Tag Archives: music documentaries

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Rock in the Ruins

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Pink Floyd at Pompeii

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

The gorgeous new restoration of 1972’s Pink Floyd at Pompeii delivers a beautifully discordant glimpse of a transitional period for one of music’s most important rock bands. Gorgeously restored image and sound immerse you in Floyd’s music. 

Adrian Maben’s doc focuses primarily on Floyd’s 1971 trip to Italy, with performances recorded live in the ruins of the Pompeii Amphitheatre to an audience of only crew . The setlist (including selections recorded later in Paris) consists of some of Floyd’s more loosely constructed symphonic jams—Careful with that Axe Eugene, Echoes, Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, One of These Days—which frees Maben visually from the need to capture a singer. Rather, he lets Floyd’s trippier melodic concoctions provide a soundscape for various images. Sometimes eerily beautiful landscapes and vistas populate the screen, while elsewhere the filmmaker turns the camera to period artwork.

Maben punctuates the live cuts with bits of interviews and fly-on-the-wall footage as the band shares a meal. David Gilmour seems forever in need of a glass of milk, while drummer Nick Mason’s request for apple pie goes unanswered. These brief snippets, though borderline Spinal Tap, balance the live performance’s grandiosity with a sweet bit of banality.

Yes, both Gilmour and Roger Waters get their screen time, but late keyboardist Richard Wright also finds his time in the spotlight while Mason often draws most of Maben’s interest. His manic drumming and respectful requests for “no crust” are a delight, and the interplay between all the band members is a bittersweet counter to the rancor that erupted in years to come.

Wisely, the restoration includes material that had made its way into an earlier director’s cut. We spend time in Abby Road studios with the band as they work through tracks for their as-yet-unreleased masterwork Dark Side of the Moon album.

It’s the perfect balance. The live, undiluted imagination and experimentation that marked Pink Floyd’s early career gives way to the masterful, controlled artistry of the album that would redefine the band (and music history).  

Even for Floyd fans who have seen much of this before, the new restoration – especially the IMAX version hitting select theaters – is a must. It not only gives some classic early jams due respect, it provides a fascinating glimpse at the days just before a legendary rock band stepped into its future.

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Still Standing

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Elton John: Never Too Late

by George Wolf

It’s not easy to quickly sum up the legendary career of Elton John. He is the most successful solo artist in the history of the Billboard chart, he’s in the EGOT club, he’s raised millions for AIDS research, he’s been busy.

The Disney + doc Never Too Late follows Elton on his journey to be less busy, wrapping up a two-year farewell tour with a final North American show at Dodger Stadium in L.A. At age 77, he’s looking to be more available to husband David Furnish and their two young boys, and the film provides some sweet, fleeting glimpses into their home life.

But Furnish, who co-directs with R.J. Cutler, is mainly out to craft a historical bridge between Elton’s original Dodger stadium shows and his recent swan song. Those two sold out concerts in 1975 cemented Elton’s status as the biggest pop star in the world, and Never Too Late spends the bulk of its time reminding us how his career was first born, and then how it grew to those legendary heights in the 70s.

There is plenty of impressive archival footage (including a young Elton pulling out a page from some Bernie Taupin notebook lyrics and explaining how the words inspired his music to “Tiny Dancer”), and Elton’s description of his depression amid worldwide success is heartfelt, but too much of the film seems calculated.

While the excellent biopic Rocketman benefitted from its senses of unpredictability, self-aware honesty and zest, Never Too Late feels a bit controlled, as if Furnish was too close to its subject for a more well-rounded treatment. The worst years of Elton’s addiction and career are barely mentioned, moving the timeline quickly from 1975 straight to his sobriety in 1990, and then to preparations before the final L.A. farewell.

For Elton’s legions of fans (full disclosure: including me), Never Too Late will be a nostalgic and hit-filled salute. And if you don’t expect much more depth than a super-deluxe souvenir tour book, you’ll be plenty satisfied.

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Dear Diary: I Wanna Rock!

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Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band

by George Wolf

In early 2020, Bruce Springsteen had a new album to promote, but – thanks to lockdown – no place to play. Instead, Bruce and longtime collaborator Thom Zimny filmed a very exclusive show at his New Jersey ranch, and released the Western Stars concert film.

The music was inspired by the smooth California sound of artists such as Glen Campbell and Burt Bacharach, and featured a band full of orchestral musicians instead of Bruce’s longtime road warriors.

By the time the E Streeters -Rock Hall of Famers on their own – reunited for Bruce’s current tour, they hadn’t been together for six full years. Hulu’s Road Diary digs into that reunion with joy and celebration, showcasing the creative process fueling Springsteen’s reputation as one of the greatest live performers in the history of rock and roll.

Zimny is back to direct, and though we are treated to several Springsteen bangers, the focus here is less about songwriting inspirations and more about the business of how those legendary E Street shows come together.

It starts, of course, with rehearsals, and Zimny’s access gives us fascinating insight into how Bruce gets the two things he wants from the warmups: to “shake off the cobwebs” and to assemble a set list.

Springsteen’s devotion to live performing is inescapable, as is the power of the musical unit backing him up. And while the band is getting prepared for the future, we do get some charming glimpses of their past. Home movies and band interviews bring context for these longtime bonds, and provide the opportunity for warm tributes in memory of Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici.

Obviously, the film is a must for Springsteen devotees, and a thrilling bookend to any show from this current tour. But for anyone who has only heard tell of the Bruce/E Street experience and wondered about the hype, Road Diary should provide a healthy nudge toward the next nearest concert.

Yes, Bruce just turned 75, but this film will also dispel any talk of retirement.

“It’s my job,” he says. “After 50 years on the road, it’s too late to stop now.”

One, two, three, FOUR!

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California Dream

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The Beach Boys

by George Wolf

Only one of The Beach Boys even knew how to surf. They had a fateful encounter with Charles Manson. Glen Campbell was a member for a short time.

Casual fans may hear some surprising new stories in Disney’s The Beach Boys, while longtime devotees will get a respectful and well-crafted overview that favors family over friction.

That family legacy started with California brothers Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson, cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine in the late 1950s. Neighbor David Marks joined for the first four albums before domineering family patriarch Murry Wilson forced him out. Campbell was the first to become a touring replacement while Brian stayed home to work his magic in the studio. When Campbell’s solo career took off, Bruce Johnston stepped in “for two weeks” and never left.

Directors Frank Marshall (From the Earth to the Moon, Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story) and Thom Zimny (various Springsteen docs and videos) weave interviews old and new, archival footage and iconic music into a compelling pop culture tapestry.

Major sources of conflict in the band’s history – Murry’s bullying, Brian’s mental health and Mike Love’s ego – are addressed but not stressed. Instead, the film spotlights the importance of each individual contribution, and how they blended for a sound that can never be duplicated.

Music historians and contemporaries such as Don Was, Lindsey Buckingham and Janelle Monáe discuss how that sound defined a “California dream” that called to them and countless others. We see a creative rivalry with the Beatles, and how the cultural revolution of the late Sixties favored the Fab Four, while the Beach Boys popularity waned until 1974’s “Endless Summer” compilation hit #1 and reignited demand.

But much like a scaled-down version of Peter Jackson’s Get Back, The Beach Boys gleans insight from going into the studio, starting with Brian’s description of how his early obsession with the Four Freshmen led to building his vision of what the Beach Boys could do. Rare audio snippets of Brian producing are layered between interviews with legendary “Wrecking Crew” studio musicians such as Hal Blaine and Carol Kaye detailing how they came to realize Brian’s genius.

Then, an older but matter-of-fact Brian sits at a studio console, proudly isolating tracks to reveal the separate pieces of beauty required to create a wonder like “God Only Knows.” Joyous.

And that’s really the simple message The Beach Boys wants to leave us with, culminated by a tender and tearful surfside reunion. Strip away the infighting, the lawsuits, the drug use and the drama, and you find family, each member an integral part of finding that perfect, indelible harmony.

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The Final Curtain

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Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus

by George Wolf

There’s that pivotal scene in Walk the Line, where a young Johnny Cash is failing his audition with Sun Records. Owner Sam Phillips is growing impatient, and finally tells Cash to play one song as if he were dying and wanted to tell God what he felt about his time on Earth.

For 103 glorious minutes in Opus, a dying Ryuichi Sakamoto delivers just such an elegy, a soul-stirring set of piano compositions that often seem to be speaking directly to the heavens.

Sakamoto, the Japanese composer and actor who earned Grammys, BAFTAs, Golden Globes, an Oscar and multiple other awards in his legendary career, was nearing the end of his long battle with cancer when he agreed to one final performance.

Director Neo Sora – Sakamoto’s son – presents his father’s farewell with minimalistic virtuosity. There is only Sakamoto, his piano, and his wonderful talent, as a cascade of musical beauty fills in all the colors needed against Sora’s rich black-and-white pallet.

Sora’s camera is often static, as if to respect and savor the moment. But when it does move it is with grace and purpose, to slowly focus on the master’s hands, his fulfilled facial expressions or the repeated bows of his head.

Sakamoto chooses original works from across his career, performing each with a depth of feeling that is transfixing and touching, reaching an almost ethereal level of expression. It is an experience that can be deeply moving for an audience, but it’s also one that requires a theater setting and uninterrupted silence to completely let it in.

Give Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus your time and complete attention, and you will be rewarded. This is a man talking to God through his piano.

Just let your soul be enriched

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Band of Brothers

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Immediate Family

by George Wolf

In the last couple decades, documentaries such as Standing in the Shadows of Motown and the Oscar-winning 20 Feet from Stardom have given just due to the unknown musicians and singers who have long backed up our idols.

Director Denny Tedesco may have been first with the idea, though his debut doc The Wrecking Crew! endured years of delays until its 2008 release. Tedesco is back with Immediate Family, and while he’s still looking behind the musical scenes, his second feature boasts some important distinctions.

To start, it’s much more contemporary. This one features a trove of interviews that are not only recent, but feature musicians that are still highly relevant, such as Stevie Nicks, Don Henley, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Keith Richards, Lyle Lovett and more.

And secondly, for serious music fans (and even casual fans of a certain age), the names Leland Sklar, Russ Kunkel, Waddy Wachtel and Danny “Kooch” Kortchmar may already be plenty familiar. As the film points out, that’s largely thanks to producers Peter Asher and Lou Adler, who in the 1970s decided to start featuring the names and faces of these longtime sidemen in the liner notes of the many albums they played on.

But even if you recognize these players, it’s still a kick to hear the superstars go into detail about how valuable they are, and to watch their specific grooves morph into fully produced classics.

It all follows a formula very similar to the one that made The Wrecking Crew! so irresistible, but with greatly improved production values that increase the immediacy along with the timeline.

Immediate Family ends up feeling like the next logical step in Tedesco’s musical journey. We get more great tunes, witness more important stages in the evolution of popular music, and spend some quality time with four more unique talents that are well worth getting to know better.

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We and Mr. Jones

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The Stones and Brian Jones

by George Wolf

At this point, it’s a good bet that any Rolling Stones fan who is familiar with the name Brian Jones is 1) dedicated 2) old or 3) both.

With The Stones and Brian Jones, documentarian Nick Broomfield aims to add some numbers to that list, reminding all who will listen about Jones’s place in the Stones enduring legacy.

It was, after all, guitarist and blues devotee Brian who is credited with forming the band at the age of 19. He recruited Mick, Keith, Charlie and Bill via other groups or local advertisements, and was the Stones figurehead until the Jagger/Richards cocktail of rock charisma and songwriting prowess began to take over.

As he did with 2019’s Words of Love: Marianne and Leonard, Broomfield leans on archival footage and interview audio to effectively stamp the time and place. He surrounds us with England in the 1960s, pulling us into the story of a young man whose troubled relationship with his parents drove both his ambition and his self-destructive nature.

We hear from other musicians (retired Stone and devoted archivist Bill Wyman serves as a consultant on the film), friends, family and the various girlfriends who bore his 5 children. And while we certainly get a peek behind the rock star curtain (“He just uses people”), Jones’s eventual fade into the background comes off as inevitable.

His haircut was mod, his aim to keep the band bluesy was pure and his attention to fan mail was sweet, but he didn’t sing and didn’t write songs.

Again, do the math.

For music fans, Broomfield has assembled a wealth of audio and video that feels like a must-see scrapbook on the birth of a legend. Ironically, it all casts a spell that’s only broken by the more recent Zoom-like interviews that are included (including Wyman, which only draws more attention to the absence of Mick and Keith).

It’s hard not to smile as a young Brian tells a reporter that he’d do it all again “a hundred times,” and wonder if he ever could have imagined that even today, the history of the band he started would somehow still be adding chapters.

But Brian’s personal history was cut short, and much like in Words of Love, a parting note from long ago becomes a bittersweet ode to the real lives that got away from the people living them. Mr. Jones may not have been a survivor, but as Broomfield makes clear, he should be remembered as more than a footnote.

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Sound + Vision

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Moonage Daydream

by George Wolf

Longtime David Bowie fans know of his early fondness for the “cut up” method to writing songs – literally cutting up lines of written lyrics and then shifting them around in search of more enigmatic creations.

Director Brett Morgen takes a similar approach to telling Bowie’s story in Moonage Daydream, a completely intoxicating documentary that immerses you in the legendary artist’s iconic mystique and ambitious creative process.

Bowie’s estate gifted Morgen with the key to the archives, and the celebrated documentarian (The Kid Stays in the Picture, Jane, Cobain: Montage of Heck) pored through the thousands of hours of footage for moments that could stand on their own while serving a greater narrative. The result is a glorious explosion of sound and vision, revealing Morgen’s choice to trust himself as film editor was also a damn good one.

Anchored by atmospheric bookends that evoke Bowie’s image as the ethereal “man who fell to Earth,” Morgen unleashes a barrage of concert sequences, still photos and interviews clips, interspersed with bits of old movies, news reports and pop culture references. It’s a luscious and cinematic (especially in IMAX) mashup, and one that slowly unveils a subtle but purposeful roadmap.

The music is thrilling and visceral, of course, but the interview footage reveals Bowie to be tremendously inquisitive and philosophical. We see him as a truly gifted artist who felt satisfaction when he “worked well,” but apprehension with new projects (such as painting) that didn’t yet meet his standards.

At first, Morgen’s approach may seem scattershot, as he appears more concerned with blowing our minds than chronological purity. But what becomes clear is that Morgen’s commitment leans toward grouping slices of Bowie’s life that speak to who he was (i.e. juxtaposing a “Rock and Roll Suicide” performance from the 70s with comments about his “sellout” 80s period). And by the time Bowie’s looking back fondly on his first meeting with wife Iman, an appropriate and touching timeline has emerged.

Though the last years of Bowie’s life are skirted just a bit, Moonage Daydream is like no music biography that you’ve ever seen. It’s a risky, daring and defiant experience, which is exactly the kind of film David Bowie deserves. Expect two hours and fifteen minutes of head-spinning fascination, and a sense that you’ve gotten closer to one Starman than you ever felt possible.

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Secret Chords

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Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song

by George Wolf

For longtime fans of Leonard Cohen, the continued pop culture embrace of “Hallelujah” can sometimes feel bittersweet. Other times it just makes you want to scream.

Jeff Buckley didn’t write it! It’s not a Christmas song! And for God’s sake, stop messing with the lyrics!

And even though that’s satisfying to yell when another TV talent show contestant attacks Cohen’s masterpiece with more bluster than feeling, you can’t deny you’re guilty of an equally false claim of ownership. As singer/songwriter Brandi Carlile rightly points out, by now the song “Is its own person. It has a life of its own.”

So, how’d that happen? Back in the early 80s, “Hallelujah” was DOA, buried on a Cohen album that Columbia Records dismissed outright as unworthy to release.

Alan Light first tracked the song’s ascent in his 2012 bestseller “The Holy or the Broken,” and Light serves as a consultant to co-directors Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine for their documentary examination. Straddling the line between biopic and expose, the film gives the uninitiated an overview of Cohen’s background while indulging veteran admirers with a deeper dive into his most acclaimed composition.

Geller and Goldfine interview fans, friends and journalists, tracking Cohen’s unique troubadour life alongside the gradual wave of “Hallelujah” cover versions. It seems only right that Bob Dylan was one of the first to recognize the song’s genius, and it’s a treat to hear his interpretation set the stage for the mainstream breakthrough that came via Jeff Buckley and Shrek (John Cale in the film, Rufus Wainwright on the soundtrack).

But the film’s strongest moments come through the intimacy of hearing from Cohen himself, and getting closer to his often tortured songwriting process (“If I knew where songs came from, I would go there more often”). We see notebook after notebook full of lyrics, while handwritten lines appear and disappear as guesses are made as to just how many verses (100? 180?) Cohen wrote for “Hallelujah” alone.

At times Geller and Goldfine lean back on biography just when the musical detective work is cooking, but A Journey, A Song ultimately connects the two with a resonant thread.

Leonard Cohen was a seeker, always striving to reconcile the primal with the spiritual. The process may have taken several years, but he wrote a song that lays that search bare with unparalleled eloquence. And though Cohen himself admitted before his death that “too many people sing it,” Geller and Goldfine are smart enough to include plenty of footage of Cohen performing the song himself, and to close with k.d. lang’s goosebump-time version that Cohen hinted was his favorite.

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Love And Mercy

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Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road

by George Wolf

“Genius” is a term often thrown around too casually, but about one third of the way through Long Promised Road, a moment drops that leaves little doubt Brian Wilson fits the bill.

Veteran producer Don Was sits in a recording studio with the original masters of God Only Knows, the classic pop symphony Wilson wrote and produced for The Beach Boys in 1966. As Was isolates track after track of those ethereal harmonies, he’s left to just shake his head in amazement.

“I’ve been making records for 40 years, and I have no idea what he’s doing.”

Credited with being an innovator of recording studio possibilities and the architect of the unmistakable Beach Boys sound, Brian has a long list of music business admirers, and director/co-writer Brent Wilson lines up an array of famous faces to sing Brian’s praises. From Elton to Springsteen, Foo Fighters to Nick Jonas and more, we hear nothing but well-earned respect and praise for a once-in-a-lifetime virtuoso. 

And that’s great, but it’s not exactly anything new.

What makes Long Promised Road resonate is the time we spend with the man himself, in rare moments when Brian feels safe enough to let his guard down and revisit people and places from his life and career.

Our guide is the film’s co writer Jason Fine, a longtime journalist who gained Brian’s trust over the course of several years and many conversations. Brian started hearing voices at age 21, and he is still troubled by mental health issues which can make formal, sit down interviews uncomfortable for him. So instead, Jason and Brian take to the road for some engaging carpool conversation.

They tool around Brian’s old California stomping grounds (some of which are now actual landmarks saluting him and The Beach Boys) as Jason asks about the past and Brian answers, while often calling out song requests for Jason to cue up in the car. Through it all, Brian comes across as a dear, sweet soul with minimal ego (he excitedly introduces himself to Vanna White in a diner), full of deep feeling and affection for those who’ve touched his life (even his father Murray and his longtime doctor Eugene Landy – whose relationships with Brian were at best volatile and at worst criminal).

Director Wilson (Streetlight Harmonies) intersperses the conversation with some terrific archival footage, at one point layering film of a young Brian directing the famous “Wrecking Crew” of studio musicians alongside more recent footage of him onstage and in studio. It’s a wonderful juxtaposition that brings the film full circle, giving us both a warm and often moving look back with a fragile genius and an illuminating glimpse of the maestro in his element.