Robert Frank: Cocksucker Blues

imagefilm still (from “Cocksucker Blues”), 1972 © Robert Frank Around the time that The Americans was first released, Robert Frank began to pursue filmmaking. His 1959 short film Pull My Daisy documents the beat generation, and then there’s Sins of Jesus (1961), Keep Busy (1975), and Candy Mountain (1988), to name the more known of the bunch. Among Frank’s contributions to the film world was a commissioned documentary titled Cocksucker Blues (1972), which chronicles The Rolling Stones’ 1972 North American tour in support of their album Exile on Main Street. Shot cinéma vérité, with film lying around so that sometimes anyone could just pick up one of the cameras and shoot, the still unreleased documentary captures backstage debauchery, group sex, the boredom of touring (televisions thrown off of hotel balconies), the Stones nodding out, and assorted tour friends and band members shooting up. Reportedly, Jagger said to Frank:
It’s a fucking good film, Robert, but if it shows in America we’ll never be allowed in the country again.
The band refused to permit its release. Eventually Frank secured the right to screen it five times a year and only if the director – Frank, himself – was physically present for the screening. After this, he would sometimes show one reel of the film and not the three that made up the complete edited footage and eventually became too busy to show it at all. Though there are bootleg copies of the film in its entirety out there, these are incredibly hard to find and it’s near impossible to see the film screened from beginning to end. Cocksucker Blues is now considered to be one of the most important and real accounts of Rock n’ Roll ever documented. Excerpt from Robert Frank interview with BorderCrossings Magazine, 1997:
BC: I’ve got a question about Cocksucker Blues. Those scenes on the plane are pretty wild and it occurs to me that some of them were orchestrated. Were they set up or were you just present as a documentarian? RF: They really didn’t want me to make the film. They enjoyed having us around but not to film. I was with my friend Danny and he had good connections for dope, much better than they had. And at one point I said to him nothing ever happens on these plane trips. It would be nice to have something happen. BC: So you were a director then, not just a shadow? RF: That was one of the few things I said in all the time we spent on the plane. When the film came out the Stones agreed not to cut anything, although I had to cut some things with the officials from the record company. That’s what adds up; your experiences. Making a film is an experience really; more so than going around photographing. Making a film is a real trip.
Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to sit in on full-length screening of this and one other short film by Frank. The footage was borrowed, due to proper connections, from the Harvard Film Archive. My first reaction to the film was an attempt to see where this and The Americans fit together. And I concluded: for the most part they don’t at all. After watching the whole film, I was struck by Frank’s ability to faithfully capture the loneliness and despair of life on the road amidst the glamour of being in a popular rock band. This ‘darkness’ is something that Frank has, throughout his career as a photographer, eloquently captured. I’ll admit, it was actually rather fun to watch the debauchery – but this sense of an underlying melancholy and dashed hopes for the band members and groupies, to me, was the most redeeming aspect of the footage. Bill tells me that he hears word that most of Frank’s films will be coming out in multiple volumes via Steidl as “Robert Frank: The Complete Film Works.” He says to look out for Cocksucker Blues sometime in 2008. I’ll end with this clip of Jagger eating ice cream (keep an eye out for Frank as he takes a moment to film himself): A few more clips here, here, and here.