I love music documentaries, can’t get enough of ’em. Here are three I saw recently:
First up, Becoming Led Zeppelin. No fucking way I was gonna miss this. I was never really much into their excessive concert movie. But I really did want to see what I’ve read so often about which is their early days. I wanted to see this in IMAX but Sonny Boy and I went to an IMAX theater which was actually playing something else on that screen. For the record, six people in the audience. I think that has less to do with lack of interest as it does lack of promotion.
And make no mistake, this is BECOMING Led Zeppelin. It goes as far as Led Zep II in 1969 and that’s it. But it’s fun and interesting to see the three surviving guys (and recordings of Bonham) talking about how the band formed. I guess the only downside is they interview literally nobody else, no fellow musicians, no rock journalists, no nothin’. And no, there’s nothing about their plagiarism or debauchery or any of that crap. Just their pure love for music.
And there are gobs of videos, some of which go on for maybe 10 minutes. The power of this (essentially) three-piece band is undeniable from the very start. Here they are in Sweden completing the Yardbirds tour after all the guys except Page dropped out:
This doc was made by Questlove who is about as knowledgeable on the music scene as anyone. (A friend of mine just lent me a pretty good book by him called Music is History. I also recently read Sly’s autobio, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)).
What can you say about Sly Stone? Who, having heard his music or seen him in the Woodstock movie doesn’t love his stuff? He was a real innovator and when “Dance to the Music” came along, no one had heard anything quite like it before.
Nor had anyone seen an integrated band with a female trumpet player who sang! The doc goes into how Sly had been a DJ and then a producer, even producing some of Grace Slick’s Great Society stuff.
The Family Stone were highly influential. Somebody dragged Miles Davis to see the band and he couldn’t get enough of them. Larry Graham’s slap bass was copied by everubody and Sly just wrote a whole bunch of great tunes. (Turns out he had some serious musical training.)
Sly eventually fucked himself up on drugs and the subtext of this doc is that highly successful Black people – at least in America – often have to bear the burden of their entire race.
If you’ve never seen it before, here is the Family Stone’s Woodstock set. For the record, Sly is very much with us (just turned 81) and in the words of his daughter, is now just your typical old Black man. But what a great band!
“He’s not paid to think, just play.” A line from the Kinks 1966 song “Session Man.”The harpsichord intro on that is played by none other than Nicky Hopkins, session man extraordinaire.
And The Session Man is the name of the third documentary on our list. Like a lot of you, I know the name Nicky Hopkins largely from Stones albums. He seemed to play on pretty much everything. (The Stones had an excellent keyboard player named Ian Stewart but Stu was determined by their manager to not have the right look. That’s show biz.)
But it turns out that Nicky played on a lot more than Stones tunes. He also played with the Beatles, the solo Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Rod Stewart, Carly Simon, Harry Nilsson, Quicksilver Messenger Service (great friends with those guys), Jerry Garcia, Art Garfunkel just to name a few. Garfunkel was at his wedding.
By all accounts, a super-nice guy, humble and a blazingly great musician. In fact if there’s any slight downside to this documentary, it’s that after about an hour of everybody saying everything but “he’s the reincarnation of Chopin” it gets a little wearisome.
Oh, someone did say he was the reincarnation of Chopin. Nicky. He believed it. Well, he WAS classically trained and could pretty much play anything. In any event, think of his haunting piano intro to ‘Monkey Man,’ or his raucous playing on the Jefferson Airplane’s song “Volunteers.’ Great stuff.
Alas, Nicky suffered from Crohn’s disease which was not well understood at the time. This caused him to eventually stop touring with the Stones which opened the door for Chuck Leavell.
“Hopkins died on 6 September 1994, at the age of 50, in Nashville, Tennessee, from complications resulting from intestinal surgery related to his lifelong battle with Crohn’s disease.”
Here’s a great jam from a solo album he did called The Tin Man Was a Dreamer. It runs over the end credits to the movie. Bobby Keys on sax.
