MusicFilmWeb: See It Loud

Numerous films have explored music as a form of protest, and at first glance Let Fury Have the Hour seems cut from the same cloth, with its all-star cast of politically minded artists. But not long into Antonino D’Ambrosio’s rousing documentary, it becomes clear that something both more broad and more nuanced is afoot. Very loosely based on D’Ambrosio’s book of the same name, a collection of essays about the life and legacy of Joe Strummer, Let Fury Have the Hour examines the nexus of creativity, community, and social and economic justice via a fast-moving collage of interviews, images, and songs that is part history lesson, part hootenanny.

Laying the foundation with a primer on how, in the film’s view, the twin ’80s onslaughts of Reagan and Thatcher replaced a social fabric built on shared citizenship with individualism and consumerism, Let Fury Have the Hour features some 50 artists (and the odd economist or historian) talking about the forces and events that forged their worldview and shaped, to use the film’s mantra, their “creative response.” The cast includes filmmaker John Sayles, comedian Lewis Black, visual artist Shepard Fairey, playwright Eve Ensler, novelists Edwidge Danticat and Hari Kunzru, and musicians like Ian MacKaye, Billy Bragg, Chuck D, Tom Morello, Wayne Kramer of the MC5, Oakland rapper Boots Riley, and extravagantly mustachioed gypsy punk Eugene Hutz (whose acoustic rooftop jam of “Immigraniada” gives the movie an emblematic exclamation point).

Antonino D'Ambrosio

More than protest or politics per se, Let Fury Have the Hour is about exploring connections – between skateboarding and social justice, activism and Afrobeat, the old counterculture and the new – and how the forces unleashed by punk and hip hop have already started remaking the world. D’Ambrosio spent a large part of November touring the film at festivals across Ireland (it opens a US cinema run December 14 in New York); we caught up with him last week at the Northwest Film and Music Fest in Sligo and decided to resuscitate our See It Loud podcast for a discussion of art, politics, and creative community-building.

Thanks very much to Sligeach Films for hosting this interview and to Colin McKeown, Tara McGowan, and the whole team at the Northwest Film and Music Fest and The Model Sligo. The opening music for See It Loud is by Los Musicos de Jose and comes from Mevio’s Music Alley.

Movies in this one:

Let Fury Have the Hour

Raymond Scott

Deconstructing Dad, Stan Warnow’s music documentary about the enigmatic composer, bandleader, and inventor Raymond Scott, makes an overdue theatrical bow on Friday, July 13, at Greenwich Village indie/art house Quad Cinemas. It’s a story, and a movie, well worth getting to know, so if you missed it the first time around, here’s a rebroadcast (or whatever you call it when you repeat a podcast) of our See It Loud conversation with Warnow, recorded in 2010 as the movie was on its initial film festival run.

As the title implies, Scott isn’t just Warnow’s subject, he’s also his father, which makes this a uniquely compelling entry in the annals of unsung-innovator music film bios. The leader of a popular swing band in the 1930s and ’40s and the somewhat unlikely maestro on the middlebrow ’50s TV show Your Hit Parade, Scott was a crazily inventive composer (best remembered today for tunes like “Powerhouse” and  “Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals,” which graced many a classic Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoon) and an overlooked pioneer in modern music history who created some of the earliest analogue synthesizers and sequencers.

He was also a distant and chilly parent who left his first wife and kids for an ingenue singer he discovered when she was barely in her teens. As much a psychological as a musical portrait, Deconstructing Dad sees Warnow, a veteran film editor whose credits include the classic music festival docs Woodstock and Message to Love, work out some understandably ambivalent feelings about his father while celebrating Scott’s singular artistry. The podcast has a few outdated references (and some ambient kitchen noise from one corner of the conversation), but it should still be fresh for those only now getting a chance to enter the strange world of Raymond Scott. If you can’t make it to the Village this weekend, check Warnow’s website for information on future screenings, or to buy the DVD.

Martin Scorsese’s mammoth music documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World has been widely hailed (including in these pages) for the breadth and cinematic skill with which it tackles the life of the so-called Quiet Beatle. But the bubble of approbation has been pricked by some very sharp critical sticks, variously objecting to the film as tediously long, riddled with gaps, or adulatory to the point of hagiography, simplifying and sentimentalizing a complex figure.

In a probing recent entry in his IndieWire.com column Grey Matters, music, film, and culture writer Ian Grey takes Scorsese to task for a multitude of Harrison-related sins (while simultaneously celebrating his more recent feature, the sublime Hugo). In this edition of See It Loud, Grey joins MFW’s Andy Markowitz – who wrote one of those glowing reviews of Material World – to debate the doc’s merits and flaws and their relationship to Scorsese’s larger body of work, and to hate on Eric Clapton.

This podcast is about Martin Scorsese movies, so it should come as no surprise that it contains explicit language. The opening music by Los Musicos de Jose comes from Mevio’s Music Alley.

Movies in this one:

George Harrison: Living in the Material World

The Last Temptation of Christ

Shine a Light

After Hours

Hugo

Tony Palmer at the Sound+Vision music film festival. Photo by Tommy Weir/Cinema North West.

In this edition of See It Loud, the music documentary podcast, we continue our conversation with Tony Palmer at last week’s Sound+Vision music film festival in Sligo, Ireland.

After detailing the tangled history of his restored Leonard Cohen tour documentary Bird on a Wire in part one of our interview, the veteran British filmmaker here recounts how John Lennon launched his career as a chronicler of rock and pop, explains why he dramatized rather than documented the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, and touches on the musical mind of Stanley Kubrick.

This edition of See It Loud contains a couple of rude words. The opening music by Los Musicos de Jose comes from Mevio’s Music Alley. Thanks again to Colin McKeown at Cinema North West, Lara Byrne at The Model, and Sligeach Films for their help with this podcast.

Movies in this one:

Testimony

All My Loving

All You Need Is Love

Editor’s note: With the very belated theatrical release in January of the storied 1974 Leonard Cohen tour documentary Bird on a Wire, we’re reposting our 2011 interview with the great music-film maker Tony Palmer on the doc’s tortured history and glorious rebirth.

Since film sidetracked him from an academic career in the 1960s, Tony Palmer has been responsible for some of the most incisive and acclaimed music films of the last 50 years, ranging in subject from classical giants to rock gods to opera divas to, in the monumental 1976 BBC series All You Need Is Love, the entire history to date of popular music.

After touching on Palmer’s work in See It Loud #11, we met up with the man himself last week at the inaugural Sound+Vision music film festival in Sligo, Ireland, where he presented two of his films: Rory Gallagher – Irish Tour ’74, which captures the incendiary blues-rock guitarist in his prime in his native land, and Bird on a Wire, an intimate, long-lost chronicle of Leonard Cohen’s 1972 European tour that re-emerged late last year after a painstaking restoration.

The extraordinary tale of how Palmer made, lost, rediscovered, and reconstructed Bird on a Wire is the primary subject of this first half of our two-part podcast with the esteemed filmmaker. In part two, to be posted tomorrow, he discusses some of his rock-related and classical work as well as shopping with Stanley Kubrick and lunching with John Lennon.

The opening music by Los Musicos de Jose comes from Mevio’s Music Alley; the closing of Leonard Cohen live is used with the kind permission of Tony Palmer. Copious thanks are due to Colin McKeown of Sound+Vision and Cinema North West, Lara Byrne at Sligo arts center The Model, and Niall Flynn and the crew at Sligeach Films, to whom we owe the better than usual sound quality.

Movies in this one:

Bird on a Wire

All You Need Is Love

Maria Callas

Margot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hyd_ygJviQ

In his music film How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin, the distinguished British documentarian Leslie Woodhead tackles the untold story of a generation of young Soviets’ illicit love for the Fab Four, and how that passion ripped a gaping hole in the Iron Curtain. It’s a tale of crude bootleg vinyl, homemade guitars, and befuddled apparatchiks featuring a varied cast of true Beatle believers, from a wild-eyed John Lennon worshiper to one of Vladimir Putin’s right hand men. It was also a personal journey for Woodhead, who shot the first footage of the Beatles in Liverpool’s Cavern club in 1962 and has been making films in Russia and the former communist world for 25 years.

In this edition of See It Loud, the music documentary podcast, Woodhead talks about discovering the alternate history of Beatlemania and other tales of the Soviet Union’s tangled dance with Western music, including the extraordinary story of Dean Reed, the Eastern bloc’s American pop idol.

The See It Loud opening theme by Los Musicos de Jose comes from Mevio’s Music Alley. The closing snippet of (what else?) “Back in the USSR” is by the Czech cover band Humbug; you can download the full version at their website or watch the video here. And if you’re interested in other movies about how rock ‘n’ roll won the Cold War, check our 5+1 list of Iron Curtain-related music films.

Movies in this one:

How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin

The Long Way Home

The Incredible Case of Comrade Rockstar

The Red Elvis

American Rebel: The Dean Reed Story

Kevin Gant

Through the magic of podcasting, See It Loud returns to Los Angeles to talk to acclaimed feature filmmaker Jay Duplass (Baghead, Cyrus) about his new music documentary, Kevin, which screens this week at LA’s Don’t Knock the Rock film fest.

For his first nonfiction film, Duplass tracked down the musical hero of his Austin film-school days – a troubadour named Kevin Gant who won a fierce following for his cosmic, flamenco-influenced folk songs until abruptly quitting music and vanishing from the local scene in 1995. Fifteen years later, Duplass finds out what happened to Kevin, and helps him rediscover his muse.

Then it’s a conversation with the mother/daughter team behind Don’t Knock the Rock, indie film OG Allison Anders and musician Tiffany Anders, on their weakness for tales of lost rockers, making music for product placement, and Allison’s upcoming film, the Britpop-inspired romance Strutter.

This podcast features a little taste of Kevin Gant’s music (thanks Jay) and no explicit language, for a change. The See It Loud opening theme by Los Musicos de Jose comes from Mevio’s Music Alley.

Program:

0:00 – intro

1:25 – Jay Duplass, part 1

4:40 – excerpt from “House of Capricorn,” Kevin Gant

5:53 – Jay Duplass, part 2

15:15 – Allison & Tiffany Anders

31:40 – excerpt from “The Bridge,” Kevin Gant

Movies in this one:

Kevin

Hit So Hard: The Life & Near Death Story of Patty Schemel

The Jim Sullivan Story

Lost Rockers

The Beat Is the Law – Fanfare for the Common People

Bob Forrest was the crazed frontman of indie cult band Thelonious Monster. Patty Schemel was the pounding drummer driving Hole in its heyday, and one of the few out lesbians in mainstream rock ‘n’ roll. And for a while in the 1990s, they might have topped anyone’s list of LA rock’s likeliest drug casualties. Schemel spent time as a homeless crack whore, Forrest as a homeless junkie, and a lot of people thought they were dead.

How Schemel and Forrest survived, recovered, and re-invented themselves – she is happily married, gigging, and running a dog-sitting service; he’s a nationally known drug counselor and one of Dr. Drew’s sidekicks on VH1′s Celebrity Rehab – is told in two of the highest profile music films on this year’s festival circuit, Hit So Hard and Bob and the Monster.

Covering similar geographical, chronological, and thematic ground but in sometimes startlingly different cinematic ways, the two films debuted side by side at South by Southwest. But Bob and the Monster director Keirda Bahruth and the Hit So Hard director/producer team of P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes didn’t meet until the movies were again programmed together at last week’s Sheffield Doc/Fest.

For the latest edition of See It Loud, MFW gathered the three filmmakers at a local pub to talk about their newfound friendship after years of eying each other’s productions at a wary distance and how they addressed the challenge of breathing new life into the rock ‘n’ rehab doc.

This podcast contains one bad word. The opening theme by Los Musicos de Jose comes from Mevio’s Music Alley. Contrary to what you might think from listening, it is not sponsored by Sheffield’s Chicken Bar.

Movies in this one:

Bob and the Monster

Hit So Hard

Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone

Coinciding with the reunited Pulp’s first tour in nine years, The Beat Is the Law – Fanfare for the Common People traces Jarvis Cocker and company’s long, bumpy ride to Britpop stardom against the backdrop of musical and social ferment the 1980s wrought in their hometown of Sheffield.

Due out on DVD tomorrow, Eve Wood’s documentary threads Pulp’s story with that of a decade-plus in which the northern English city was riven by industrial and economic decline and its music scene – briefly the national vogue with the experimental/electronic pop success of the Human League, ABC, and Cabaret Voltaire (the subject of Wood’s acclaimed prior feature Made in Sheffield) – was seemingly in remission. But The Beat Is the Law paints 1980s Sheffield as a hotbed of creativity where musicians and artists on the dole carved out new creative spaces and a largely forgotten band’s sole single spawned a dance music empire and indirectly led to the founding of powerhouse indie label Warp.

Together, Wood’s films recount the story of Sheffield music from the mid-’70s to the mid-’90s as told by the Jarvis Cocker, Human League’s Phil Oakey, and other scene stalwarts. In this edition of See It Loud, featuring musical snippets from Clock DVA, Heaven 17, and Chakk, she talks to fellow South Yorkshire transplant Andy Markowitz about discovering the Sheffield scene, tossing a guitar off an apartment building, and chronicling the birth, extended adolescence, and seemingly sudden rise of Pulp.

The opening theme by Los Musicos de Jose comes from Mevio’s Music Alley.

Movies in this one:

Made in Sheffield

The Beat Is the Law – Fanfare for the Common People

From the mid-’80s to the late ’90s, the sound of British indie rock was the sound of Creation Records, the buccaneering label that launched the Jesus and Mary Chain, Ride, Primal Scream, Teenage Fanclub, and a little Mancunian outfit called Oasis, among others. A dozen years after mercurial founder Alan McGee shuttered the label, audiences all over the world are reliving its tumultuous history, and re-hearing its remarkable output, in Danny O’Connor’s Upside Down: The Creation Records Story.

As candidly told by McGee and most of Creation’s key players (including Noel Gallagher of Oasis, Jesus and Mary Chain’s Jim Reid, Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, and Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine), it’s a tale fueled by drugs, fights, and financial adventuring, and a run of musical creativity that produced several of the era’s most influential records.

Since its London bow last October O’Connor’s doc has been one of the hits of the festival circuit, criss-crossing the planet from Texas to Trondheim and Santiago to (soon) Sheffield, with more screenings on tap through summer and UK theatrical and home video release imminent. On a break from his travels, the Irish director talked to MFW from his home in rural England about capturing Creation’s sound and fury on screen and taking it on the road.

This podcast contains explicit language and a bit of feedback. The opening theme by Los Musicos de Jose comes from Mevio’s Music Alley.

Movies in this one:

Upside Down: The Creation Records Story