If you’re not familiar with the name Alain Johannes, there’s a good chance he’s had something to do with an album in your collection. Whether he played on it, recorded it, or mixed it, Johannes has been a major contributor to such bands as Queens of the Stone Age, Them Crooked Vultures, Mark Lanegan, Puscifer, Eagles of Death Metal, Arctic Monkeys, and PJ Harvey – to mention only a few. His staggering list of credits as either a producer, session musician, or touring band member is only one aspect of his notable career in modern music.
Perhaps the most important credit in his career is the six albums he produced with wife Natasha Shneider and their alternative rock band Eleven. Criminally underrated, Eleven earned some decent exposure in the 90’s supporting Soundgarden and Pearl Jam on tour, but their sound just never fit into the trends of the decade.
Johannes and Shneider ...
This documentary about Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band picks up where Ron Howard left off – without any of the band’s music or even images
It’s not easy to make a documentary about the greatest album in history when you don’t have access to a single note of the music, but this documentary forges on and cashes in regardless, perhaps assuming its target audience already knows the band’s back catalogue (or won’t realise there’s no Beatles music in it). It cannily picks up the story where last year’s “official” doc – Ron Howard’s Eight Days a Week – left off: the pivotal year of 1967, when the band gave up touring, recorded Sgt Pepper and met the Maharishi.
This history is raked over by greying, second-tier talking heads in granular detail, right down to the design of the “get well soon” card John Lennon drew for George Harrison’s sister-in-law. But without the supporting music, or even images, there’s a dancing-about-architecture feel to the whole exercise....
The Hollywood Vampires take their name from an all-star social club that drank itself to oblivion during the mid 1970s at the Rainbow Bar and Grill on The Sunset Strip. The 2019 documentary The Rainbow chronicles the restaurant’s place in the Los Angeles music scene and is an engaging profile of the family that’s run it for three generations (that is, when it’s not indulging in lazy nostalgia). Directed by Zak Knutson, it is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
Since opening in 1972, the Rainbow has offered food and drinks to successive generations of rockers. Located in West Hollywood, betwixt a cluster of music venues, it was popular with bands visiting Los Angeles as well as those living and trying to make it in the City of Angels. Besides the Hollywood Vampires – which included Alice Cooper, a couple Beatles and riotous Who drummer Keith Moon, Led Zeppelin picked up groupies there, The Runaways ate there and a teenage Slash snuck in dressed as a woman. Motörhead’s Lemmy ...
The 1991 documentary of the making of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' album that undoubtedly broke them through to the mainstream proper with the crossover hit, "Under the Bridge."
When I originally saw the film in the mid-90s, I was astounded at the recording process — with a much younger Rick Rubin and engineer Brendan O'Brien (before he became a household name producer himself with Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, Soundgarden, etc.), and made in a house, the supposedly haunted The Mansion (which Rubin now owns).
It shows a much younger band — there's a lot of serious talk mixed in with their own brand of sexual juvenility.
What's interesting is seeing the brief moments of interplay amongst the Peppers. John Frusciante before his descent into his hell of drugs and madness and his subsequent return to the fold. Kiedis mixing his own sense of the world from the brotherhood he feels with the ...
