars to some backing track with drums and bass of some basic Rock’n’Roll patterns. He’s adding some of his trade mark Chuck Berry riffs to the backing track and you can see, that, like the message of the tweet says, the music is right there in his bones…

Obviously, this outtake is taken from the same sequence as we have already seen in February…