BEFORE: OK, so this one wasn't part of the original plan either, and I've decided that I have to stop adding documentaries at the last minute, but yet I'm still continuing to do so. This one's running on Starz on Demand right now, so it's essentially FREE (umm, with my cable bill) and there's another one I'm thinking about adding, "Hitsville: The Making of Motown".
The problem here is, I still don't know when movie theaters are going to open up, or if they will at all during calendar year 2020. So I was forced today to write out my whole plan for the rest of the year, just to make sure I'm not screwing it up by adding extra documentaries that are available and can be just worked into the chain. As I said the other day, if I assume for a minute that "The New Mutants" will not get released in August, that actually frees up four slots for me, because I can eliminate the extra films I would have had to add to link to it - and if "Bill & Ted Face the Music" also doesn't get released in time, that will free up two slots, so where do I stand, now that I've added three rock docs already that weren't part of the plan, and I'm thinking about adding two more?
I think everything maybe still could be OK - if theaters open in August I can fit in "Bill & Ted" in August and "Black Widow" in November, but I'll have to drop the last two movies in December to make it work, and I can still end on a Christmas movie. If theaters open up some time between August and November, I'll also be in good shape, and dropping "Bill & Ted" but keeping "Black Widow" will allow for TWO Christmas movies, assuming nothing else changes between now and then. And if theaters stay closed past November and I can't see "Black Widow" either in 2020, then I'll have to drop "Hellboy" too, and chart a different course to the end of the year, but I think then I can work in THREE Christmas movies - so things are mostly set in stone, barring any last-minute surprises, and I can adjust the plan to fit the industry's recovery schedule, no matter what it is.
It's good to have a plan, sure, but these days I need to make sure it's a flexible one. I had high hopes for seeing "The New Mutants" and "Wonder Woman 1984", but as best as I can tell, that's not going to happen for me in 2020, even if theaters open tomorrow - so I'm just trying to salvage what I can from my plans right now and finish the damn year as best as I can. I thought for a few weeks that maybe I could move "Hellboy" to the start of October, but whatever link I thought I found before, I can't find it again. And I also tried to re-organize October, but that was a bust, too.
David Crosby carries over from "Echo in the Canyon", and so do a few other Laurel Canyon residents and visitors - I'm at the point where all the movies seem to be drawing from the same group of rock icons via interviews and archive footage, and that could easily allow Bob Dylan or Paul McCartney to beat out all the actors with 8 appearances and win the year. That could happen, especially if I keep adding rockumentaries.
THE PLOT: Meet David Crosby in this portrait of a man with everything but an easy retirement on his mind.
AFTER: David Crosby is a two-time inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (for his stints in The Byrds and Crosby, Stills and Nash), who, as of 2019, can't get any of his old band-mates to talk to him any more. Even the last time they played on stage with him, it was all done facing in a different direction, and very few words were exchanged before and after the show. The explanation for this is quite simple, David Crosby is an asshole, which he freely admits in this documentary. He's hurt or disappointed nearly everyone in his life, from Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman right on down to his current wife. But he keeps on making music, because he's much better at music than he is at relationships, and these days he's a solo act out of necessity, because he's burned every bridge he ever crossed. At one point the interviewer here asks him if he were magically offered joy in his life and home, but had to live his life without music, would he make that trade? And the answer, of course, is no. So there's apparently some solace in being talented at something, even if everything that came along with that talent, fame and drugs and money, kept him from forming solid friendship bonds that would stand the test of time.
Considering health problems both caused by and tangential to years of drug addiction, along with being 78 and one of the last surviving members of the rock generation that contained Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and almost every member of The Band, among so many others, he alternates between wondering how much time he has left and questioning how he made it so far in life when so many others didn't. And it's a valid question, however with it comes a long line of non-productive thinking. Why did Brian Jones die and how is Keith Richards still alive? That's something like a Zen koan, there is no answer, other than that the question somehow contains its own answer.
His father was Floyd Crosby, a Hollywood cinematographer who won an Oscar in 1931 and a Golden Globe for his work on "High Noon". David bounced around through a few California high schools and then dropped out of college, like so many people did back then, to pursue a music career. Like Bob Dylan, he was literally too cool for school. He joined a couple bands in the Greenwich Village club scene before heading back to Chicago, where he met Jim (later Roger) McGuinn and Gene Clark to form the Jet Set, changing their name to The Byrds, probably around the time the Beatles became a thing. And as David Crosby has told me in THREE documentaries now, when The Byrds played their electric version of Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man", they not only had a hit, this convinced Dylan to go electric. So this now solves that little mystery behind the Newport Folk Festival incident.
This film has a couple of animated segments, to show us things that happened when there were no cameras present, like McGuinn and Hillman kicking Crosby out of The Byrds. What happened was, at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, Crosby went into a rant about the JFK assassination conspiracy, and the other Byrds didn't think there should be so much politics in a political performance. Perhaps showing the crowd a graphic presentation of the Zapruder film was a little too much, David. Then Crosby went to substitute for Neil Young when Buffalo Springfield took the stage, and by that summer the band members were fighting over song selections for the new album, and whether they should record only original materials or keep doing covers. Either way, Crosby was out.
But as was so well detailed in both "Laurel Canyon" and "History of the Eagles", the 60's music scene was a volatile one - if you took one member of the Byrds, one (later two) from Buffalo Springfield and one from the Hollies, you could form a super-group, and that was Crosby, Stills & Nash. Neil Young from B.S. later came and left the band, then came and left again, so every once in a while they were CSNY instead of CS&N. Meanwhile other members of The Byrds formed The Flying Burrito Brothers and The Desert Rose Band, and other members of Buffalo Springfield formed bands like Manassas, Poco and half of Loggins and Messina. Finally, by the end of the decade, the Eagles came together with two members of Linda Ronstadt's band, one from the Flying Burrito Brothers, two from Poco and then later one from the James Gang. And somehow, at one time or another, all of them probably slept with or in love with Joni Mitchell, it was just that kind of a decade.
Everybody tended to find their new band at parties at Cass Elliot's house, for some reason. I think Cass just like throwing parties, as seen in the Tarantino film "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood". Maybe it was for the food. David Crosby mentions her in this film, reminding us that she was a sweet person, someone who needed love, and a "fat girl". Gee, thanks, David. Is that code for "I wouldn't sleep with her as long as Joni Mitchell was available?" You've been known to rock a potbelly yourself from time to time, David, so I'd maybe watch it with the "fat girl" comments - we all know this about her, but we just don't SAY IT to pigeonhole her like that. Oh, and that brings me to the next installment of "This Day in Rock History", because on July 27, 1968, Cass Elliot released her first solo single, "Dream a Little Dream of Me", after the break-up of The Mamas and the Papas. It may have been an old standard song, but she brought it to #12 on the singles charts. Way to go, Cass, have a sandwich.
Anyway, Graham Nash's high harmony was just the thing to go over Crosby's and Stills' vocals, and they discovered this during a 40-second jam session that for some reason, didn't happen at Cass Elliot's house. And that's all it took in March 1968, and their second live performance was at a small gig in Woodstock, NY with only 400,000 people in attendance. Some documentaries will tell you that Neil Young was there, but refused to appear on film, so he stayed in the dark on the stage so the cameras couldn't see him. I'm having trouble getting confirmation on this, because the stage announcer in this documentary clearly said "Crosby, Stills and Nash". No Young. Ah, a little research tells me that he joined them on stage halfway through their acoustic set - so he wouldn't have been announced, because he wasn't on stage yet. Then he didn't want to be filmed, so he was there for half of the set, but nobody saw him. OK. He was jamming off to the side with Bigfoot, I guess.
What appears to have happened with CSNY was that four alpha males came together to make this group happen, and as long as they were making music, they were fine. But offstage you just can't have four Alphas working together for very long, because they're all going to be fighting for dominance, it's pack mentality and you can't have four leaders. The Beatles got by with two leaders, Lennon and McCartney, but when George and Ringo wanted more control, then they were heading for the same situation, four Alphas. The Rolling Stones have played together for 87 years now because I think there are only two Alphas, Jagger and Richards. And they didn't talk at all for a long period that they called "World War 3" - but they eventually came back together, and all of the other musicians, from Bill Wyman to Charlie Watts to Ronnie Wood, are clearly not alphas.
So the four alphas in CSNY could come together and work for brief periods, play on stage for the length of a tour, then invariably couldn't stand each other and had to walk away for a few years. Then they'd patch things up, realize how low the bank accounts were getting, get back together, write some more songs and go out on the road again - repeat as necessary. But now they're all in their 70's, what are they going to do, go entertain at nursing homes? And they can't even do that these days because of Covid-19. Their most recent tour was in 2006.
Crosby's probably been the busiest solo member, during the group's down times, because after he served time in prison, he's put out solo albums fairly consistently, constantly being inspired by his sailing trips. Oh, the prison thing? Yeah, I tried to slip that by but I figured you'd probably catch it. Crosby served nine months in a Texas state prison in 1985 after numerous drugs and weapons charges. But first (as another animated segment in this doc tells us) he hired a drug-smuggling pilot to fly him down to Florida, where he re-located his boat and intended to sail away from the U.S. as a fugitive, rather than face both criminal charges and drug rehab. But the boat was in disrepair, so he walked into the Miami office of the F.B.I. and turned himself in - used the time in prison to get himself clean, I really doubt that took, but still I think these days he limits himself to just weed, which is legal now, especially when you have health problems, like he does. Diabetes, heart problems, and in 1994 he got a liver transplant after a long run of hepatitis.
Look, I don't understand it either, why this guy's still around and other people aren't. Luck of the draw, good genes, or maybe there's some order to the universe that we can't understand, and his work just isn't finished. Maybe some people are just too tough or ornery to give up. Still, if the news broke tomorrow that Crosby kicked the bucket, it wouldn't be that surprising at all. The other day I went back through my old photos from San Diego Comic-Con 2006 and 2007, and I realized that nearly every celebrity I met during those years is now gone - Carrie Fisher, Peter Mayhew and Ray Harryhausen. Somebody check on Lou Ferrigno for me, would you? Thanks.
Also starring Jackson Browne, Chris Hillman, Roger McGuinn (all three carrying over from "Echo in the Canyon"), Jan Crosby, Cameron Crowe, Henry Diltz, Glenn Frey (last seen in "History of the Eagles"), Stephen Barncard, Enrico Merlin,
with archive footage of Graham Nash, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Cass Elliott, Eric Clapton, Gene Clark, Mike Clarke (all 11 carrying over from "Echo in the Canyon"), Bob Dylan (last seen in "The Last Waltz"), Joni Mitchell (ditto), Jerry Garcia (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), James Taylor, Don Everly, Phil Everly, Gary Cooper (last seen in "Sergeant York"), Lloyd Bridges (last seen in "Battle of the Sexes"), Dick Cavett (last seen in "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead"), Jack Nicholson (ditto), Peter Fonda (last seen in "Grace of My Heart"), Dennis Hopper (last seen in "River's Edge"), Barack Obama (last seen in "The Laundromat"), Michelle Obama (last seen in "Fahrenheit 11/9"), Joe Scarborough (ditto), Mika Brzezinksi (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Paul Shaffer (ditto), Christine Hinton.
RATING: 6 out of 10 terrible hats
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