Worth: $17.00
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Cast:
Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Michelle Phillips, Stephen Stills, Jakob Dylan, Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, Regina Spektor, Cat Power, Beck
Intro:
… a delightful wallow.
This doco is a music nerd’s heaven, especially if you like Californian rock music from the sixties and seventies. This will appeal to those types who can tell you who played guest percussion on the original recording of this or that track (better still if they were uncredited).
Documentary maker Andrew Slater has not tried to trick it up too much, relying instead on words from the horse’s mouths. The front man/interviewer is Jakob Dylan (yes, the son of Bob and Sara) who is a gentle soul and who knows better than to get in the way of the old farts’ reminiscing. He is also a muso himself, of course, and clearly loves this music as is shown in intercut contemporary concert footage when he and his band recreate (quite faithfully) various songs from the era.
The hook, as it were, is the location Laurel Canyon, a leafy Californian suburb that was home to ‘everyone’ from The Mamas and the Papas to Frank Zappa. This quickly grew into a fertile scene in which anyone could rock up to anyone’s house with a guitar and a few joints and be sure of jamming and writing songs all night. The thread is more or less chronological, beginning with Roger McGuinn of the Byrds who is credited with starting a new sound by fusing old folk songs with rock guitar amplification.
Actually, (Bob) Dylan had also thought of this and he is the absent centre of this universe as he doesn’t appear at all here or get directly cited much. The gender dimension is also uncommented upon. The bands are all hippyish men with the occasional female singer up front. Michelle Phillips, who beguiled (and bedded), so many rockers back then, gets to say her piece here but Joni Mitchell, perhaps the greatest female songwriter/performer of this generation, isn’t mentioned once.
What we do get though, is lots of studio reminiscences and some stories about who liked whose music and some inhouse gossip, some of it spicy, much of it mutually reverential.
There are also lots of shots of the various famous studios and their mixing desks, though there is precious little studio jamming footage.
It is quite a cast list, though. There are about a dozen ‘big names’ from this era here and you get the sense that it was timely to make the film now before people are no longer around or able to contribute. For example, the film features interview footage of Tom Petty (recently deceased) to whom the film is dedicated.
Much is made of the cross fertilisation of styles, and the relationship between British bands and this emerging scene. Interestingly, the one they all revere, and who contributes nice interview sound bites here, is Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. He professes to have ‘loved’ the Beatles and he kept a close eye on what Lennon and McCartney were doing with their harmonies and their innovative recording techniques. It gets almost Biblical here with a lineage of cascading influences. So, Rubber Soul begat Pet Sounds and Pet Sounds begat Sergeant Pepper’s and hallowed be their names.
Because there isn’t quite enough of the original music, either informally played or in classic concert footage, this can’t quite go down as one of the truly great rockumentaries, but for anyone who formed their musical tastes around these big talents, this is a delightful wallow.