Arresting portraits of the Stones in flamboyant youth and slightly mellower maturity.
The Rolling Stones spend 40 years rocking out on stage in this captivating photo album.
Angeledes travelled 153,043 miles, by his reckoning, to attend 132 Stones concerts from 1975 to 2017 and took black-and-white and color photos of the shows. The subjects of these 276 pictures are a constant—singer Mick Jagger, bassist Bill Wyman, and company playing instruments and/or singing on standard-issue stages—so the book’s deeper theme is the effects of time on each of the band members. Some things changed markedly over the decades: The band’s 1970s glam stylings—lamé, bell-bottoms, heavy eyeshadow—gave way to jeans, natural fibers and lighter makeup, and Jagger’s delicate physique became noticeably more muscular in his 60s. Some things didn’t change, including Jagger’s and guitarist Ron Wood’s hair color, which never betrayed any gray, and drummer Charlie Watts’ stony expression and sartorial conservatism. There’s a timelessness to the images in the sense that, even in the ’70s, Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards often looked like old men, creased and haggard as they shrieked into microphones. As the years unspooled, the Stones looked less like raging enfants terribles, and more like relaxed old friends, sneering less and smiling more. Angeledes’ photographs are evocative and atmospheric, and each conveys something of the character of those pictured and the kineticism of their performance antics. There are some indelible images here, including a shot of a youngish Jagger, writhing in a torn, wispy top and print pants, his lips gaping, which is, by itself, worth the price of admission. In between photos, Angeledes relates a few amusing, shaggy dog anecdotes from his Stones-chasing days: getting a snapshot of Richards leaving a court proceeding regarding drug charges; hitchhiking through England after a gig; or getting hassled by security at a Calgary concert (“the guy got really steamed when I tossed that roll of film hoping to ‘lasso’ some portion of his anatomy”). The result is a fine record of the Stones’ stage act and a set of absorbing pictorial studies of the band mates.
Arresting portraits of the Stones in flamboyant youth and slightly mellower maturity.Pub Date: June 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-93-825806-3
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Sea Lion Productions
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Lg. Prt. 0-375-70288-1 This first nonfiction outing from singer/songwriter Buffett (Where Is Joe Merchant?, 1992, etc.) is more food for his Parrothead fans, but there is some fine writing along with the self-revelation. Half autobiography and half travelogue, this volume recounts a trip by Buffett and his family to the Caribbean over one Christmas holiday to celebrate the writer’s 50th birthday. Buffett is a licensed pilot, and his personal weakness is for seaplanes, so it’s primarily in this sort of craft that the family’s journey takes place. While giving beautiful descriptions of the locales to which he travels (including a very attractive portrait of Key West, from which he sets out), Buffett intersperses recollections of his first, short-lived marriage, his experiences in college and avoiding the Vietnam draft, and his brief employment at Billboard magazine’s Nashville bureau before becoming a professional musician. In the meantime, he carries his reader seamlessly through the Cayman Island, Costa Rica, Colombia, the Amazon basin, and Trinidad and Tobago. Buffett shows that he is a keen observer of Latin American culture and also that he can “pass” in these surroundings when he needs to. It’s perhaps on this latter point that this book finds its principal weakness. Buffett tends toward preachiness in addressing his mostly landlubber readers, as when he decries the seeming American inability to learn a second language while most Caribbeans can speak English; elsewhere he attacks “ugly Americans out there making it harder for us more-connected-to-the-local-culture types.” On the other hand, he seems right on the money when he observes that the drug war of the 1980s did little to stop trafficking in the area and that turning wetlands into helicopter pads for drug agents isn’t going to offer any additional help. Both Parrotheads and those with a taste for the Caribbean find something for their palates here. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-43527-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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