Cocksucker Blues
                                
Director: Robert Frank
Year:  1972
Rating: 6.0
This was a planned documentary about the Rolling Stones during a tour in 1972 to promote Exile on Main Street. It is a behind the scenes intimate graphic no holds bar look at this life on the road. It has a rough look to it - as it switches back and forth from black and white to color - and with no particular narrative focus. Jumbled as hell as it jumps all over the place but that is what makes this film different than any other type of film like this and fascinating on one level and dull on another. Apparently, the directors just left cameras around and asked anyone who felt like it to pick it up and film. People are surprisingly un-camera-shy. A smaller amount of time than you might expect is spent with the Stones - with of course Wyman and Watts barely a blip on the screen - but even Mick and Keith are not in it a lot. There are a few concert songs which are kind of muddled but give you a sense of what the audience was hearing.



Most of the film instead revolves around the many hangers-on, the groupies and staff. A few famous faces flit by - Capote, Cavett, Warhol, Tina Turner, Ahmet Ertegun and Stevie Wonder show up on the tour. The film whether intended or not takes all the romance out of touring. It just looks like hell to me - people just hanging out waiting all the time - playing cards, watching TV, shallow conversations, drugs and sex. Ok drugs and sex I guess but the film even makes that seem unseemly as well.



Which was a problem - there is a lot of drug taking on camera that made it into the documentary - marijuana, cocaine and heroin - and sex - frontal nudity, a flash of a bj, some sex - scenes on the plane of groupies being stripped. Of course this is real. This is how tours went back then. Groupies all over. I wonder if the women involved have seen this or whether their permission was obtained. At the end of the day, the Stones watched it and nixed it. It was embarrassing for them though they actually don't do anything very shocking in it. The film was never released and could only be shown if the director was present in film festivals! Eventually, it was leaked out and is available somewhere. It isn't the easiest film to watch - some may find it offensive, the heroin parts are jaggedly depressing and I need to see frontal nudity of both sexes as much as I do a punch in the eye - but it is honest. I can imagine what didn't get into the documentary if this stuff did.