Day 11 - A song from Your favorite band : Memo From Turner, The Rolling Stones

by Dick Mac

The 30 Day Song Challenge has been presented to me by my friend Beff. The month of April will be dedicated to those thirty songs.

I don't remember how old I was the first time I saw "Performance," but it was my mid-teens, in the mid-seventies, at a second-run movie house, late at night, stoned.

I had never heard of the star, James Fox (Chaz) or the pretty French girl Michele Breton (Lucy); but everyone knew Mick Jagger (Turner), and the Italian beauty Anita Pallenberg (Pherber) although not quite a household name, was well-known in her own right.

I had no idea what the movie was about, I couldn't find any consistency in the plot, the sexual dynamics were not remotely clear to me, and the gangsters weren't anything like the gangsters in Hollywood films. The cars and clothes were amazing, the people either exaggeratedly attractive or unattractive, the drugs and money rampant, and the housing stock impressive.

It had something to do with some mafia types and money and a reclusive rock star and his two girlfriends living in Powis Square, Notting Hill.

Still, I left the theater as stoned as I was going in and probably knew less about the movie after viewing it than I did before purchasing my ticket.

I got the soundtrack as soon as I could find it, which wasn't easy; and I really only wanted it for one song: Memo From Turner (although I didn't know the name of the song before I purchased the record).

The song is as sensible and nonsensical as the movie, and is a very typical Rolling Stones song (in retrospect).