Rock Docs book sampler

“Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey” Available Now!

The Last Waltz. The Kids Are Alright. Stop Making Sense. Standing in the Shadows of Motown.
The Filth and the Fury. Searching for Sugar Man. Twenty Feet From Stardom.

Over the last half century, music documentaries like these have provided us with a priceless moving-image history of rock ‘n’ roll. My just-released book “Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey” is a first-of-its-kind anthology of the rockumentary genre, viewing pop music’s timeline through the prism of non-fiction film. Since its earliest days, the look of rock ‘n’ roll has been integral to its overall appeal. Up and down the hallways of pop history there is always something interesting to see as well as to hear.

This book reviews over 150 films–actually closer to 170 but that number didn’t seem right on a book cover. It starts with a ground level look at the Beatles’ world-changing first visit to America and comes full circle fifty years later with “Good Ol’ Freda,” where the Fab Four’s secretary looks back through the years as both a fan and an insider. In between, readers will find many films to re-experience or discover for the first time.

The anthology format consists of 50 feature-length reviews and paragraph-length pieces on the remaining 100+ titles. In the coming weeks, I will be posting selected clips from the book. If you are interested in purchasing the book, please leave a message in the comments. The book is only $12 including mailing within the U.S.

Also, if interested join my “Rock Docs” Facebook group.

Click on the link below to see the first “Rock Docs” book sampler.

“Rock Docs” Sampler #1: The Early Days

The Annotated “Rock Docs” Radio Special

by Rick Ouellette

Last month, I was honored to be interviewed by DJ Bob Dubrow of WMBR-FM 88.1 in Cambridge, Mass. to talk about my book Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey. Why honored, you ask? Because Bob is not just your average guy blabbing with some local scribbler with a book to peddle. He interviews (on a regular basis) many of your favorite musicians from the Sixties and Seventies, which is the focal point of the “Lost and Found” show which airs on “the Big 88” every weekday from noon-2PM (Bob is usually in the Tuesday slot). Your humble blogger and indie author was preceded the previous week by Bob Cowsill of the famous singing family and was followed by Justin Hayward (Moody Blues) and Paul Rodgers (Free/Bad Company) the next two Tuesdays.

You can click the link below to hear the whole two-hour show or, if you’re pressed for time like most people, I will break it down into sections so you can jump ahead to certain interview segments or songs. Please note, however, that you can’t rewind on this slider. Also, check out Bob’s many great past interviews by visiting his MixCloud page at https://www.mixcloud.com/bob-dubrow/

For about the first four minutes, I get to talk a little bit about myself and how I came to write the book, while you become acclimated to my velvety radio voice 😉. Bob arranged the show to revolve around the work of various directors who have made the filming of rock music subjects a facet of their careers. I thought this was a good idea as it shows that from the beginning of the books timeline (1964) there were serious filmmakers recording performances and depicting real-life events of musical artists that were shaping a major cultural shift of the 20th century.


David (left) and Albert Maysles filming Mick Jagger during the making of Gimme Shelter.

First up, we discuss David and Albert Maysles (at the 5:00 mark) who were hired to film The Beatles First U.S. Visit only a couple of hours before the group’s plane landed in New York in February of 1964. The notion of rock mass-media was so new that the Maysles were giving full-access, sight unseen, by the Beatles management, giving us an up close look at this now-legendary event, which today would have a virtual army of handlers attached to it. The other two parts of rock’s great triumvirate (the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan) were also committed to non-fiction celluloid before 1964 was out: the Stones on The T.A.M.I. Show and Dylan at the Newport Folk Fest. Director Murray Lerner in fact, filmed at Newport for several years and compiled his highlights in the 1967 doc Festival!

At 14:10, Bob plays Dylan’s very plugged-in version of Maggie’s Farm from Newport 1965 that has gone down in legend (and is seen in the Festival! film). So many rumors have surrounded this watershed Dylan-goes-electric moment—did Pete Seeger try to cut the cord with an axe, was Bobby booed off stage—that Mr. Dubrow’s anecdote he learned from an interview with Newport participant producer Joe Boyd gives an fascinating spin on this famous tale.

Discussion of the work of Murray Lerner continues with his film Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival (at 28:45), his outstanding doc of that 1970 event attended by 600,000 people but, because of funding issues, not released until 1997. Bob plays a song not seen in the original film, Leonard Cohen’s “That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” preceded by some typically esoteric stage banter from the bard of Montreal.


Leonard Cohen at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival

The crucial role of documentary makers in preserving the counterculture experience for posterity—the good, the bad an the ugly—is discussed (at 28:45) in the section about the Maysles Brothers’ Gimme Shelter, about the Stone’s 1969 US tour that ended in the calamitous Altamont festival. At 32:15, Bob cues up the disheveled version of “Under My Thumb” during which the Hell’s Angels murdered a gun-brandishing audience member.

A discussion of the venerable American documentarian D.A. Pennebaker starts at 38:35. Pennebaker (like the Maysles) was an adherent of the new Direct Cinema and their fly-on-the-wall methods often yielded startling results, like D.A.’s bracing classic Don’t Look Back. At 38:35, Dylan’s defiant version of “Like a Rolling Stone” from his 1966 UK tour (also controversial with the folkie purists).

At 47:30, we discuss another Pennebaker film (and my all-time favorite rockumentary) Monterey Pop and after that Bob Plays a couple of songs from that beatific Summer of Love event, one at 51:27 from Buffalo Springfield (from a DVD extra) and one from the legendary set by Otis Redding (at 54:20). Also, he plays a song from a later Pennebaker film shot in 1973, the title song from the David Bowie concert film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.


Among the legendary performances captured by Pennebaker at Monterey Pop, the Who’s “smashing” version “My Generation” ranks near the top.

At 1:03:25 the name Peter Whitehead comes up. Though not a household name in the States, Whitehead produced several music videos for the Rolling Stones (as well as the first film about them 1965’s Charlie is MY Darling)
His most lasting effort is probably the free-form Swinging London opus “Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London From that film’s soundtrack we hear the part of a wild live-in-studio jam on “Interstellar Overdrive” by the original Pink Floyd (founder Syd Barrett was a friend of Whitehead).

Another British director, Tony Palmer, met John Lennon when the Beatles visited Cambridge University where he was a student. (Starting at 1:10:30) He ended up at the BBC where he used his Beatle connection to be introduced to many of the rock stars that would appear in his musical-sociological study All My Loving. He would film the final show of one of the bands featured. From Cream: The Farewell Concert Bob plays a great version of their hit “Sunshine of Your Love.”

The next filmmaker on the docket (at 1:27:30) is Michael Lindsay-Hogg, known for capturing England’s two most prominent bands at the end of the Sixties. From the Rolling Stones Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus we get the one-night-only supergroup The Dirty Macs (with Lennon, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards) doing “Yer Blues” (at 1:29:50) and from the Beatles swan-song doc Let it Be Bob plays “I’ve Got a Feeling” from the rooftop concert.


The Beatles in “Let it Be.” Though the film depicts the fraying of the group’s unity that would lead to their breakup, the film is redeemed by the rooftop concert. From the book: Like a pack of squabbling brothers who find themselves in better temper after obeying a parent’s order to “go out and get some fresh air,” the mood of the film brightens as soon as the band emerges from the stairwell onto the rooftop. It may have been a chilly, overcast London afternoon but as soon as they launch into the remonstrative rocker “Get Back” the Beatles seem warmed up to the idea that they are out there to prove themselves. A month’s worth of studio work was not in vain.

Of course, no discussion about classic rock docs can be complete without Woodstock, which made Warner Bros. a ton of money while also being good enough to take the Oscar for Documentary Feature in 1970. It’s true, as Bob points: what hasn’t been said about this iconic film. But I hope, we added a few new insights here and there about these films in general. Hopefully, the time and care I put into making this book more of “journey” through fifty years of music and lives, transcending the (still useful and user-friendly) anthology format. So if interested, click on the book cover above, or the link below, to see the index and the first 20+ pages of the text.

You can check out the excerpt at http://booklocker.com/books/8905.html or by clicking on the book cover image above. If interested in purchasing, you can contact me directly for a special offer and free shipping! Thanks, Rick.
rick.ouellette@verizon.net

Wait, there’s more: Purchase “Rock Docs” and get free comic!

The T.A.M.I. Show. Don’t Look Back. Monterey Pop. Woodstock. Gimme Shelter. Let it Be.
The Last Waltz. The Kids Are Alright. Stop Making Sense. Standing in the Shadows of Motown.
The Filth and the Fury. Searching for Sugar Man. Twenty Feet From Stardom

Over the last half century, music documentaries like these have provided us with a priceless moving-image history of rock ‘n’ roll. My book “Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey” is a first-of-its-kind anthology of the rockumentary genre, viewing pop music’s timeline through the prism of non-fiction film. Since its earliest days, the look of rock ‘n’ roll has been integral to its overall appeal.

This book reviews over 150 films from 1964 to 2014 in anthology form. It starts with a ground level look at the Beatles’ world-changing first visit to America and comes full circle fifty years later with “Good Ol’ Freda,” where the Fab Four’s secretary looks back through the years as both a fan and an insider. In between, readers will find many films to re-experience or discover for the first time.

From Craig Breaden, contributing writer for the Progarchy site:
Rick Ouellette’s “Rock Docs” is right at home in my rock reference collection, sitting next to my old Trouser Press Record Guide and my Rolling Stone Interview books. It’s the kind of read you can dip into piecemeal, as the mood strikes, and Ouellette’s amiable style will keep you coming back. Nicely done, and a really fun read!

And speaking of Prog, order “Rock Docs” between now and the end of February and I’ll throw in a free copy of my new (and first) comic book, “I Was a Teenage Proghead” with illustrations by Brian Bicknell.

Wilsontown High School, 1974
Travel back to a time when the hair was long and so were the musical attention spans. That fall the mellow vibe of Wilsontown High gets disrupted by a mysterious rich-kid bully. But he makes a “sad” miscalculation when he focuses his grievances on Sean and Paul—two know-it-all aspiring rock critics—and their two new friends: clairvoyant Jane Klancy and kung-fu enthusiast April Underwood. Things are going to get personal in a hurry…

If you are interested in purchasing “Rock Docs” and getting the comic book in the bargain, please leave a message below as I now sell the book directly for these promotions. You can also click on the link below for my author page at BookLocker.com. The link also has a click-through where you can view a 30-page excerpt.
Thanks, Rick

http://booklocker.com/books/8905.html

“Rock Docs” Sampler #5: Pop Music’s Long & Winding Road

Rock and roll as a named art form is more than sixty years old. For a musical genre made for and by the young (at least originally) it is a little strange to think that the biggest worries in life have gradually gone from being worried that you might get grounded to whether you have enough savings to retire. Plus, categorical mortality has shifted from tragic plane crashes and overdoses to the sad reality that a certain percentage of people will die from various health issues in their 60s and 70s. But before everyone gets depressed let me say that one of the things I came to realize while writing my book Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey is that the youthful energy of classic pop music helps sustain the spirit even as our Social Security years approach or are reached. As Freda Kelly, the Beatles’ secretary and fan club president pictured above says at the end of Good Ol’ Freda, “Although there’s a fifty-year gap since I started, I still like to think that I’m back where I was in the beginning.”

Many of the newer rockumentaries in the book focus on the long trajectory of rock history, from the perspective of musicians, fans and people behind the scenes such as Freda. Below are four related excerpts.
If you are interested in purchasing, please contact me by commenting below or by messaging me at my “Rock Docs” Facebook group.

From the entry on Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me

Drew Nicola’s film has a certain shadowy quality that sustains Big Star’s mythical essence. The band had friends handy with an SLR or home movie camera so there are some early images that survive like half-remembered dreams. But it’s on disc that their legacy rests and Nicola profiles many of the band’s most beloved songs like “Ballad of El Goodo,” “September Gurls,” “Daisy Glaze” and “In the Street.” It’s the universality of yearning (“Years ago my heart was set to live,” begins “El Goodo”) that in the end is as big a reason as any for Big Star’s durability. So is the patina of tragedy—especially in the case of Chris Bell, who died in a car crash in 1978 at twenty-seven while he was trying to figure a “way into the future” with only one solo single to his name (the exquisite “I Am the Cosmos”). He had been working in the kitchen of his family’s restaurant. Both Alex Chilton and Andy Hummel passed away in 2010. As Lenny Kaye says at another point in Nothing Can Hurt Me: “They were there waiting, like a little jewel in the earth, for me to dig them out.” This sense of personal discovery is central to the rock and roll experience.

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From New York Doll

In an age of comforting singer-songwriters and technically-savvy arena acts, the New York Dolls’ raucous flamboyance failed to translate from the demimonde to the heartland. Of course, by the end of the decade, they would be more widely recognized for their trailblazing role but by then the band was defunct. There was no second act for bassist Arthur Kane. When this film opens in the early 2000s, we find Kane working at the Mormon Family History Center in Los Angeles. He joined the Latter-Day Saints after his life bottomed out by the late 80s-early 90s. A failed marriage, a fruitless attempt at an acting career and alcohol abuse was followed by a suicide attempt—a jump from a second story window that left him with minor neural damage. Now he’s a slightly addled fifty-something in white shirt and tie, complaining about the long commute to work caused by an inconvenient bus transfer. Pausing on the street, Kane gets us caught up, explaining that he is single and “eligible to go out on dates.” But he has to be careful now because of his religion (“No more wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am”). It’s no secret that for “Killer” Kane (named after a villain from the old Buck Rogers serial) the fondest memories of his life will be his platform-booted heyday with the New York Dolls. His ride comes along and he takes a seat in the very last row. With a wry smile he confirms that “I’ve been demoted from rock star to schlep on the bus.” Director Greg Whiteley has fashioned an eloquent and bittersweet documentary on Kane’s rise, fall and fleeting redemption in the form of a New York Dolls reunion concert in London. It is one of the leading entries in what has become a mini-genre: films centered on fringe figures floating out there in the vast rock and roll firmament (others would include The Nomi Song, Best of the Beatles and A Band Called Death).

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From Standing in the Shadows of Motown

In the middle of this film, musician and author Allan Slutsky tells of meeting Detroit-based guitarist Robert White for dinner in 1993. As they were about to order, the blissful opening guitar lick to the Temptations’ 1965 chart-topper “My Girl” spilled out from the restaurant’s speakers. White’s face lit up and he was about to tell the waiter that that was him playing the guitar, but checked himself. When Slutsky later asked him why he didn’t say it, an abashed White suggested that the server would never have believed a “tired old fool” like himself. Slutsky admits he was floored that a man who played “one of the top five all-time guitar hooks” had “lived for thirty years this close to his dream and yet instead of being inside the dream looking out, he was on the outside of the dream looking in.” This sad anecdote neatly summarizes Standing in the Shadows of Motown, developed from Slutsky’s book of the same name, that profiles the interracial group of instrumentalists (often referred to as the Funk Brothers) who provided the infectious grooves to scores of Top 40 hits for Motown Records but who were largely left behind when the label left Detroit for Los Angeles in 1972.

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From Good Ol’ Freda

The seventeen-year-old Freda Kelly got to know the Beatles as only one can who was part of the band’s original fan base. She can tell you the best place in the Cavern to watch (second archway on the left), tells sweet anecdotes of Paul walking her to the bus stop and still calls Ringo “Ritchie.” In 1962, the Beatles new manager asked the incredulous teen if she wanted to work for the band. It was a canny move. As both Epstein and Kelly realized, she was a fan but not a fanatic and could directly relate to the band’s famously ardent female supporters, which would grow into numbers unimaginable back then. She held the job for a decade and still dutifully replied (on her own time) to the back log of fan mail even after the band broke up; a process that took some three years. In an archive news clip from around the time of the Beatles breakup, we see Freda Kelly somewhere in between, as a young woman asked what she missed most about the early days. “The closeness,” she says, a reply all the more poignant when we later see the roll call of those involved who have passed on, starting with John, George and Brian Epstein. Approaching seventy years of age, she agreed to be the subject of Ryan White’s cameras so that her grandchildren will grow up knowing who she once was. Although good ol’ Freda would likely be too humble to say so, she was not just a bit player in rock and roll’s greatest success story but a person who was symbolically very near to the heart of it.

“Rock Docs” Sampler #4: When Winners Are Losers

It’s a bit of a mixed blessing, being a fair-minded kind of guy with wide-ranging tastes in music and film. On the one hand, they are good qualities to possess when writing a book like Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey because I was easily able to give a fair shake to a broad spectrum of rock subjects and directorial styles, allowing me to reflect consensus opinion while blending in my own outlook on things.

But let’s face it: writing bad reviews is so much fun! Maybe it’s because I spent so many years reading Creem magazine with their famously smart-aleck record reviewers. How about this zinger from a write-up of Foreigner’s “Head Games” album: “I’ve listened to this album ten times and I still don’t care whether singer Lou Gramm gets laid or not.” Or consider this scholarly assessment of Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s “Works, Volume 1”: “It ‘works,’ but only as a Frisbee.”

But out of about 170 reviews in my book, I could only muster up four pannings and a footnote for this thumbs-down sampler (mixed reviews don’t count here). Unchecked narcissism, unearned cultural annexation and the over-praising of marginal figures are a few of my rockumentary pet peeves. They all get an airing out below:

For a 30-page excerpt of “Rock Docs” and purchase info, please click on the link below.
http://booklocker.com/books/8905.html

From the review of Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991)

At its best, pop music–like most other art forms, you would think—-reaches an optimal state when it becomes an inclusive and evolving community of practitioners spinning out a self-sustaining supply of good ideas that are built on and modified over an indefinite period of time. And then there’s Madonna. The former Miss Ciccione, who found fame in the early Eighties, was certainly not the first self-obsessed pop star to come down the pike. Born in 1958, she emerged from the 70s as a perfect embodiment of the so-called Me Decade, drawing all attention on herself and becoming the Material Girl without a whiff of irony. Along with her legions of fans, this self-consciously naughty “Queen of Pop” had her share of detractors—nowadays we would say “haters.” But if one of this latter group wanted to advance the premise that Madonna’s rise had something to do with the downfall of mainstream music, he or she would only need to point at this 1991 vanity project. Truth or Dare shows us a type of stardom that has little reason to exist beyond its own perpetuation.

The movie basically consists of two distinct and alternating elements. The concert sequences, usually featuring complete song performances shot in living color, are often quite striking and can reasonably appeal to more casual observers. These show Madge during the 1990 aptly-named Blonde Ambition tour, pretty near or at her career peak. The balance of Truth or Dare is comprised of black-and-white footage, mostly from dressing rooms and hotel suites, that self-reveal Madonna as a manifest destiny ego-tripper, playing indulgent den mother to her troupe of dancers, allowing other famous people to fawn over her, ratting out her brother as a drug abuser and patiently explaining to viewers her lingering vulnerabilities despite the fame and fortune. For those who are not rabid fans, these segments may prove to be an endurance test.

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From U2: Rattle and Hum (1988)

The core appeal of U2 is not hard to figure out. They reflected the renewed musical excitement of the late 1970s without the abrasive clatter, had a sweeping sense of spiritual redemption and global concern (even if hazily defined) and made full use of grandiose gestures—all these elements found wide acceptance with kids coming of age in the 1980s. But they have to be one of the strangest examples of a “populist” band ever. True, they seized the moment at Live Aid when Bono climbed down from the stage to embrace fans, somehow capturing the essence of the mega famine-relief event. But a couple of years on, it seems like that kind of closeness is not part of the U2 business plan. When asked by director Phil Joanov at the start what this film is to be about, they can barely give him an answer except that it’s some sort of “musical journey.” Unfortunately, this means a trip that smacks of ego-tourism, traipsing across America, performing with a church choir in Harlem, pressing into Graceland and Sun Studios in Memphis, cornering B.B. King for a duet, staring soulfully at the Mississippi River while a song called “Heartland” plays on the soundtrack—all the while looking like they’ve become bigger than that which spawned them.

Most of this will hardly detract from the enjoyment factor with true-blue fans though viewers with a more discerning eye may find themselves exasperated. Even when the music was soaring something came along to dampen the mood: Was it really necessary that Bono should deface the Vaillancourt Fountain while doing a surprise outdoor concert in San Francisco—especially when he spray paints it with the humdrum phrase “Rock & Roll Stops the Traffic”? Despite their level of fame, Rattle and Hum only did so-so at the box office while setting into motion a cottage industry of Bono jokes that persists to this day (“Breakfast with Bono is the most self-important meal of the day” etc.).

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Under Africa Skies (2012)

Paul Simon’s landmark 1986 album Graceland, partly recorded in apartheid-era South Africa, may be considered a landmark in the annals of cross-cultural pop music, but its making has always been dogged by controversy. This fact hangs over Joe Berlinger’s film about Simon’s return to the radically-changed country for a twenty-fifth anniversary event. Paul admits to not caring much “what the internal debate was” when he went there in ’86 without getting the blessing of the black liberation movement in the form of the African National Congress, despite being advised to do so by friend Harry Belafonte. This apparent disregard of the cultural boycott still sticks in the craw of people like Artists Against Apartheid founder Dali Tambo, who calls Simon’s original visit “counter-productive” to the cause.

But while Simon’s album and the subsequent tour may have enlightened Westerners to a vibrant but terribly repressed population, Under Africa Skies’ repeated moments of black musicians saying what an honor it was to play with Paul hints of white entitlement and that gets tiresome, if not borderline offensive, long before the film’s 100-minute running time has elapsed.

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The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006)

Early on in this film, when Daniel Johnston is introduced at a 2001 gig as “the best singer-songwriter alive today” those for whom this praiseful documentary was made will nod their heads while neutral observers may well start scratching theirs. His braying voice and incongruous philosophizing is guaranteed not to be to everyone’s fancy, but still director Jeff Feuerzeig lets stand numerous favorable comparisons that have Johnston right up there with Bob Dylan, the Beatles and even the greatest classical composers. Not long after he shouldered his way into an MTV special, he was befriended and/or championed by members of Sonic Youth, Nirvana and the Butthole Surfers among others. The Devil and Daniel Johnston may prove an uncomfortable experience for those not already converted as Johnston’s schizophrenia has led to violent and extremely reckless behaviors that have endangered himself as well as friends and families. Director Jeff Feuerzeig doesn’t tackle those kinds of issues, leaving his film to look like a vanity tribute to a hipster mascot.

So there you have it. The post probably would have been a little longer if it weren’t for the fact that were a few films (like the execrable Air Guitar Nation and the unfortunate Derailroaded: Inside the Mind of Wild Man Fischer) that were so bad I couldn’t get through them so I just left them out of the book. Maybe I’ll just have to embrace the hate and do a whole post on the “best of the bad”, if I can only bear to watch

“Rock Docs” Sampler #3: Salute to the Seventies

Oh, to have grown up in the Seventies. That’s not a hypothetical, because I did. To me, the later baby boomers got a bit of the best of both worlds, musically speaking. At the start of the decade, we had just graduated from the kids table and many of the best Sixties performers still going strong, while the glorious excesses of newer rock gods like Led Zeppelin were on the vanguard. If the music scene seemed to be a bit on the wane by the middle Seventies, that was OK. By the time we were off to college or moved away to the big city a couple of years later, the punk and indie-rock movement was just taking hold. In my new book, Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey, I examine this ever-shifting and regenerating rock history through how it was captured in concert and documentary films.

From The Song Remains the Same (1976)

Jimmy Page’s fantasy sequence, the most conceptually fine-tuned of the four, arguably holds up the best. It comes during the twenty-eight-minute, nuclear-option version of “Dazed and Confused,” the fame-making psycho blues from the band’s first album. The concert incarnation of “Dazed” featured several sections not heard on the studio original, most notably the unearthly interlude when Page took a violin bow to his guitar, fed it through an echoplex, and played to the crowd like a modern-day Merlin. Then the scene switches to his property near Scotland’s Loch Ness where he had recently (and un-coincidentally) bought the former home of occult figurehead Aleister Crowley. The atmospherics are just right (full moon and a light snowfall) as Page climbs an escarpment in a near re-creation of the “Stairway to Heaven”-suggestive gatefold illustration in Led Zeppelin IV. At the top he meets the same Tarot-deck hermit but it’s actually himself in advanced old age. In a special effects shot that always got a cheer from theater audiences, the hermit’s face then morphs back in time, eventually revealing Page in his Yardbird days, as a schoolboy and as a young tot—suggesting, as Page said in a 2007 magazine interview, that enlightenment “can be achieved at any time in a man’s life.” To top it off, the hermit’s staff turns into a multi-hued light saber.

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From Soul to Soul (1973)

Ten years after becoming the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence in the post-colonial era, Ghana celebrated in part by staging a huge cross-cultural concert event. Featuring local performers and an array of mostly black soul, pop and jazz musicians from the U.S., this was an age before a word like “multiculturalism” was part of everybody’s vocabulary and there is a real sense of discovery here on both sides, though the solidarity is touched with befuddlement at times. The biggest star to the 100,000 fans is clearly Wilson Pickett, whose bravura performance inspires a giant mosh pit.

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From The Kids are Alright (1979)

Despite the Who’s tendency to tomfoolery in interviews, in the end all you need is in the music. Jeff Stein made his best directorial move in cajoling a reluctant band to go back on stage at Shepperton Studios and give him one definitive take of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” for the record (there was an invited audience of about 500). Townshend’s eight-minute manifesto of self-determination in an unreliable world is one of rock’s great galvanizing classics and the fired-up band pulls out all the stops. The years of hard living were catching up to Moon (as they would with John Entwistle in 2002) and he showed up for rehearsals overweight and out of practice. But coming out of the song’s electronic keyboard interlude (with its 2001-inspired laser light display) Keith nails the thunderous drum cadenza and Roger lets rip rock’s most histrionic “Yeah!!” while Pete leaps clear across the stage, landing in a knee slide straight at the camera. Yes, rock ‘n’ roll does matter despite the Who’s self-conscious protestations.

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From The Filth and the Fury (2000)

Julien Temple started filming the Sex Pistols from their earliest gigs in 1976. He starts The Filth and the Fury with a bracing montage of British social upheaval, discontent and rioting in the mid-70s that left the country ripe for the Pistols’ confrontational and chaotic revolt. It is the ex-Rotten John Lydon who gets off a lot of the best lines in the contemporary interviews, during which group members are shown individually and in silhouette, as if in witness protection, still somewhat menacing. Lydon recalls his life and times as a “damn ugly fuck-up” who emerged “brain-wiped” after being in a coma for a year with a bad case of boyhood meningitis, then realizing at age fourteen he had only a short time left to escape a third-rate fate. By the end, Lydon tears up at the memory of the ill-fated Sid Vicious, admitting to his inability to pull his childhood friend off the dismal path to junkiedom—it affords Sid a humanity rarely allowed to him by both detractors and idolizers.

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From Rust Never Sleeps (1979)

Never mind the Jawas: an open-ended life quest, in the end, is concept enough for Rust Never Sleeps. Never as overtly confessional as some of his singer-songwriter contemporaries, Young connects with his fan base using a more loose-ends type of questing poetry. It’s the type that is easy to project oneself into even when the language gets elaborate and impressionistic. Is the Dylanesque “Thrasher” a beguiling manifesto of creative and personal independence or a thinly-disguised dissing of his former and future colleagues named Crosby, Stills and Nash? Of course, it could be both and more, and the imagery (“Where the eagle glides ascending, there’s an ancient river bending/Down the timeless gorge of changes, where sleeplessness awaits”) of escape and discovery are universal. Rust Never Sleeps, both the film and his then-current album of the same name can be seen as an end-of-decade mission statement.

Please contact me via a comment below if you are interested in purchasing a copy. Thanks, Rick Ouellette

“Rock Docs” Sampler #2, The Bests of the Fests

Rock festivals, especially those in the golden era of the late 60s and early 70s, are the source for some of the best filmed footage in pop music history. The primary reason for this is pretty obvious. The parade of musical talent for 1967’s Monterey Pop, 1969’s Woodstock and 1970’s Isle of Wight festivals is awe-inspiring, especially in retrospect: high-water marks of a genius era. But they are also great sociological snapshots of their time period and often the audience members are just as entertaining as the performers!

Below are five excerpts from my book Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey about this important rockumentary sub-genre, with accompanying vdeo clips. For more info about purchasing information this book, please leave a comment below. Thanks, Rick Ouellette

From the review of Monterey Pop (released 1968, directed by D.A. Pennebaker)

There’s hardly a baby-boomer to be found who doesn’t know something of the quartet of near-mythic Monterey Moments: the Who’s pre-punk working class anthem “My Generation” ending in a cacophony of smashed equipment, Janis Joplin’s no-holds-barred belting on the bluesy “Ball and Chain,” soul singer Otis Redding’s electrifying set winning over the “love crowd” in a career peak just six months before dying in a plane crash, and, of course, Jimi Hendrix’s epic eroticisation of the hitherto harmless ditty “Wild Thing.” The Seattle native had gone to England to make his name, and here reintroduced himself to America with a stunning display of six-string mastery that culminated with the famous fiery sacrifice of his instrument.

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From Woodstock (released 1970, directed by Michael Wadleigh)

The logistical and crowd scenes that pop up after every three or four songs are every bit as interesting, especially the bravura ten-minute sequence depicting the famous Sunday thunderstorm. It drenched a crowd that had just been galvanized by Cocker’s dramatic recasting of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends,” and thrust the stage crew into the role of reassuring the sea of humanity while simultaneously fretting over the fate of their vulnerable light towers and staving off the possibility of electrocution. When the crowd comes out the other end of this mud-covered crucible with their good spirits intact, their reputation is made.

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From Message to Love: The isle of Wight Festival (released 1997, directed by Murray Lerner)

With six hundred thousand rock fans ferrying over from mainland England in August 1970, the third annual Isle of Wight Festival was one of the biggest concert events in history. Unfortunately, the five-day festival turned out to be a financial failure, and the commissioned footage from director Murray Lerner’s crew did not emerge as a feature film until a quarter of a century later. Nevertheless, Message to Love is a documentary that deserves to sit up on the same mantle as Monterey Pop and Gimme Shelter. It contains a wealth of great musical moments; especially notable are clips of both Jimi Hendrix and the Doors’ Jim Morrison shortly before their deaths as well as footage of the Who at the very apex of their career. It is also a clear-eyed view of an event that was supposed to be an English Woodstock but instead descended into utter chaos as the Aquarian hippie ideal knocked heads with the emerging notion that rock music was ripe for mass-market exploitation.

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From Wattstax (released 1973, directed by Mel Stuart)

Every music festival film has at least one classic show-stealer and in Wattstax that moment arrives when Rufus Thomas, the perennial Memphis favorite duly advertised as “The Prince of Dance” on the L.A. Coliseum scoreboard, takes the stage. Appearing for all the world to see in a hot pink suit with short pants and white go-go boots, he works up the crowd to such a degree with “The Breakdown” that when he then instructs them to “Do the Funky Chicken,” thousands of dancers storm the football field to oblige him.

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From Glastonbury (released 2006, directed by Julien Temple)

The Glastonbury Festival in rural England holds a rather unique place in the annals of rock as being the one outdoor event started in the Woodstock era that has continued—despite a few missed years—straight into the present day, adapting and growing exponentially but still retaining much of its counterculture spirit. Rockumentary master Julien Temple has funneled this considerable history into a vibrant, if occasionally jumbled, film record of just under two and a half hours. He benefits from the availability of vintage early footage (some of it from 1971’s Glastonbury Fayre) and adds in his accounting of the modern festival (Temple shot there from 2002-05) with much attention to the event’s evolving sociology and an extensive sampling of live performances clips. What is just as memorable as this multi-generational musical cornucopia is the thirty-ring post-hippie circus that accompanies it: a freewheeling pagan arts fair and anti-establishment concave that equals or even overshadows what’s on the main stage.

“Rock Docs” Sampler #1: The Early Days

My book Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey traces rock history through its depiction in documentary film. Rock ‘n’ roll has always been a strong visual medium and movies based around it, like “Jailhouse Rock” and “Rock Around the Clock” and others with the “R” word in its title, were all the rage by as early as 1956. But it wasn’t really until 1964, with the Beatles’ seismic impact on the entertainment world, that this music started being committed to film by documentary producers. In the first of five themed samplers from the book, I look at those early days, accompanied by related video clips.

If you are interested in purchasing Rock Docs, please note that the book is now only available directly thru me. Please comment if interested. Also, feel free to join my “Rock Docs” Facebook page. Thanks, Rick Ouellette

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It was only ten weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy. With the pall of national tragedy still in the air that winter, filmmakers Albert and David Maysles got a call from Granada Television in England saying a musical group named the Beatles were arriving in New York in a couple of hours and asking if they would mind heading down and maybe getting some footage? They arrived just in time to record that famous moment when John, Paul, George, and Ringo hesitated a moment at the top of the steps while leaving their plane, realizing that the hordes of people lining the balcony of the terminal were there for them and not some head of state as they first thought. And just like that, the Maysles brothers found themselves in the middle of one of the twentieth century’s defining cultural moments.

From The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit (1964/1991)

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Produced by their manager Andrew Loog Oldham reportedly to get his rising stars used to the idea of film, Charlie is My Darling was the first documentary about the Rolling Stones. Back in the screaming-teenager epoch of the mid-1960s, the boys are whisked off to Ireland for a quickie tour hastily arranged to capitalize on the recent smash hit “Satisfaction.” It’s a bit of a revelation here to see the Stones in the first flush of their youthful success. They were already well known for the riotous audiences they attracted and by the end of the third number in Dublin the stage invasion is in full stride, memorably captured by Peter Whitehead’s in-the-wings camera.

From The Rolling Stones: Charlie is My Darling (1965)

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It’s been described as the ultimate Battle of the Bands—James Brown and the Famous Flames vs. the Rolling Stones. It definitely helped that both still had a lot to gain at this point in their careers. Brown coveted the crossover audience that so far eluded him and the Stones were fighting to crack into the American pop marketplace. Though Brown wanted to close the show the producers opted for a British Invasion finale. It hardly mattered: The Flames’ eighteen-minute set is justly hailed as one of the more thrilling concert sequences of the rock era. This in turn made the Stones step up their game and during all this the audience makes the final transformation from excitable to certifiable.

From The T.A.M.I. Show (1964)

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Although blues great Son House has been seen doing an electrified set with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (and going over well with it) it’s another story when Bob Dylan plugs in with the same guys and launches into “Maggie’s Farm,” complete with a searing guitar solo by Mike Bloomfield. The reception is actually mixed, in contrast to the legend of him being booed off the stage. He is coaxed into coming back with his acoustic guitar, but the die has been cast. The authenticity claimed by folk fans earlier mentioned has shaded into defensive orthodoxy and Dylan, seeing the similarly gifted Beatles already becoming worldwide icons, was off to chart a new course.

From Festival! (Murray Lerner’s compilation film of the Newport Folk festival 1963-66)

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Cream was one of the first media-ordained supergroups and their final show, at London’s Royal Albert Hall in November ’68, was one of rock’s first self-consciously grand events. There was an imperative to capture the talented but fractious band on film before the split. The non-concert segments have an oddly defensive tone, with the power trio’s music having to be compared to the “traditional arts” by the BBC narrator. Back then, the thought of a longhair band and their scruffy fans taking over the august Albert Hall was probably still a bit controversial. Even if they had “almost single-handedly given rock an authority which only the deaf cannot acknowledge”!!

From: Cream: Farewell Concert (1968)