I’ve been loving the coverage of the movie premiere at Sundance: “You mean to tell me that Yellow Submarine has a narrative arc?” (Bono, in response to some trainspotter criticizing the film’s lack of cohesiveness).

1) There’s no doubt that this was the right band to test this technology. Big and bold and loud - but not loud enough. It’s a concert film. TURN IT UP.

2) I found myself fascinated by the oddest things, like - what drink, exactly, does Larry Mullen, Jr. have next to his drum stool, within arm’s reach? Iced tea? Mint Julep?

3) The film needed a pause, and a zoom, mostly so I could see what, exactly, Bono had taped to the stage in front of his mic.

4) Every person in South America owns a tiny digital camera. Or at least so it seemed every time any member of U2 got near the edge of the stage.

5) The setlist is incredibly deficient. Where were some of the no-brainers like “Elevation,” or “City of Blinding Lights”? I mean, “Miss Sarajevo” is compelling and all but it’s not “Even Better Than The Real Thing.” This was a BIG SCREAMING MULTIMEDIA THING and not the place for subtlety.

6) You know those guys at every concert who get up on each other’s shoulders, take their shirts off, and wave them around in a circle above their head? They have them in South America, too. (Former readers will be interested to know that woo girls also exist in S.A.)

7) I realize that any song from “Achtung Baby” is going to present a tempting opportunity to recreate ZooTV in 3D format. However, when “The Fly” gives me the only time to watch all four members of U2 wearing instruments and jamming together at center stage, I do not want to have my view obscured by words and letters at the front of the screen.

8) If you went to this movie to see anything, it would be “Streets,” right? I got goosebumps just thinking about it during the opening notes. South America, 100,000 people, if God was ever going to walk through the room, it would be here, right?

It was so underwhelming it was just sad. “With Or Without You,” a song I hate and despise (HI SHARON), was more compelling than “Streets” in U23D.

9) You will find yourself scanning the crowd, at least I did. You are looking for the people like you, the people like your friends, the people that are like the annoying people you don’t want to be near at any concert. But I liked that. The commonality is refreshing.

10) Cutting between cities/venues in one song was terrible. I felt cheated later. This isn’t a Disney ride.

While it was definitely U2, it didn’t really give you the feeling of seeing them, I don’t think. I think “Streets” in Rattle and Hum, in all its one-dimensional simplicity, gives you that feeling a million times more than U23D did. I am glad I saw it for free, if I had paid for it I would have felt more than a little ripped off.

My problem with this remains that the house (well, the orchestra) is fake, and I think history deserved a real fucking audience with real fucking fans, no matter how old, wrinkled and unattractive the fan base might be.

On the one hand I loved the unconventional approach taken, not yet another boring documentary with hours of headshots and voiceover gravely intoning the details of the subject’s childhood. And I knew who the players were, so it was fine for me. But all I could think was, what about the people who haven’t read every word written about John Mellor and the Clash? We’re documenting Joe’s legacy and we can’t be bothered with a small unobtrusive caption identifying who the person was? I mean, ya know, I *think* that was Bobby Gillespie, but I wasn’t sure, and would it have not been punk rock to let people in on the secret?

And maybe that was it, but the whole “punk is a secret world only for the insiders” ended a long time ago, especially for Joe. The whole point of the campfires was inclusion, and Joe was INCLUSIVE. Wouldn’t it have been meaningful for people to know that Mick Jones was doing the interview from the same counsel block (if not the same apartment) that his grandmother lived in, with its view of the Westway, the ledge he purportedly wrote “London Calling” on? Why deprive someone of that if they don’t know it? People weren’t born knowing punk rock legends, they learn them. Why not teach a whole new generation and the generations after this one?

Even if the film wasn’t meant as definitive, but more of an oral history, I’ll point out that none of the major players are getting any younger. It’s hard to get them all in one place and it may never happen again. Just the most basic of conventional documentary standards would have served Joe’s legacy well, without choking on conventionality.

The campfires. They became so important to Joe, but we don’t learn this until the end of the movie, which is filmed from the vantage point of someone looking into the campfire, not as a member of the campfire, another thing that seemed exclusionary and foreign and, well, not Strummer, ya know? I felt excluded, and I consider myself a distant member of the tribe, the girl who skipped her senior prom to see the Clash at Bond’s Casino. The boyfriend, who values Joe’s place in the rock pantheon, felt that even more strongly: “Okay, I get it, we’re not invited.”

Maybe I’m reading too much into it but for two different people approaching the movie from the two places people are likely to approach this work, it seemed a valid sample size.

I don’t know why Simonon wasn’t part of it. If it was his ego, get the fuck over it already. If it was the ego of the filmmakers, I don’t even know what to say. Even Mick showed up and was, I felt, reasonably honest about things. Not, of course, that I pretend to really know what went on - only the men involved will ever truly know - but I felt like he stood up and honored his friend and their band and their work with his honesty.

Finally, a touch of brilliance to overlay Joe’s BBC broadcasts. It was like he was there, and had never left.

It just could have been so much more.

And watched all four. Avidly.

It will probably sound ignorant in the extreme when I offer that on one level it amazes me that there was a significant enough story to comfortably fill four hours without feeling thin. It’s not so much ignorant as myopic, I think; I was never an *enormous* fan and kind of stopped following his career around Wildflowers. And probably ignored some of the commercial releases after Damn The Torpedos, because, well, it was everywhere and you didn’t have to work for it or look for it.

But I liked Petty, even if he struck me sometimes as an absolute bastard. He was definitely one of the good guys.

The documentary is priceless for many things (including the fact that someone around Petty had a video camera since the band’s VERY FIRST TRIP TO CALIFORNIA, not to mention every single other moment after that), but the winning footage to me is the evolution of the Wilburys. What luck to have such great interview footage with George. What serendipity that the camera was there the whole time. How sad that they never got to tour. The footage of him working with Johnny Cash - even more breathtaking than Petty and Orbison.

I sat there the entire time going, “Oh, yeah, *that*, I forgot about that.” The tour with Dylan. The fight over the $9.98 album price. Filing for banktruptcy, which at the time I didn’t even begin to understand. How good the videos were, and how many of them were so iconic and still hold up today. The unsung talents of people like Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench.

I also felt that the coverage was fair but not fawning. Howie Epstein’s death, Stan Lynch’s departure - these were the things that were not ignored, not glossed over.

Even if you think you don’t care about Petty, if you are at all interested in the history of rock and roll, this is worth the investment of your time. And for Petty, it’s a dignified representation of his legacy; there’s no other word for it. Would that other artists of his stature use this as a model. (Hint, hint.)

Keith’s scene in the new Pirates movie.

[via undercover, via rocks off]

It’s a document about how anger fades to — well, it just fades. And, truth be told, much of what Arthur said and felt I would bet that David and Syl felt at one time or another: the anger at watching the disciples of the Dolls make millions of dollars while for years you couldn’t even buy the Dolls albums in the U.S. except used, or imports of Dutch reissues. One could probably write a thesis about this, but, again, anger fades, and people move on.

Arthur’s life is portrayed with dignity and sympathy but also objectively, and the religion isn’t shoved down anyone’s throat, it’s presented exactly as it was for him. You can feel sorry for him but he doesn’t ask anyone to do that. The film captures perfectly and cleanly what was swirling around this reunion: was it going to happen? Would everyone actually show up? If they showed up, would they be able to play together? Would they implode before making it to London? And even worse, would it suck? Bob Geldof (one of many luminaries nicely assembled to speak passionately about the Dolls) relates how his children, fans due to their access to his record collection, utterly refused to go to Meltdown “because it wouldn’t be like the poster”. Mick Jones, Chrissie Hynde, heck, even Fern, who has been in the front row of every Dolls related show since the beginning of time was there. The tears in (Dolls and JT biographer) Nina Antonia’s eyes as she speaks about the upcoming shows are genuine and moving.

And it wasn’t like the poster, but even most of the people who were there Back In The Day barely remember what it was like. It was what it was, and it was big and glorious and even watching badly filmed live performance of that first moment when the three of them, the reformed Dolls, stepped onto that Royal Festival Hall stage and played those first notes will give you goosebumps.

Well, provided you give a fuck. And if you don’t, why on earth are you reading this blog? Because, as Morrissey said, without the Dolls, I wouldn’t be here, doing this.

The footage of early Dylan is mindblowing; and someone, thank Allah, got Dylan to sit down and spell it all out before he’s not here to do that.

It seems kind of amazing that Dylan - Dylan! - would be so willing to do this, but it feels like he has enough of sense of his legacy and how he wants it to be presented when he is no longer on this earth that he’s being willing to let us in behind the curtain.

Thank god someone is doing this. Thank god Dylan is letting them. And why can’t some people get over their large freakin’ egos to let a Scorsese do the same thing for them, before it’s too late?

(Thanks, H., for the tip off!)

“All you need is one guy or girl to stand up and say ‘Fuck this,’ and everyone goes: ‘Voice of a generation! Thank you. I’ve been thinking that, I never had the guts to say it’ - and all of a sudden - ‘Fuck this’ has a backbeat.”
–Henry Rollins

July 9 (thanks, BP) on IFC at 10pm (for the six people who have it as part of their cable package), and July 20 on A&E! So you have, actually, no excuse not to see this. (Also, coming soon to DVD, I hear.)

My review of “Punk: Attitude!”

“Two-shot on Mike and d.boon.”

The story begins with Mike Watt telling the story of how he and d.boon met, that d.boom jumped out of a tree and fell on him.

CUT TO:

An older, greyer, more grizzled Watt in 2003: “This is the tree, right here.”

If your heart doesn’t plummet at that very moment — at the contrast, at the fact that Watt remembers, at the constant subtext, that d.boon has not been on this planet for 20 years now, then this isn’t the film for you.

we jam econo is the story of the late, lamented Minutemen, West Coast punk rock pioneers out of San Pedro. Over the course of the almost two hours of footage (including over 53 interviews, covering everyone close to the band (including Watt’s mother), up to John Doe, Thurston Moore, Raymond Pettibone, Byron Coley, Greg Ginn, Keith Morris, Ian Mackaye, Richard Meltzer, Flea, and of course, Watt and George Hurley, you come away with an incredibly intricate, thorough understanding of this band and its history and, the impossible task, comprehending why this band was so important and meaningful to so very many people.

The latter is a task that is the most difficult, in my opinion. You’ve taken on the task of historian and archivist but in the burning need to capture all the details, sometimes it is hard if not impossible to retreat and find some perspective, and push through to be able to convey import to outsiders, to those who weren’t there, to those who were but didn’t have the entire picture. This is something that producer Keith Scherion and director Tim Irwin (childhood friends who discovered the band together) have excelled at; it makes the film more cerebral than flashy, but the Minutemen and the music they created also fit that description.

The film has a good balance of interview and live footage, and I especially appreciated their willingness to let a live clip play out in its entirety (then again, easy to do when few songs were more than 2 minutes; Watt’s incredulity when he realizes one song - the first song to go over 2 minutes - was actually 2 minutes and 30 seconds was priceless). Still, it’s tempting to cut live songs short, especially when the quality is 80’s camcorder and you have 53 interview subjects to try to cram into a short span of time.

But live is where the Minutemen came alive for me; West Coast punk rock, to me, was this inpenetrable wall of dark blackness that I could not relate to (with very few exceptions, such as X); Double Nickels On The Dime (the explanation of which I won’t spoil, as it’s one of the best moments of the film) changed that for me, but it wasn’t until I saw the Minutemen live for the first time, opening for R.E.M., that everything fell into place.

I saw a series of at least a dozen R.E.M. shows in the fall and winter of 1985 during which the Minutemen were the opening act, and watching d.boon perform his cannonball-cum-Townshend jumps around the stage every night was nothing short of joyous. So for me personally, it was heartbreaking in the extreme when the film ended with the band discussing the upcoming opening band slot (which was incredibly controversial at the time), and hearing Watt talk about how the last show of the tour, in Charlotte (which I can still close my eyes and remember) was the last time he ever played onstage with d.boon, who died in a car accident several weeks later.

You are left with the indelible sense that d.boon’s absence still affects those close to him on a daily basis; Watt most obviously (and heartbreakingly); Ian Mackaye holding up a note he’s clearly held onto all these years, alerting him to d.boon’s death.

we jam econo is a labor of love, a fitting tribute, a thoroughly professional and well-thought out piece of documentary filmmaking. If you weren’t there, it gives you the keys to the kingdom; if you were, it will fill in the holes and leave you smiling and bittersweet and just a little misty. It’s loud, it’s direct, and it does this band justice. Go see it if it’s playing anywhere near you — but if you can’t, there will be a DVD in the fall, which will also contain at least three live shows in their entirety.

[disclaimer: i have contributed to this project in the way of photographs and memorabilia, and appear in the end credits as a result.]