It’s significant to note that getting one’s
ya ya’s out, for those unfamiliar with the term, has to do with behaving in a
manner of explicit affrontery to, ahem, polite society. Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out was also,
appropriately, the name of a Rolling Stones live album. So it’s fitting
that at the exhibition opening celebrating Ethan Russell’s extravagant,
transporting new photographic tome, LET
IT BLEED: The Rolling Stones, Altamont and the End of the Sixties
(Springboard Press), which traces the band’s infamous 1969 US
Tour, one of the first images one encounters is that of a louche Keith Richards
standing directly beneath a pre-Reaganite anti-drug poster. Just as
telling, a nearby placard describes how Mick Jagger, ever the debauched romantic
to Keith’s loveable punk, opened a show on the tour by reading Shelley to
the applause of thousands of probably wasted rock & roll fans—the Stones
always carefully balancing their prodigious depravity with a certain
English-middle-class elegance. But the exhibit and book can't help but focus on
the epochal tragedy that was the Stones’ free concert at Altamont in San
Francisco, which, with Hell’s Angels running amok, resulted in more than 800
injuries, four fatalities, and, one can argue, the virtual death of all that
drug-fueled ’60s idealism. Russell’s photos, in fact, are a fascinating document
of a band, from stage to studio to luxurious poolside lounging, about to be
launched into mega-stardom, never again to share even the vaguest
of intimacies with their fans. As for the ya ya’s—Keith, to his credit, has
never stopped getting them out.
-Ken Scrudato, with photos by his satanic majesty Adam Pollock
