DVD Review: Rollouts from the Stones

Back in May, the Rolling Stones passed through Los Angeles for an intimate warm-up gig at the Fonda Theatre, blasting through their classic 1971 album “Sticky Fingers” and other tunes. It was a rare chance to see the band up close for fans more accustomed to watching from faraway in arenas and football stadiums, but it was hardly unprecedented.

The band has a long history of returning to small rooms to tap into the original spark that launched them in 1962, from Chicago’s Checkerboard Lounge with Muddy Waters in 1981 to L.A.’s Echoplex in 2013. Now the Stones have opened up the archives to release one of those special nights on a new DVD, “The Marquee Club — Live 1971,” part of the band’s “From the Vault” series.

It documents an interesting moment for the so-called “World’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band,” caught here at a time between two of their most acclaimed albums, the iconic “Sticky Fingers” and “Exile On Main St.” That puts Mick Taylor in the second guitarist position beside Keith Richards, and the combination led to some of the band’s toughest but most elegantly played material. The eight-song set on “Marquee Club” is frustratingly short, but still gives a glimpse of an essential band at their peak. Outtakes amount to alternate takes of a few songs, plus a performance of “Brown Sugar” on the U.K.’s “Top of the Pops.”

Just two years earlier, the Stones emerged reborn after the firing and unexpected death of founder Brian Jones, stepping onstage for a free concert in London to pay genuine tribute to Jones and to show off Taylor, his young virtuoso replacement recruited from John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Security for the day was provided by the British Hells Angels, an entirely different lot from the California bikers who disastrously policed their free concert at Altamont Speedway the same year. At that show, the cameras of the startling doc “Gimme Shelter” watched as Angels beat fans with cue sticks and punched singer Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane, before a fan was stabbed to death while carrying a gun.

Nothing so dark was on the agenda in Hyde Park, other than Mick Jagger reading a poem for Jones and releasing hundreds of white butterflies into the air. “Hyde Park Live 1969” is more a traditional TV documentary made a the time of the scene that day, which makes it more satisfying as a cultural document, but far less so as a concert experience.

Now that the Rolling Stones have passed the half-century mark, the band has been slowly releasing more material from its vaults, including these new DVDs. Much more is still out there and buried. Finally getting at least some of it out into the world is good news to any fan of the band’s most productive years.

The Rolling Stones: From the Vault, ‘The Marquee Club — Live 1971’ and ‘Hyde Park Live 1969’ (Eagle Vision; Blu-ray and DVD)