By Travis Johnson
Born Daniel Feinberg, the boy who would grow up to be Danny Fields was a child prodigy who drifted from Harvard Law School to cutting edge art scene of New York’s Greenwich Village in the mid 1960s, plugging into Warhol’s Factory and eventually founding the music magazine, Datebook. From there, it seems that Fields was a key – albeit largely behind the scenes – player in every major musical moment in the city, ushering popular tastes from the fall of the hippie ideal to the rise of punk and New Wave. His life and work is now on record in Danny Says, a compulsively watchable and hugely informative documentary from director, Brendan Toller.
“I think the key thing about Danny was that he really had a role more than he did a job,” Toller explains. “And I think that’s an important thing for audiences to see in an era where people are so defined by their jobs. This was a guy who sort of worked in the emerging pop music scene, pop culture world, that would intersect with the New York downtown avant garde and arts renaissance in the ‘60s and ‘70s. I think Danny took whatever job at the time that was offered to him where he could be himself, whether it was starting up Datebook magazine in 1966, or being editor of 16 magazine in the ‘70s, or manager of The Ramones, proxy manager of The Stooges and MC5, or publicity at Elektra Records.”
Toller first became aware of Fields when he interviewed him for his first film, I Need That Record!, a look at indie record store culture, and immediately realised that here was a ripe subject for documentary. “I interviewed Danny for it in 2008. He was so fascinating from that one interview. We stayed friends for two years and when I came to New York, he was game to do a movie.”
For music fans, Fields’ name is a familiar one, cropping up in numerous memoirs and biographies – Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk is dedicated to him, for example. Danny Says, named after the song from The Ramones’ End of the Century, would be the first time Fields’ whole story would be told in his own words. Over the next several years – “I shot from fall 2009 until March of 2015” – Toller worked with his subject, interviewing him exhaustively about the entire sweep of his life. “We would wake him up every Sunday, make coffee and shoot for two or three hours for years. The film took seven years to make so I think you get a sense that we have a very well-rounded view of who Danny is and you really understand the context in which he was working.”
Toller avers that Fields didn’t want any creative input. “He didn’t want this to be a vanity project. He often said this was a kind of Rashomon tale – this person remembers it this way, how do you remember it?” He also provided a staggering amount of archival material, recordings and photo negatives, many of which had never seen the light of day before.
But perhaps most importantly, he put Toller in touch with many notable veterans of the era, including Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, Jann Wenner, and Tommy Ramone, all of whom were happy to offer up anecdotes about Fields and his work. “We did interview a tonne of people. Even the people we interviewed who aren’t in it, it did help shape the picture of who he is and who he was. This was a project that was really steeped in the material.”
Danny Says plays at Sydney’s Event Cinemas George Street this Sunday, September 25, as part of the Queer Screen Film Fest. For tickets, click through here.
