the magic that's going down

"Bold Moves"

In his autobiography, Life, Keith Richards wrote, of the Exile on Main Street album, "The fact that we stuck to it, saying...if it takes two albums that's what we're going to do -- was a bold move, and totally against all business advice.

...And anyway, if you don't make bold moves, you don't get...anywhere. You've got to push the limits."

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Bold moves

When I read that, thought -- where have I recently heard someone else talking about "bold moves"?  In the Oliver Stone film Nixon, Anthony Hopkins' President Nixon uses that phrase -- several times I think.  "You've got to make bold moves...!"

I don't know if I think in terms of "bold moves" very often.  Maybe that's a "man-thing."  Or maybe it's the imaginative expression-of-ambition by a public-type of person -- Keith Richards and Richard Nixon might seem different, not the same -- but they aren't so different from one another.  Both politicians and rock songwriters / musicians speak to the public at large.  They are public figures.  And -- evidently, making "bold moves" is one of their frames-of-reference.

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[excerpts from Life, by Keith Richards; the two song-inserts (from "Rip This Joint"-Exile on Main Street, 1972), are added by this blog]----------------...When I came back to Jamaica at the end of 1972...the place was blooming.  In Kingston the town was rife with an exotic form of energy....

We were all shacked up at the Terra Nova Hotel....Neither Mick nor I could get visas to the United States at that moment, which partly explains why we were in Jamaica.
("Mister President, Mister Immigration Man,
Let me in, sweetie, to your fair land...")
We went to the American embassy in Kingston.

The ambassador was one of Nixon's boys and he obviously had his orders and also he hated our guts.  And we were just trying to get a visa. 

The minute we walked in, we knew that we weren't going to get it but, even so, we had to listen to this guy's stream of venom.  "People like you..."  We got a lecture.
("Dick and Pat in old D.C.,
Well they're gona hold some sh-t for me...")

Chapter Nine.  We embark on the [American] tour of 1972....We never missed a show, though we came near it.  The guy that opened for us, in almost every city, was Stevie Wonder, and he was barely twenty-two....

Better to hear an impression from another resident writer, Robert Greenfield.  There were so many writers on that tour -- it had become like a political campaign in terms of coverage. 

Our old friend Stanley Booth ["I hoped for better things.  The idealism of the 1969 tour had ended in disaster.  The cynicism of the 1972 tour included Truman Capote...."] retired, disgusted by the new mob of socialites and famous authors who had diluted the once pure patch....But we played on.

Robert Greenfield:

In Norfolk and Charlotte and Knoxville, the set seems to fly from beginning to end, the musicians completely locked into one another and on time, like a championship team in its finest, most fluid moments.  But only people who listen, like Ian Stewart, and the Stones themselves and their supporting musicians, are aware of the magic that's going down.  Everyone else is either worrying about logistics or trying to find a way to get out...

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{Life, written by Keith Richards with James Fox.  Copyright 2010.  Back Bay Books.}

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