Songs by the Rolling Stones are used in the soundtracks of so many contemporary film and television productions that any attempt to count them would be a fool’s errand. The group’s role as the stars or principal subjects of documentary films concerned with popular music and culture is far easier to chronicle, however, but no less instructive in terms of demonstrating the central influence of the Stones within the world of motion pictures. It is not an exaggeration to suggest the Rolling Stones represent the most documented musical group in the history of cinema. It is explained, in part, as the result of their unrivalled longevity, but equally for the timing of their emergence on the scene and the ease with which they both invited and adapted to the presence of cameras in their professional lives. Looking at Dominique Tarlé’s still-photography (1971) captured during the band’s exile in France and the recording of Exile on Main Street at Villa Nellcôte, alongside home footage from the period (now available within the Stones in Exile DVD, Stephen Kijak, USA, 2010), it becomes clear that the band was surrounded by motion picture cameras – those of professionals as well as their own – to an ubiquitous degree. Over the course of their career, the Rolling Stones embraced documentary film-making and the opportunities made available through increasingly sophisticated, progressively mobile, synchronized sound film technology in a manner rivalled by few, if any, of their contemporaries. Early on, they understood the power of the moving image and the degree to which it could both secure and perpetuate the mythology of the band, collaborating with a range of innovative filmmakers and artists whose approaches would facilitate such a project of self-creation. However, after public controversies, personal turmoil, and diminishing financial returns, the Rolling Stones would begin to exert an increasing amount of control over their cinematic representation, which results in work through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s that rarely, if ever, demonstrates the innovation and intimacy for which the first decade of their documentary appearances is so celebrated.1

The Rolling Stones are one of the most critically and commercially successful acts in rock music history. The band first rose to prominence during the mid-1960s in the UK, and in the USA as part of what Americans call the “British Invasion” – an explosion of British pop ignited by the UK success of the Beatles in 1963 and their storming of the American shores and charts in early 1964 (see Figure 1.1). The Beatles and the Stones were part of a fab new cohort of mop-topped combos that also included the Animals, the Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Yardbirds, the Zombies, the Kinks, the Who, the Hollies, Herman’s Hermits, and even Freddie and the Dreamers. However much comparisons between the Beatles and the Stones may irritate the faithful of both groups, the similarities and differences can nevertheless be useful. Place of origin matters: The Beatles were not the first pop act from Liverpool to hit it big in London, but they were perhaps the first not to hide their northern roots. Although Brian Jones was from Cheltenham (Gloucestershire), the Stones as a band were, by contrast, from London. Songwriting factors in: John Lennon and Paul McCartney were writing together even before the Beatles were a band, while Mick Jagger and Keith Richards did not start writing until after the Stones had already begun their careers together. Commercial success is also worth noting: The first Beatles No. 1 hit single in the UK was “Please Please Me,” released in March 1963; the first Stones UK No. 1 was “It’s All Over Now,” released in August 1964. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” topped the American charts in late January and February 1964; the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” hit the top of the US charts in the summer of 1965. The most important distinction between the two bands – and the one that probably tells us the most about the stylistic distance between them – has to do with early influences. The Beatles were very much a “song band,” focused mostly on pop songs and their vocal delivery. And while Jagger and Richards were fans of the 1950s rock and roll of Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, they were also students (along with Brian Jones) of American blues. As a result, the Stones’ music is often more “rootsy,” at times placing more emphasis on expression than on polish.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, musicals with Gershwin scores returned to Broadway for the first time in half a century. Four “new” Gershwin musicals – widely distributed across almost a quarter century with none created or produced by the same individuals or organizations – put Gershwin songs (and sometimes his concert music) into brand new or greatly revised narratives. These shows effectively sidestepped the prohibitive commercial challenge of reviving Gershwin’s musical comedies and operettas of the 1920s and 1930s in their original form. No other songwriter of Gershwin’s era has enjoyed a similar pattern of book-show reinvention on the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Broadway stage.

The “new” Gershwin musical begins with My One and Only (1983, 767 performances), a tap dance-laden show set in the 1920s starring Tommy Tune (who directed and choreographed with Thommie Walsh) and Twiggy.

Shortly before the death of his father, George Gershwin told his friend and biographer Isaac Goldberg that the saddest part of knowing that the end was near was the realization “that there is nothing we can do to really help him.” One year later, in the spring of 1933, in accordance with Jewish burial traditions, the Jahrzeit of Morris Gershwin’s death was commemorated with the unveiling of his tombstone at the Westchester Hills Cemetery, a Jewish reform cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Although the Gershwins were not observant Jews, they did participate in certain traditions of their faith.

Shortly before the death of his father, George Gershwin told his friend and biographer Isaac Goldberg that the saddest part of knowing that the end was near was the realization “that there is nothing we can do to really help him.” One year later, in the spring of 1933, in accordance with Jewish burial traditions, the Jahrzeit of Morris Gershwin’s death was commemorated with the unveiling of his tombstone at the Westchester Hills Cemetery, a Jewish reform cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Although the Gershwins were not observant Jews, they did participate in certain traditions of their faith.

More than eight decades after his death, George Gershwin remains an outsize figure in the story of instrumental jazz. “I Got Rhythm” (1930), a popular hit from the musical Girl Crazy, provided an essential template over which swing musicians such as Lester Young etched free-wheeling improvisations during the 1930s. “I Got Rhythm” continued its prominence in the 1940s, when its melody and harmonies were reworked by the likes of Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker. Over time, musicians streamlined Gershwin’s original composition into a standard form known as “rhythm changes.” This thirty-two-bar, AABA chord progression became a template to rival the twelve-bar blues as a jam-session cornerstone. In the 1950s, Gershwin’s compositions spurred explorations of modal jazz, as on Miles Davis’s and Gil Evans’s album-length reinterpretation of the opera Porgy and Bess (1958).

Many of those who lived through the turbulent period sparked off by the revolution in Paris in 1789 such as Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) in England, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) in Germany and Madame de Staël (1766–1817) in France, concurred in their different ways that what was at work was the action of human reason, in a progressive direction – that had been subverted by reaction – and that the new century would renew the progress promised by the initial event.

Gershwin called himself “a man without traditions.” Although most early twentieth-century American composers eschewed tradition, ranging from Dane Rudhyar’s “spiritual dissonance” to Aaron Copland’s exploration of jazz rhythms, Gershwin’s approach was viewed cynically – his concert works labeled as tainted products of an uneducated outsider. Larry Starr crystallizes this disparity most succinctly: “There was simply no preexisting model for the kind of American composer that Gershwin became; he had to invent himself each step of the way, and it stands to reason that his remarkable success in doing so was met with skepticism and resentment by those personally invested in more traditional musical paths.”

Like his other concert music, Gershwin’s four works for piano and orchestra – Rhapsody in Blue (1924), Concerto in F (1925), Second Rhapsody (1932), and “I Got Rhythm” Variations (1934) – showcase a composer who roamed freely across traditional musical boundaries and pioneered stylistic hybrids of lasting enjoyment and value. Taken as a group, they also contribute unique perspectives on the multifaceted artistry of his concert works. Only the concerti were conceived as vehicles for Gershwin the pianist, resulting in extant recordings featuring the composer as a central musical protagonist. These recordings, unlike those of him performing popular song, convey a less familiar image of Gershwin as a score-oriented composer-pianist in the European tradition, at once revealing a pianist assiduously attuned to the notated part while also yielding insights into the composer not accessible through his scores alone. And although Gershwin often related his music generally to the spirit of the modern American metropolis, the concerti comprise his most vivid and varied portraits of New York City in particular.

George Gershwin has been both celebrated and reviled as a hybridizer of musics popular and classical. The tale that he was turned down as a pupil by Stravinsky is a case in point. In this frequently reprinted anecdote, the young American met Stravinsky (or Ravel in some tellings) and asked for lessons. The European master replied by asking Gershwin how much money he made and, after Gershwin named an astronomical sum, quipped: “Then I should take lessons from you!” Whether the story is true or not is irrelevant to the argument here. It is the persistence of the tale and its humor that highlight an ideological fault line between Old World and New, classical and popular, artistic accomplishment and economic success.