Bill
Wyman is a rock star—and he has the top 40 hit to prove it. I was called “(Si Si)
Je Suis un Rock Star.” It charted in the UK, Australia, and NZ, but it never
really caught on here. However, you might have heard of the band Wyman was in.
They are called the Rolling Stones. They had a raft of hits and they are even
credited with ending “The Sixties,” with their disastrous Altamont concert. Wyman
retired from the Stones just as the band started slipping into self-parody, but
he remains the foremost archivist of the band’s history. Wyman and his assembled
scrapbooks, ephemerals, and memorabilia provide a treasure trove for filmmaker
Oliver Murray to mine in The Quiet One, which releases this Friday in
New York.
Arguably,
Charlie Watts could just as easily be called “the Quiet One,” but he was always
a jazz drummer at heart, so he made plenty of noise behind his kit. Wyman was not
a blues fanboy like the rest of the band, but he was knocked out by the sound
of the electric bass in early rock & roll. He heard the Stones were looking
for a bassist and one thing led to another. Eventually, he was part of one of
the biggest, most enduringly popular bands in rock & roll history, yet he
still carried the insecurities and resentments instilled in him by his casually
contemptuous parents.
Wyman’s
parents will sound borderline abusive to most viewers, because they probably
were, but they perfectly reflected the value system of the British Labour Party
and its adherents, which insists on loyalty to the “working class” and scorn
aspirations of upward mobility. Fortunately, Wyman spent considerable time with
his more supportive grandmother, whom he even lived with for several years. In
a tellingly moment, Wyman readily admits on camera his decision to change his surname
from Perks to Wyman was indeed a partial rebuke of his parents.
For
the most part, Murray chronicles the history of the Stones (especially the
Brian Jones era) from Wyman’s perspective, because it is the most significant
association of his professional/artistic career and it is what audiences will
be most interested in. He also devotes some time to Wyman’s assorted marriages,
his solo career, and his more relaxed work leading Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings, whose
ranks include Procol Harum’s Gary Brooker, and British jazz musician Martin
Taylor and Georgie Fame. However, Giallo fans will be disappointed Murray does
not delve into the soundtrack work Wyman did for Dario Argento’s Opera and
Phenomena.
