Docn' - A Celebration of the Music Documentary

Docn' is back! This lost episode was taped two years ago upon the holiday season release of Peter Jackson's Get Back. 

Divided into thirds and running nearly eight hours, Get Back is a look at the beginning of the end of the Beatles. The documentary is doubly successful: first, it complicates and challenges the conventional narrative for why the band broke up (Yoko, bickering) while establishing entirely new questions about what was really happening between these four bandmates. We watch as an arbitrary deadline - for a film, or show, or movie, or something - slowly approaches. The Beatles are then forced to decide if they will continue on at all - and, if so, how. 

What’s surprising about Get Back is how enjoyable it really is to see one of the most over-scrutinized musical acts of the 21st century simply being…themselves. George is often self-deprecating and brittle; Paul is intensively creative and ambitious; John is an endless cutup; Ringo is hungover and/or hesitant. But when they all go up on that roof, the reservations and mythos crumble.

Joining us to talk Beatles for this very special episode is Leah Churner, co-host of The Horticulturati, a talk show about landscape design and gardening.

Docn' Podcast also celebrates the release of Chalk Diary, a collection of essays by our very own Adam Schragin! 

Canadian director and writer Dean DeBlois has a film oeuvre that reveals two passions: one, for bringing fantastical creatures to life via animation (Lilo & Stitch, 2002 and How to Train Your Dragon, 2010) and two, for the music of Icelandic band Sigur Rós, fronted by Jon Thor Birgisson (a.k.a. Jonsi), who DeBlois also featured in the acoustic short film Go Quiet (2010).

Sandwiched between Stitch and Dragon is Heima (2007), a film that has DeBlois chronicling a series of homecoming concerts performed by Sigur Rós for free across Iceland. As is appropriate for a documentary about a band whose music is the primary focus, the film eschews extended interviews or contextual explanations for the real thing: the band playing in various settings, alternately plugged in or not, with the camera panning across the faces of families drawn to the spectacle and to other objects of natural wonder. Joining us for this episode is Tim Robinson, a former island dweller himself who helps us discuss the winding and wooly path of these somewhat unlikely art-rock stars.

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The Woodstock Festival held in 1969 over three days in August would not be fated as a short and mostly sweet gathering around music and instead bears the historical weight of a sprawling and chaotic youth bacchanal that defines how we think about the sixties. But how well do we remember Woodstock itself? Thanks to a 1994 director’s cut of the original 1970 film called Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music (that director being Michael Wadleigh), we are treated to almost four hours of sound and visuals that is nothing if not transportive. The Docn’ crew task ourselves with the good, the bad, the exaggerated and the wonderful in this legendary movie and cultural memory, call for more fringe, and are a little less than enthusiastic about how we might have enjoyed sleeping in mud had we been there.

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This very special episode of Docn' has three big firsts - it's our first episode without co-host Carolyn on the microphone (boo), our first episode featuring a guest (yay) and our first discussion of a movie currently out in theaters (ambivalent noise).

We are joined by Managing Director of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (or "TAMI") Elizabeth Hansen to talk about The Velvet Underground, the first music documentary from established and beloved director Todd Haynes.

We discuss how and maybe why this music film is just so damn visual, about film archives in general and Elizabeth's work with TAMI in particular, and about the laser focus of director Haynes and his choice of working with a small set of interviewees to tell a very big story.

Relevant links: The Velvet Underground in Dallas (at Vietnam Moratorium Day in 1969)

The Tyrrell Historical Library Collection - The Amazing Iceberg Machine (1980)

Behind the Music was on for seventeen years and chronicled a dizzying amount of musicians on the sorta music-centric channel VH1. While episodes of the show are quite concise and not proper 'documentaries', we really couldn't avoid addressing this behemoth of very appropriate content.

Armed with breakthrough technology (a random number generator) and crucial data (a list of episodes), the Docn' crew were all set to rally...and then tragedy struck. While Doc'r Carolyn's episode on Lenny Kravitz was happily available online, searching for Adam's episode on Bette Midler and Andrew's on Grand Funk Railroad was ultimately doomed. Our second go-round was more successful, and we ultimately were able to find and analyze episodes on Natalie Cole and Styx.

Aside from commenting on the ups and downs of the artists profiled in the episode, we also reflect on our thoughts about the program in general and speculate about its rebirth this year as a part of Paramount+.

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This month we are excited to discuss the monumental music documentary series, VH1's Behind the Music, which aired from 1997 to 2014. This topic is too expansive for a single podcast episode so we are making it a multi-parter. This week the Docn' crew got together to assign viewing homework to each host for a show-and-tell to be released 14 days from now. With the help of random episode generation technology, Adam, Carolyn, and Andrew find out what Behind the Music they will be watching in this episode. We thought it best to live-record the random picks and resulting emotions therein. 

The breakthrough 1991 album Blood Sugar Sex Magik by The Red Hot Chili Peppers turned 30 this month, and our latest Docn' episode concerns Funky Monks, a promotional vehicle/making-of documentary about that very album.

Funky Monks was directed by Gavin Bowden and released one day after Blood Sugar Sex Magik, an accompanying visual spectacle to pair with an album that would (it turns out) need very little of a push to become not just tremendously successful but also instrumental in the evolution of what was then known as “alternative” rock. Funky Monks shows the band at a creative apex and on the cusp of major changes, and without hyperbole at what is possibly the most defining and important part of their career.

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In 2003 director/producer/writer Ondi Timoner posed the following question to a then-theoretical audience: would anyone ever possibly be interested in the travails of two similarly heady and ambitious (and pretty fresh) psych-influenced ‘90s bands meeting in some strange middlespace of warm recognition and mutual respect before taking deeply dark and contested divergent journeys?

The answer is ‘YES’!.’ Dig! is a documentary about the muddled relationship between alternative radio darlings The Dandy Wharhols and the more prolific/scattered Brian Jonestown Massacre. The movie reveals an excellent set of contrasts, with one band seemingly on a collision course with stardom (but at what creative cost?) and the other pulling deeper into violence and obscurity as if change the subject. Us three found Dig! to be enlightening and depressing - though for different reasons than when we first saw it - and that alone necessitates this reevaluation.

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For our late summer return your Docn’ pals take a bow with Madonna: Truth or Dare, a 1991 doc directed by Alek Kenshihia (of the feature full-length film With Honors in 1994, and of the 2017 Fergie short “Fergie: Save it Till Morning”) and starring Madonna but personally introducing her coterie of dancers, assistants, stage managers, family, and obscure hangers-on. Truth or Dare was a fantastically successful documentary by most critical and commercial standards, but perhaps because of Madonna’s own constant reinventions or just the fact that it has been thirty dang years since its release, exploring this documentary in 2021 felt both nostalgic and fresh. Join us in cheers for the hardworking staff who made the 1990 Blonde Ambition tour such a success despite seasonal and other mishaps; indulge in jeers for “neat” boy Kevin Costner and the Fascist State of Toronto.

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Suzi Q - 2019 - dir. Liam Firmager

At first blush the Suzi Quatro story might not reveal itself as the most fertile ground for a rockumentary - no singular superstar moments or deep tragedies mark this artist’s upward trajectory.  Instead, Quartro’s challenges are dramatic but relatable, and her history contains more slow simmering and less sudden eruption.

Quatro’s difficulties with her immediate family (especially her musician sisters) are the product of years of resentment and regret, and likewise, the dogged question about ‘making it’ in the States seem to endlessly pepper press conferences and eat into even good news.

But the question of what success ultimately means - and more importantly what it means to Quatro - allow us to witness the bassist and singer-songwriter continuing to self-explore past the constrictive career expectancy of the seventies 'girl rocker' and right into the present day.

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