There is no RIP for Fidel Castro in Miami. Just good riddance

BY FABIOLA SANTIAGO

fsantiago@miamiherald.com

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http://www.miamiherald.com/

November 26, 2016

Miamians celebrate the death of Cuba's Fidel Castro in front of Versailles Restaurant in Little Havana.

The tyrant is dead.

I have to say it to believe it.

Al fin.

Finally, the guerrilla leader who rose to power on a promise of social justice but instead separated families, executed and persecuted opponents, and unleashed unprecedented misery on the Cuban people no longer exists on this earth.

I’ve been waiting all my life for this moment.

Finally, the traitor whose Communist rule uprooted me from all I knew and loved and brought me to these shores with a broken heart is gone.

The tyrant is dead.

I have to repeat it to believe it.

I was born the same year the Cuban Revolution triumphed. I was 10 years old when I left Cuba on a Freedom Flight in 1969 with parents who paid dearly for my freedom and future. I’m a grandmother now. That’s how long Fidel Castro has maintained his grip on Cuba, first as self-anointed despot, then after he ceded the throne to his brother, as symbol.

This is an iconic moment. Generations of Cubans, Cuban-Americans and our children in Miami, capital of exiles, are celebrating his physical erasure with an ardor reserved for World Series and NBA titles. Behold this hashtag on social media: #myabuelitosarehavingapartyinheaven.

Don’t judge us harshly. Give us this moment. Our exile is his doing. There’s no RIP from us for the embodiment of evil in our collective and personal histories.

"Satan, he’s all yours," said in Spanish a sign held by a man on Calle Ocho in the dawn hours of Saturday after brother Raúl announced Fidel Castro’s death on Cuban television.

During the six decades of the Castro brothers totalitarian rule, more than two million Cubans fled their beloved island, taking solace in the words of Cuba’s most famous exile, poet and independence hero José Martí: "sin patria, pero sin amo," without a homeland, but without a master.

Countless met their deaths in the attempt to cross the seas and now trekking through the jungles of some seven countries to reach the U.S. border. One of Castro’s most heinous crimes was the massacre of 41 men, women and children attempting to flee Cuba on a tugboat on July 13, 1994. Cuban authorities sprayed the vessel with water hoses, rammed and sank it. This is not something I read. I interviewed survivors at the Guantanamo Cuban refugee camps months later. The Cuban Coast Guard refused to rescue the drowning, they told me.

There were so many other crimes and human rights abuses, largely ignored or benignly viewed by a world that gave Castro the benefit of the doubt, and only slapped him on the wrist occasionally at some forums like the United Nations.

Fidel Castro, myth and legend to the international left, has died without being brought to justice for his crimes against his people — the passing of the torch and title of president to his brother in 2006 challenged only by brave dissidents who are beaten and detained daily. The Castros have installed their children and grandchildren in government roles, an indication they plan to sustain the family dynasty beyond Raúl’s promised retirement in 2018.

There’s joy, excitement — and hope — at the news of Fidel Castro’s death at 90. I’m skeptical. Castro didn’t govern alone. He had accomplices. They’re mourning him today, planning to bury his ashes near Martí’s resting place in Santiago de Cuba, an honor he doesn’t deserve.

Still, it won’t be the same without the patriarch. With his death, it feels as if an evil curse — the heaviest of weights — has been lifted on a nation whose children are scattered all over the world.

The bogeyman is gone.

At the break of morning, the streets of Havana were deserted. People were told to stay inside, refrain from playing music, close their doors.

Miami never went to sleep, some of the arteries that run through its Cuban heart closed so that people could express the accumulation of 58 years of loss and separation, of disillusionment and never-ending hope.

Cuba sí, Castro no more.

There will be no farewell comandante from us, only a good riddance. 　

Fabiola Santiago: fsantiago@miamiherald.com, @fabiolasantiago

READ MORE: The death of Fidel Castro

READ MORE: Exiles pour onto Miami streets

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/fabiola-santiago/article117216323.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/fabiola-santiago/article117216323.html#storylink=cpy

When Did the Left Know the Truth about Cuba, and Why Does it Still Support the Communist Regime?

BY RON RADOSH

https://pjmedia.com/

November 28, 2016

Much has already been written about Fidel Castro’s passing, but I would like to add a few thoughts in the days left before his funeral.  In the summer of 1973, I experienced life under Castro when I went on an extended trip to the island organized by the pro-Castro Center for Cuban Studies.  Traveling around the country, I observed close-up what it was like to live in the Communist state and I didn’t like what I saw. Afterwards, I wrote about it for the left-wing magazine Liberation, which consequently was bombarded with angry letters calling me a traitor to the Left. Later, I included the experience in my memoir describing how it contributed to my  political transformation.

Like many others of my generation, including my colleague Roger L. Simon, I was at first mesmerized by Castro’s seductive allure and  promises of creating a Cuba freed from authoritarian and corrupt rule.  I was hopeful when he said that Cuba would have free elections and would be a non-Communist state that would work to bring equality to Cuba’s people.

Many members of the New Left transferred their parents’ idolization of Joseph Stalin to Fidel Castro, whom they saw as the premier revolutionary hero of their generation. They believed that Fidel, unlike Stalin, would bring a humanist revolution to Cuba, in contrast to the failures of the old Cuban Communist Party. Like the Columbia University best-selling sociologist C. Wright Mills, they believed, as Mills wrote, “I am for the Cuban revolution. I do not worry about it. I worry for it and with it.”

However, these admirers of Castro’s regime could have seen his true colors right from the start when scores of so-called followers of Batista were executed by firing squads without trial. Castro rationalized it by saying they deserved such a fate because they had worked for Batista’s authoritarian regime. But soon afterwards, other dissenters and opponents of the turn towards socialism became political prisoners and were regularly tortured to make them confess to imaginary crimes, or simply because Castro saw torture as justified extra punishment.

One follower of Castro was shocked. Carlos Franqui operated Castro’s radio station “Radio Rebelde” from the Sierra Maestra, where Castro and his armed bands were fighting Batista. In his memoir of the revolutionary struggle, Family Portrait With Fidel (1984),  Franqui, then the editor of the official revolutionary newspaper Revolucion, noted how surprised he was to hear reports of the torture of counterrevolutionary suspects. Bringing news of this to  Fidel  Castro, Franqui quickly learned that the torture had the leader's blessings.  When Mr. Franqui raised the issue of the moral degradation torture implies, Castro told him that it ''annihilates the enemy'' and hence was necessary. Eventually Franqui left Cuba and moved first to Italy and later to Puerto Rico, where he became one of the leading Cuban opponents of the regime he once served.

In Stalin’s days, Western true believers later made the excuse that they did not know the truth at the time and only learned of it when Nikita Khrushchev gave his famous speech about Stalin’s crimes in 1956. The New Left had no such excuse about Cuba. They simply ignored whatever evidence was presented.

Case in point. When Armando Valladares’s book about his years of torture and imprisonment in Cuba was published in 1986, the late Stalinist journalist Alexander Cockburn waged a campaign against Valladares in the pages of The Village Voice. He accused Valladares of lying about the conditions and his treatment in a Cuban jail, and repeated Cuban allegations that Valladares was “a police officer in the Batista regime.”  Cockburn added, for good measure, that “there is no institutionalized torture in Cuba.” By that late date, Cockburn had no excuse whatsoever for writing those words.

Neither did the left-wing press. In his PJ Media column, Roger Kimball writes about the love affair in those days by Nation magazine writers for Fidel. It’s still going on. On Nov. 26, the magazine promptly ran leftist historian Greg Grandin’s ode to the butcher of Cuba which extolled him as a figure of the “Enlightenment.”

Grandin rationalizes the totalitarian control of Cuba's people by the Castro brothers as necessary, asking whether “the Cuban Revolution would have survived, had Castro not shut down civil society, and if that survival was worth it.” Answering his own question, Grandin points to the regime’s claim about the great advances in health care, literacy, and “beating back white supremacy in Africa.” I assume he is referring to the Cuban military intervention in Angola in 1974, fought on behalf of the far-left MPLA, and again in 1988, when thousands of Cuban troops fought against the anti-Communist UNITA. All of their aid was described by the Cuban regime as “humanitarian,” and not military. Grandin fails to mention how Cuba was doing the Soviets' bidding in an attempt to create Soviet client states in Africa.

But Grandin is not completely blind, and he worries if all the “repression” carried out by Castro “was for naught,” since there is still racial and economic inequality, sex tourism, and corruption. Of course, he attributes these continuing problems to the U.S. embargo, not to the failed collectivist utopia that Castro tried to impose. He shows no concern for the perpetuation of oppression by Raul Castro. Rather, he is worried about the coming presidency of Donald Trump, which he refers to as  “a new darkness.”

The question now is how the United States will use Fidel Castro’s death to advance the Cuban transition to democracy and in time help to bring about the end of the oppressive regime.  How much of the modest and token reforms that have taken place in Cuba can be expanded? What measures instituted by President Barack Obama, made through executive action, can be modified or rescinded, without damage to the innocent and brave people of Cuba? I wish President-elect Trump, whose statement after Castro’s passing shows he understands fully the horrendous nature of the Castro regime, success in bringing about these ends.

WHY ALL THAT DANCING IN THE STREETS OF MIAMI?

The brutal legacy of Fidel Castro you won't hear about in the mainstream media.

Humberto Fontova

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

Novemebr 29, 2016

Fidel Castro jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror. He murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered Germans during his first six. 

Fidel Castro shattered — through mass-executions, mass-jailings, mass larceny and exile — virtually every family on the island of Cuba. Many opponents of the Castro regime qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period three times as long in Fidel Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s Gulag.

Fidel Castro and Che Guevara beat ISIS to the game by over half a century. As early as January 1959 they were filming their murders for the media-shock value. 

Fidel Castro also came closest of anyone in history to (wantonly) starting a worldwide nuclear war. 

In the above process Fidel Castro converted a highly-civilized nation with a higher standard of living than much of Europe and swamped with immigrants into a slum/sewer ravaged by tropical diseases and with  the highest suicide rate in the Western hemisphere.

Over TWENTY TIMES as many people (and counting) have died trying to escape Castro’s Cuba as died trying to escape East Germany. Yet prior to Castroism Cuba received more immigrants per-capita than almost any nation on earth—more than the U.S. did including the Ellis Island years, in fact.   

Fidel Castro helped train and fund practically every terror group on earth, from the Weathermen to Puerto Rico’sMacheteros, from Argentina’s Montoneros, to Colombia’s FARC, from the Black Panthers to the IRA and from the PLO to AL Fatah.

Would anyone guess any of the above from reading or listening to the mainstream media recently?

In fact, from their reactions, all that dancing in the streets of Miami’s Little Havana this week-end seems to strike some talking heads as odd, if not downright unseemly. 

But prior to the big news this week-end many of those same celebrants could be found with itchy noses and red-rimmed eyes ambling amidst long rows of white crosses in Miami’s Cuban Memorial.  It’s a mini-Arlington cemetery of sorts, in honor of Fidel Castro’s murder victims.

The tombs are symbolic, however. Most of the bodies still lie in mass graves dug by bulldozers on the orders of the man whose family President Obama just consoled with an official note of condolence.  

Some of those future celebrants were often found kneeling at the Cuban Memorial, others walking slowly, looking for a name. You might remember a similar scene from the opening frames of “Saving Private Ryan.” Many clutched rosaries. Many of the ladies would be pressing their faces into the breast of a young relative who drove them there, a relative who wrapped his arms around her spastically heaving shoulders. 

Try as he might not to cry himself, this relative usually found that the sobs wracking his mother, grandmother or aunt were contagious. Yet he was often too young to remember the young face of his martyred father, grandfather, uncle, cousin -or even aunt, mother grandmother– the name they just recognized on the white cross.

“Fusilado” (firing squad execution) it says below the name– one word, but for most visitors to the Cuban Memorial a word loaded with traumatizing flashbacks.

On Christmas Eve 1961, Juana Diaz Figueroa spat in the face of the Castroite executioners who were binding and gagging her. They’d found her guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits.” (Castro and Che’s term for Cuban peasants who took up arms to fight their theft of their land to create Stalinist kolkhozes.) Farm collectivization was no more voluntary in Cuba than in the Ukraine. And Cuba’s kulaks had guns–at first anyway. Then the Kennedy-Khrushchev pact left them defenseless against Soviet tanks, helicopters and flame-throwers. When the blast from Castro’s firing squad demolished Juana Diaz’ face and torso, she was six months pregnant.

Rigoberto Hernandez was 17 when Castro’s prison guards dragged him from his jail cell, jerked his head back to gag him and started dragging him to the stake. Little “Rigo” pleaded his innocence to the very bloody end. But his pleas were garbled and difficult to understand. His struggles while being gagged and bound to the stake were also awkward. The boy had been a janitor in a Havana high school and was mentally retarded. His single mother had pleaded his case with hysterical sobs. She had begged, beseeched and finally proven to his “prosecutors” that it was a case of mistaken identity. Her only son, a boy in such a condition, couldn’t possibly have been “a CIA agent planting bombs.”

“Fuego!” and the firing squad volley riddled Rigo’s little bent body as he moaned and struggled awkwardly against his bounds, blindfold and gag. “We execute from Revolutionary conviction!” sneered the man whose peaceful death in bed President Obama seems to mourn.

Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when the bullets from the firing squad shattered his body. His twin brother and father collapsed beside Carlos from the same volley. All had resisted Castro’s theft of their humble family farm.

According to the scholars and researchers at the Cuba Archive, the Castro regime’s total death toll–from torture, prison beatings, firing squads, machine gunning of escapees, drownings, etc.–approaches 100,000. Cuba’s population in 1960 was 6.4 million. According to the human rights group Freedom House, 500,000 Cubans (young and old, male and female) have passed through Castro’s prison and forced-labor camps. This puts Fidel Castro political incarceration rate right up there with his hero Stalin’s.

It’s not enough that liberals refuse to acknowledge any justification for these Miami celebrations. No, on top of that here’s the type of thing the celebrants are accustomed to hearing from the media and famous Democrats:  

“Viva Fidel! Viva Che!” (Two-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination Jesse Jackson, bellowed while arm in arm with Fidel Castro himself in 1984.)

"Fidel Castro is very shy and sensitive, I frankly like him and regard him as a friend." (Democratic presidential candidate, Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, and “Conscience of the Democratic party,” George Mc Govern.)

“Fidel Castro first and foremost is and always has been a committed egalitarian. He wanted a system that provided the basic needs to all Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal education…We greeted each other as old friends.”  (Former President of the United States and official "Elder Statesman” of the Democratic party, Jimmy Carter.)

“Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly–even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!” (NBC’s Andrea Mitchell.)

“Fidel Castro could have been Cuba’s Elvis!” (Dan Rather)

"Castro's personal magnetism is still powerful, his presence is still commanding. Cuba has very high literacy, and Castro has brought great health care to his country." (Barbara Walters.)

 “Fidel Castro is one helluva guy!” (CNN founder Ted Turner.)

 Tags: Castro, Communist Cuba, Miami

Fidel Castro: My Generation's Disgrace Finally Died

BY ROGER L SIMON

https://pjmedia.com/

November 26, 2016

Castro waves to crowds outside the Statler Hotel in New York City.

IMAGE: JOHN DUPREY/NY DAILY NEWS VIA GETTY IMAGES

In April 1959, when I was all of fifteen and a student at Scarsdale High, I made the trek with by buddies from the 'burbs to the city to see our new hero Fidel Castro speak in Central Park.

It's fifty-seven years ago now, but I still remember that night well. How could I forget? It was high drama the likes of which I had never seen, people streaming in from all over New York, klieg lights splayed across Sheep Meadow. The Daily News reported thirty-five thousand people squeezed into the park.

I couldn't get up that close, but close enough to see Fidel in his familiar beard and fatigues, gesticulating with his hand in the air, speaking in Spanish while the crowd around me, largely Dominicans, screamed "Viva! Viva!" and "Viva la revoluçion!" with a fervor not even given, later, the Beatles or the Stones. They wanted their country liberated, just as Castro had supposedly freed Cuba from the dastardly Batista.

I am loath to admit it now, but I remember shouting "Viva!"—though somewhat tentatively—myself. I didn't speak much Spanish then.

What I was watching, indeed participating in, was my generation being seduced. I didn't know it at the time. Almost no one did. But a mass seduction is what it was happening that would last to the present day, metaphorically and actually. It was an early version of the events of 1968.

Fidel was seducing all of us and he was seducing himself, convincing himself of his own importance, of his own greatness, a greatness and importance that led him to murder his old compadres Soviet-style, imprison gays, and impoverish his people for decades (although not himself—he ended up a billionaire) in a country that amounted to a giant jail for some bizarre and truly sick Marxist vision of the good.

Still, over the years, even with reports of what was happening, even while half of Cuba seemed to be fleeing to Florida, it was hard for my generation to escape his allure and that of his sadistic, legendary, glamorous partner-in-crime, El Ché, Comandante Ernesto Guevara, subject of so many dishonest songs and movies.

That allure, although somewhat diminished, had continued for me up until 1979 when I visited Cuba as a delegate to the First Festival of the New Latin American Cinema and got to hobnob with the likes of Nobelist Gabriel Garcia Márquez—himself a pal of Fidel's, able to drive a swanky new Mercedes on an island filled with aging DeSotos and live in a posh finca while the proles, under surveillance by the secret police, subsisted in decaying coldwater flats with no plumbing. And with Régis Debray—the French "philosopher" who chronicled Ché's exploits in the Bolivian mountains and became the most famous journalist of "the revolution."

I should have been impressed. And maybe I was in a way, but not for long, because the truth was there in front of me—the reality of Cuba itself. It was—you could find no other words—a communist shithole.

After a week, I was desperate to get out, as were the mostly leftist filmmakers who were with me, one of them even a member of the sainted "Hollywood Ten." The problem was, getting out wasn't so easy. We were stuck for ten hours at Havana Airport waiting for our semi-illegal charter flight from Miami to be allowed to land. I don't have to tell you that I and the rest of the group were sweating—and not just from the humid weather. Suppose we had to spend the rest of our lives in the "Marxist paradise"?

Finally, our plane was allowed to land, due to a special dispensation from Raul Castro, Fidel's tyrant brother now in control of the island, and we departed. In some ways, I date the end of my romance with the left from that experience, although the seduction— call it the Seduction of Fidel—was not completely over for me. It took years fully to dwindle away, finally to be extinguished on September 11, 2001.

Needless to say, the Seduction of Fidel was never fully extinguished for the current president of the United States. Indeed, I suspect it still burns relatively brightly for Barack Obama.

We can see this in his statement on Castro's death. No mention of the despotism under which the Cuban people lived or their suffering. Obama refers instead to decades of "political differences," as if the brutal totalitarian oppression of the Cubans was merely a policy disagreement.

On the other hand, our President-elect Trump writes "Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights."

Tell it like it is, Donald. What a difference! What an improvement!

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media.  His latest book is I Know Best:  How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If  It Hasn't Already.

Fidel Castro and dead utopianism

By George F. Will

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/

November 26, 2016

Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev (TASS via AP)

With the end of Fidel Castro’s nasty life Friday, we can hope, if not reasonably expect, to have seen the last of charismatic totalitarians worshiped by political pilgrims from open societies. Experience suggests there will always be tyranny tourists in flight from what they consider the boring banality of bourgeois society and eager for the excitement of sojourns in “progressive” despotisms that they are free to admire and then leave.

During the 1930s, there were many apologists for Joseph Stalin’s brutalities, which he committed in the name of building a workers’ paradise fit for an improved humanity. The apologists complacently said, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” To which George Orwell acidly replied: “Where’s the omelet?” With Castro, the problem was lemonade.

Soon after Castro seized power in 1959, Jean-Paul Sartre, the French intellectual whose Stalinist politics were as grotesque as his philosophy was opaque, left Les Deux Magots cafe in Paris to visit Cuba. During a drive, he and Castro stopped at a roadside stand. They were served warm lemonade, which Castro heatedly said “reveals a lack of revolutionary consciousness.” The waitress shrugged, saying the refrigerator was broken. Castro “growled” (Sartre’s approving description): “Tell your people in charge that if they don’t take care of their problems, they will have problems with me.” Sartre swooned:

“This was the first time I understood — still quite vaguely — what I called ‘direct democracy.’ Between the waitress and Castro, an immediate secret understanding was established. She let it be seen by her tone, her smiles, by a shrug of the shoulders, that she was without illusion. And the prime minister . . . in expressing himself before her without circumlocution, calmly invited her to join the rebellion.”

Another political innovator, Benito Mussolini, called his regime “ennobled democracy,” and as the American columnist Murray Kempton mordantly noted in 1982, photographs of Castro “cutting sugar cane evoke the bare-chested Mussolini plunged into the battle for wheat.” Castro’s direct democracy was parsimonious regarding elections but permissive of shrugs. It did, however, forbid “acts of public destruction,” meaning criticism of communism.

This charge condemned Armando Valladares, then 23, to 22 years in Castro’s prisons. Stalin’s terror was too high a price to pay for a great novel, but at least the world got from it Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon.” And although Castro’s regime, saturated with sadism, should never have existed, because of it the world got Valladares’s testament to human endurance, his prison memoir “Against All Hope.” Prison food was watery soup laced with glass, or dead rats, or cows’ intestines filled with feces, and Castro’s agents had special uses for the ditch filled with the sewage from 8,000 people.

On April 15, 1959, 15 weeks after capturing Havana, Castro, then 32, landed in Washington at what is now Reagan National Airport. He had been in the United States in 1948, when he studied English and bought a Lincoln. This time, on April 16, in a concession to bourgeois expectations, he dispatched an aide to buy a comb and toothbrush. His connections to communism? “None,” he said. He endorsed a free press as “the first enemy of dictatorship,” and said free elections were coming soon. Then he was off to a Princeton seminar and a lecture in the chapel at Lawrenceville prep school, well received at both places.

By July red stars were being painted on Cuban military vehicles. Three years later, Soviet ballistic missiles were arriving. A year after that, a Castro admirer murdered the U.S. president whose administration had been interested in, indeed almost obsessed with, removing Castro.

U.S. flings at “regime change” in distant lands have had, to say no more, uneven results, but the most spectacular futility has been 90 miles from Florida. Castro was the object of various and sometimes unhinged U.S. attempts to remove him. After the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Kennedy administration doubled down with Operation Mongoose, which included harebrained assassination plots and a plan skeptics called “elimination by illumination” — having a U.S. submarine surface in Havana harbor and fire star shells into the night sky to convince Catholic Cubans that the Second Coming had come, causing them to rebel against Castro the anti-Christ. Nevertheless, Castro ruled Cuba during 11 U.S. presidencies and longer than the Soviet Union ruled Eastern Europe.

Socialism is bountiful only of slogans, and a Castro favorite was “socialism or death.” The latter came to him decades after the former had made Cuba into a gray museum for a dead utopianism.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

Carlos Eire: Farewell to Cuba’s brutal Big Brother

Armando Valladares: I was a prisoner of Castro’s regime. Obama’s visit to Cuba is a mistake.

Eric Zurita: Fidel Castro’s death won’t reshape Cuba. Trump’s presidency might.

Rolling Stones pay tribute to their Chicago blues school on 'Blue & Lonesome'

Greg Kot

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/

November 25, 2016

As the final song on the new Rolling Stones album ends, an escalating slow-burn on Willie Dixon's "I Can't Quit You Baby," Charlie Watts' drums rumble amid the buzz and hum of the amplifiers. A raspy voice exults during the fade — "Yeah, boys!" — followed by laughter.

In the late stages of a career that spans more than 50 years, the Stones have just about run out of surprises. But the Chicago blues they studied as kids growing up in London will always be with them, and it's only fitting that the forthcoming "Blue & Lonesome" (Interscope), due out Dec. 2, is dedicated to that lifelong devotion. It marks the first Stones studio album in 11 years, and features all cover versions of songs to which the band owes its very existence.

In October 1961, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger bumped into one another at a train station outside London. Jagger had a collection of Chess Records albums imported from Chicago under his arm, and Richards was intrigued that this casual acquaintance turned out to be a blues acolyte just like he was. Less than a year later they played their first gig together at the Marquee Club in London as the Rollin' Stones, named after a Muddy Waters' song. They were students as much as musicians.

Jagger was learning how to play blues harp by religiously listening to the Chess albums of Little Walter, and Richards and his roommate, Stones guitarist Brian Jones, would huddle next to a speaker of their cheap little record player and listen to the recordings of Waters or Jimmy Reed. They were fascinated at how the bands of these Chicago blues giants often sounded like a single instrument. As Richards wrote in his 2010 autobiography, "Life": "You're looking to distort things, basically. … the sounds just melt into one another and you've got that beat behind it, and the rest of it just has to squirm and roll its way through."

In the beginning, the Stones wanted nothing more than to be a blues band. And for a long time, they were — albeit one that realized it could never, ever be as good as the musicians who schooled them from overseas. Dixon once told the Tribune that he remembered playing Piccadilly Square in London during the early '60s. The callow Jagger, Richards and Jones were in the audience. "(These kids would) tell us, 'Look, man, we got a little group and we want to do some of your songs,'" Dixon said. "We put a lot of songs on tape for them ... and then some years later, somebody played me a record of (Dixon's classic) 'Little Red Rooster' and told me some fellows called the Rolling Stones had done that song out of England. ... (But) back then they were just little kids, no hair on their faces or anything, so how would I remember them?"

The Stones early albums were stuffed with cover versions of American blues and soul music, and as soon as the quintet became popular enough to tour America in the late spring of 1964, they beelined to Chess studios in Chicago for a two-day recording session. There they were greeted by the mighty Waters himself, who, according to the oft-repeated story, was slapping a coat of paint on the studio walls. Waters had no idea who these long-haired kids were, but helped them unload their gear anyway. While there, the Stones recorded the master's "I Can't Be Satisfied," which appeared on their second album, "Rolling Stones No. 2," while Dixon's "Little Red Rooster" wound up on its U.K. companion, "Rolling Stones Now!"

The Stones early recordings — newly reissued on the boxed set "The Rolling Stones in Mono" (ABKCO) — affirm how much the Stones borrowed from the Chicago blues: the songs, the mix of jazzy swing and backstreet menace, even the recording engineer, Ron Malo. All told the Stones recorded more than two dozen songs in three visits to Chess studios in 1964-65, which they sprinkled across several albums. Long afterward, the Stones continued to record blues covers and perform them in concert. But they'd never devoted an entire album to their obsession — until now.

"Blue and Lonesome" came out of a three-day session in London last December after the recording of a new studio album of Stones originals stalled. The Stones decided to warm up with the music they know best and ended up recording an entire album of songs that are part of their musical DNA. The music was largely cut live on the floor of Mark Knopfler's British Grove Studios in London with producer Don Was, and its unvarnished tone approaches the feel of the tracks the band cut at Chess 52 years ago.

In the intervening decades, the Stones have learned a few things about an art form created by Southern blacks who migrated North in the middle of the last century. Jagger was often self-deprecating about his blues-inspired vocals, fully aware that there was no way he could possibly match the intensity or experience of the singers whose personal hardships informed the way they performed. As a result, he would often put his own outlandish spin on his blues-inspired songs, exaggerating and mugging, especially in concert. The Stones were never as academic or self-serious as some of the other white British blues bands, led by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies.

But the Jagger on "Blue & Lonesome" is 73, three years older than Waters was when he died in 1983, and Richards is 72, Watts 75 and guitarist Ronnie Wood 69. In a sense, the Stones have become their elders, and their seasoning as a first-rate blues band is evident.

What's more, the new album upends the Jagger narrative that has taken hold in recent decades. The singer has been cast as the pin cushion for a lot of the Stones' musical indifference since the 1970s watershed "Some Girls" — he was ridiculed by Richards in "Life," and is generally seen as the Stones' preening celebrity and resident businessman, in opposition to the more "authentic" Richards, the quintessential rock 'n' roll outlaw. If so, "Blue & Lonesome" is Jagger's vindication.

When Jagger sings "Baby, please come on home to me" on Little Walter's title song, his voice breaks on "please" — a yowl from the gut that a more precious singer might've wanted to retake. He shades the lines on Magic Sam's "All of Your Love" with eroticism or wistfulness in the way he stretches or compresses the syllables. For Lightnin' Slim's "Hoo Doo Blues" he brings a more subdued, sinister tone to the thick, swampy groove. His harp playing turns downright nasty — that's the only way to describe the drone he blasts out over a relentless Watts drum groove on another Little Walter track, "Hate to See You Go."

As for the band itself, it lives by Richards' law of the blues: "you're looking to distort things … the sounds just melt into one another and you've got that beat behind it." Watts' crash cymbal ratchets up the chaos on Howlin' Wolf's unforgiving "Commit a Crime" — it's the kind of song played in a bar where everyone is carrying a switchblade for their own protection. "Just Your Fool" turns the mix of Jagger's harp and the rhythm guitars of Wood and Richards into a freight train, ornamented by Chuck Leavell's piano fills, straight out of the Otis Spann playbook.

This is not a pretty or comforting album. Even Eric Clapton gets in the spirit. Clapton's polished takes on his beloved blues have made most of his recent albums forgettable, but his solo on Little Johnny Taylor's "Everybody Knows About My Good Thing" turns the song's air of paranoia into a five-alarm fire. The arrangement drops off a cliff, and Jagger re-enters. Like the savvy blues disciple he is, he knows not to try to top Clapton's moment. So instead he underplays it, growling and purring over the subtle organ and piano backdrop.

"Call me a plumber, darlin', there must be a leak in my drain," he sings. You can almost see his eyes rolling at the delicious double entendre in the Miles Grayson-Lermon Horton composition. It's the kind of performance that testifies eloquently to the mystery and permanence of an art form that will outlast its makers and the bands like the Stones who not only embraced and learned from it, but endured long enough to eventually embody it themselves.

The Rolling Stones: Blue and Lonesome review – more alive than they've sounded for years

Alexis Petridis

https://www.theguardian.com/music/

24 November 2016

Last week, a US journalist interviewing the Rolling Stones offered up a 21st-century spin on the old ‘Can white men sing the blues?’ argument. Wasn’t the Stones’ early repertoire, heavy on the songs of Willie Dixon, Jimmy Reed, Slim Harpo, Muddy Waters et al, just an example of cultural appropriation, he asked? You might charitably describe Keith Richards’ response as a little confused. At one juncture, he appeared to suggest that the blues was actually “quite Jewish”, but the bulk of the answer consisted of Richards insisting that he was, in fact, black: “Ask any of the brothers.” 

Tireless on your behalf, I’ve researched this thoroughly and can exclusively reveal that he isn’t. But equally, the charge of cultural appropriation feels deeply unfair. The biggest band of the British blues boom were always among the loudest cheerleaders for the real deal. They never pulled the grim Led Zeppelin trick of claiming they’d written songs they’d clearly swiped from old blues artists, never missed an opportunity to take BB King on tour or to try to educate their audience about the artists they were paying homage to. “I think it’s about time you shut up and we had Howlin’ Wolf on stage,” suggested Brian Jones to the presenter of US TV show Shindig! in 1965, after the Stones had agreed to appear only if the show also booked Wolf and Son House, a ballsy move in a country where the Voting Rights Act hadn’t yet been passed.

The issue is being raised again because, for the first time in their career, the Rolling Stones have elected to release an album consisting entirely of blues covers. A sceptical voice might suggest it finally confirms what their last album, 2005’s lacklustre A Bigger Bang strongly hinted at: that, as songwriters at least, the Jagger/Richards partnership is out of juice. A less cynical observer’s first thought might be to wonder why they didn’t do something like this sooner: the opening cover of Buddy Johnson’s I’m Just Your Fool comes barreling out of the speakers, sounding more raw and vibrant than the Stones have done in years.

Their second thought might be that Blue and Lonesome sounds surprisingly like Mick Jagger’s show, which rather goes against the commonly held belief that Keith Richards is the band’s R&B heart and Jagger is a fashion-conscious dilettante who’d have the Stones recording tropical house with Kungs and Seeb if he thought it would make them seem relevant. You can see how that notion came about, but while there are fantastic contributions from Richards and Ronnie Wood – the grumbling twin guitars of Little Rain; the taut interplay that powers Hate to See You Go; and, especially, the woozy, chaotic backdrop they conjure on a version of Lightning Slim’s Hoo Doo Blues – it’s Jagger’s voice and harmonica that really drive Blue and Lonesome. At his least inspired, Jagger can sound like a man who isn’t singing so much as rearranging a well-worn series of mannerisms and tics, but here his vocals are extremely powerful and genuinely affecting, as if he’s digging deep within himself to find the emotions to fit the material. You expect him to be able to summon up the kind of swaggering lubriciousness requisite for Everybody Knows About My Good Thing, originally recorded by Little Johnny Taylor, which he does; more surprising is how authentically wracked he sounds on All Your Love, Hate to See You Go and the Memphis Slim-penned title track. There’s a really striking moment on the last one where he sings the line “Baby please come on home to me”, drawing out the word “please” into a chilling, agonised, vulnerable howl.

Moreover, you wonder if Jagger’s fashion-conscious dilettantism might account for the album’s sound: Blue and Lonesome feels very much a record piloted by someone who’s heard the White Stripes or the Black Keys, or the raw blues releases on which Mississippi label Fat Possum’s reputation was founded. The sound is appealingly visceral and live: the guitars are spiky and slashing, the drums punch hard, everything – including Jagger’s voice – is coated with a thin, crisp layer of distortion, as if the band are playing at such volume and with such force that the microphones can’t quite take it.

The obvious point of comparison would be the recordings the Stones made in the brief period between their rise to fame and the full flowering of Jagger and Richards’ songwriting. But if at least one track, a version of Willie Dixon’s Just Like I Treat You, might have slotted neatly onto 5 x 5 or The Rolling Stones No 2, for the most part Blue and Lonesome doesn’t really feel or sound much like the stuff the Stones made half a century ago. They wouldn’t have thanked you for saying it, but back then, their skill lay in a perhaps unwitting ability to transform gnarled rhythm and blues into thrilling teen-friendly pop: listen to Muddy Waters’ original version of I Just Wanna Make Love to You next to their 1964 version and you hear a very grownup, slow-burning record, made by a man already in middle age, converted into something urgent and wired, the soundtrack to an overexcited fumble in the back of a Ford Anglia.

Now in their 70s, men who by anyone’s standards have lived a bit, they frequently seem to tap into something deeper about the music: they really inhabit its sense of hard-won experience. The last thing you hear on the album, after a version of Willie Dixon’s I Can’t Quit You Baby crashes to a halt, is Mick Jagger asking uncertainly “was that OK?” He sounds like a man who’s still slightly awed by this music in its original form; who knows he’s still paying homage to artists he can never entirely grasp, whatever Keith Richards thinks. But the answer to his question is an unqualified yes: it’s more than OK, which is not something you can say about many Stones albums over the last 30 years.