“Cocksucker Blues”: Robert Frank’s Suppressed Rolling Stones Documentary Comes to Film Forum

When Robert Frank and Danny Seymour made “Cocksucker Blues,” their documentary about the Rolling Stones on tour in the United States, in 1972, the band hadn’t been here for three years—not since the catastrophic concert at the Altamont Speedway that’s the subject of the Maysles brothers and Charlotte Zwerin’s “Gimme Shelter.” That earlier documentary is not about the Rolling Stones but about the concert itself, about the bad meshing of the power of their music with societal power systems, with infrastructure and with the lack of it; it’s about the dying myth of total liberation.