Dave Grohl takes another step toward Renaissance-man status with “Sound City,” his likable debut as a documentary director.
Mr. Grohl has already had considerable success as a drummer, guitarist and vocalist in groups like Nirvana and Foo Fighters and has shown a boundless curiosity with various side projects. (Yes, that was him in a cameo in the 2011 movie “The Muppets.”) Directing “Sound City,” about the recording studio of that name, now defunct, in the San Fernando Valley of California, he shows a decent grasp of how to pace a documentary and how to push nostalgia buttons, avoiding the marsh of smarminess most — though not quite all — of the time.
But “Sound City” is not merely a those-were-the-days eulogy for the studio, which closed in 2011. It’s really three films. The first third is a pleasant, somewhat glossy-feeling look back at the albums that were made there and the stars who made them, with anecdotes from Fleetwood Mac, Rick Springfield and many others that will be candy to several generations’ worth of rock fans. The studio, an unimposing-looking place to say the least, had a knack for turning out a big album just when it seemed on the brink of failure: Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled 1975 album and “Rumours” two years later, Mr. Springfield’s “Working Class Dog” in 1981, Nirvana’s seminal “Nevermind” in 1991.
The film then becomes a chronicle of the slow death of the studio, an analog operation whose heart was a Neve soundboard that recorded on tape, which by the 1980s had begun to be supplanted by digital technology.
Mr. Grohl has become something of a musical preservationist, and he and others lament the loss of the human element of the analog era and the emergence of music created and manipulated on computers. It’s not an antidigital argument — Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails makes a case for digital technology as a creative tool — so much as an antiblandness argument.
And then Mr. Grohl turns his attention to making some new music. He bought the Neve board when Sound City closed and installed it in his own studio, and we see him and others putting it to use.
The big draw is Paul McCartney, who is shown recording a song called “Cut Me Some Slack,” seemingly making it up on the spot. It’s a little incongruous to hear Mr. Grohl advocate for a quick-and-dirty approach — “Do it,” he says. “Make it simple. Make it fast. Don’t overthink it.” — while working with Mr. McCartney, whose résumé includes some beloved Beatles songs that were painstakingly assembled track by track.
But hey, don’t overthink it.
Mr. Grohl has put a lot of affection into this film, and it shows. One of the nicest touches may go unnoticed. Over the ending credits a catchy song called “Sound City” plays. The vocals are credited to Doug Deep and Paula Salvatore — Ms. Salvatore having been the manager of the studio in the 1980s. Earlier in the film she had spoken wistfully about having dreamed of her own musical career.
https://odysee.com/@Documentary-Archive:0/sound-city-2013:e?r=7eNr6s5Zv53V9JtaUGvJfSAidoZ9Xnmx
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 ...
