BEFORE: Neil Young carries over from "David Crosby: Remember My Name", and so does one Beatle and one member of the Grateful Dead. This is my 8th film in the big Summer Rock Concert (and Documentary) series, and so far Neil Young's in the lead for most appearances, tied with Ringo Starr. This is Mr. Young's 6th appearance in a row, either being interviewed or seen in archive concert footage. Some of those appearances have been uncredited, but I've been keeping track and submitting updates to the IMDB each day as I go along, which is just something I do to make my little corner of the universe a bit more organized.
I did say that things might change very rapidly once I hit the documentaries - there's been a real bottleneck in the competition for most appearances this year, Robert De Niro, Maya Rudolph and Owen Wilson are tied with eight, and I expect Matthew McConaughey to join them - but keep your eye on Ringo Starr, I think. The Beatles have their way of turning up in archive footage again and again, because it always comes back to the Beatles, doesn't it? Right behind with 5 appearances are George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Roger McGuinn and Joni Mitchell. And tonight both Lennon and McCartney move up to 4, to tie David Crosby, Ronnie Hawkins and most of The Band. John and Paul will probably move up further in the rankings, based on what films are coming up next.
THE PLOT: A documentary on the fabled recording studio that was located in Van Nuys, California.
AFTER: There's a little something for everybody in this documentary about the Sound City recording studio, which of course speaks to the wide variety of artists who have recorded there over the years, despite the Yelp! reviews which have no doubt classified the place as "a dump, but one of the better dumps" - and even then, someone was perhaps being charitable. If you like classic rock, that's the place where Neil Young recorded "After the Gold Rush" and Fleetwood Mac recorded their first album with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. If you like your music on the softer side, Barry Manilow recorded one album there, and if you enjoy the harder stuff, let's talk about Black Sabbath and Dio, plus Ratt and the Pixies, then later Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, Weezer and Rage Against the Machine.
I'm just not a hardcore guy, my tastes range a bit to the softer side, so for me personally it's a delight to see bands like Cheap Trick, REO Speedwagon and Rick Springfield mentioned in the same documentary with those acts listed above. The Speedwagon just doesn't get enough love - when my wife and I made a push in the early 2000's to go to rock concerts, to see all the bands we'd previously missed out on, like Styx and Jethro Tull and Meat Loaf, after we saw Boston live then REO was the band on the top of my list, and I've seen them live twice now, once with Styx and once with Chicago. Bucket list items crossed off, for sure. Also, every year I make a Christmas Mix CD to mail out with my cards, and the last few years I've bounced back and forth between classic rock and alternative themes. Last year's mix was arranged as a "Classic Rock Beach Party X-Mas", and I had tracks from Cheap Trick, REO, Jackson Browne, Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Rick Springfield, Ringo Starr, and Bob Dylan, among others (Yes, Bob Dylan made a Christmas album, check it out if you don't believe me. It's mostly terrible but I found his rendition of "Silver Bells" to be acceptable.). But suddenly I'm realizing that this year's documentary chain has accidentally reunited those bands, or perhaps I've just gravitated back to a similar classic rock line-up. Also, I'm reminded that I should probably start thinking about this year's Christmas mix, it's still July, but it's never too early to pick tracks.
Anyway, "Sound City". Honestly, I would have been pleased if this documentary had just supplied a rundown of all the great albums that have been recorded there over the decades, like:
Grateful Dead - "Terrapin Station"
Fleetwood Mac - "Rumours"
REO Speedwagon - "You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can't Tuna Fish", "Good Trouble"
Foreigner - "Double Vision"
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - "Damn the Torpedoes", "Southern Accents", "Wildflowers"
Pat Benatar - "Precious Time"
Cheap Trick - "Heaven Tonight"
Rick Springfield - "Living in Oz", "Hard to Hold"
Ronnie James Dio - "Holy Diver"
RATT - "Out of the Cellar"
Nirvana - "Nevermind"
Blind Melon - "Blind Melon"
Rage Against the Machine - "Rage Against the Machine"
Red Hot Chili Peppers - "One Hot Red Minute"
The Black Crowes - "America"
The list goes on from there, but once they get into bands like Tool, Rancid, Slipknot, Wolfmother and Arctic Monkeys, I'm afraid I'm out of my element. You crazy kids today, with the rock music, and the crowd-surfing and the tattoos and the piercings, I just don't know. I swore I wouldn't grow up to sound like my grandparents, but then again, I don't think my grandparents even would know who Fleetwood Mac was, they'd probably think it was a sandwich from McDonald's. That list of albums above was enough to impress me, but if you prefer more modern music, that's fine too, just turn it down or put on some headphones so I don't have to hear it.
What happened to Sound City was, the studio's fortunes seemed to rise and fall with the musical trends over the years, and for some reason they weren't content to just be a studio, they were signing acts like a record company would, hoping one would break big - but the only one that did was Rick Springfield, and even he left for new management after marrying the studio's receptionist. The Laurel Canyon crowd rushed in to record in the same studio that Neil Young and the Grateful Dead used, and then things got quiet until the 1980's, when bands rushed in to record in the same studio that Tom Petty and Cheap Trick used. Then things got really quiet, but when Nirvana's "Nevermind" hit, guess what happened? Along came all the grunge and hard-rock acts, and that was enough to keep the studio going for another decade or so.
What finally killed the studio was the rise of personal computing, ProTools software on musicians' laptops could finally replicate all the effects of a giant sound-board (Sound City was particularly proud of their giant analog NEVE console, which is larger than the console of the Millennium Falcon, closer to all the ones on the Enterprise combined) but why would anyone pay to record in a big studio when they can futz around on their home computer? This is like what happened to Kodak film and Technicolor Labs when everyone suddenly had a movie camera on their phone. Progress is great, but it also sucks and causes collateral damage in unexpected places. So there's some tragedy here after decades of success, Sound City finally called it a day in 2011.
The film, directed by Dave Grohl, then chooses to focus on Grohl's purchase of that giant analog console - why anyone would want to record on TAPE in this day and age is beyond me, and I'm also wondering why he didn't just buy Sound City altogether, just to keep it running. But Dave already had his own personal studio, and he moved the console there - then he invited a bunch of recording artists from Sound City's history to come over and record something new on the old NEVE, and he made both an album and a movie out of that, so I guess that high-school dropout did make a solid investment after all. Though I bet if Grohl just wanted to invite Stevie Nicks, Rick Springfield, Trent Reznor and Paul McCartney over to jam, they probably would have all said "YES" anyway, he's got that kind of clout. But I can't help thinking that the movie shoot was all an elaborate cover story.
Or, since something similar happened with "Echo in the Canyon", where a straight documentary about music recording history took something of a left turn and became a concert instead. Don't get me wrong, this is my Big Summer Concert chain, after all, so anything that shifts the focus from dry documentary to live performance should be appreciated, but both movies still feel like odd hybrids. I suspect somebody, somewhere, gave some advice to these filmmakers along the lines of "Documentaries are dead, nobody watches them, so you've got to find a way to shake the format up, maybe throw in some new music or a live show to get more of the younger kids interested." That's blatant pandering, of course, but it also makes some sense - the fans of Fleetwood Mac, CCR and The Beatles have been dying off at increasingly faster rates since even before the pandemic, and before long those original Nirvana fans are going to be setting up retirement plans and looking at senior living communities. Maybe including material for fans of Weezer, Queens of the Stone Age and Slipknot was a shrewd business move that got a few more eyeballs on this doc. (It's a rental on Amazon Prime, but it's also there for FREE via imdb.com if you're willing to endure a couple of ad breaks.)
Maybe it's fine that Dave Grohl got to make some new recordings with his personal heroes, I won't say that he hasn't earned that right. But forcing an emotional reunion between these people and a soundboard is an odd direction to take, I think. The resulting songs with Stevie Nicks - "You Can't Fix This" and Rick Springfield - "The Man That Never Was" - sound fine, but the duet with Paul McCartney is somehow a non-starter. Sure, it's a mind-trip for Grohl and Novoselic to jam with their idol, get that old Nirvana groove back and then look up and see an ex-Beatle in place of Kurt Cobain (!!), but why didn't this collaboration produce a better song? Most people regard McCartney as a genuinely great songwriter, but it turns out that when you jam with him, you end up with something akin to "Helter Skelter" or "Why Don't We Do it in the Road", where the song really rocks, but the lyrics are pure shit. Go listen to "Cut Me Some Slack" and tell me you see it differently.
For that matter, I have to point out that the sound mixing on this whole film is pretty horrible - sound mixing is one of those categories nobody understands when the Oscars are given out, except when you hear BAD sound mixing, that's easy to recognize. Whenever people were talking in this film, I had to crank up the volume, then whenever the music kicked in, I had to quickly lower it again - don't they know my wife is trying to sleep upstairs? Again, I watched this on Amazon Prime via IMDB.com, so maybe there's a better platform for sound or a better-mixed version out there, but since the whole film is essentially about the production, mixing and transmission of sounds, I really expected better on this front.
While I'm at it, I have to make a confession today - I have zero idea how sound recording works, and I went to film school. You'd think they would have covered something like this there - I know what a microphone is and how it works, sound goes in over there and then sound waves get transmitted into a machine, but then what? Tape, digital, vinyl, whatever the format is, I don't get it. Video, I've got no problem with - I know what a pixel is and I know that a beam of light is moved by magnets left to right and up & down over a screen, many times per second, to create an ever-changing image. I know how light gets into a camera and chemically changes a piece of film so that after other chemicals are applied to it, lights and darks and colors happen and that image is, ideally, a representation of the light that came into the camera in the first place, but what is up with sound recording?
I don't want to sound stupid here, but what's the sound equivalent of a pixel? A sound electron? Going back to audio tape, I think that magnets somehow move electrons around on a piece of audio tape, but how do those electrons represent sound during playback? And how do they imitate or represent the recorded sound in the first place? If I go all the way back to vinyl recordings and wax cylinders, sound went into some kind of device and a needle scratched a line into a wax cylinder, but how did that line represent sound? Then another needle scraped through that line and somehow reproduced the original sound via what, vibrations? It all sounds so barbaric, did some caveman drag his bone knife through a piece of wax honeycomb, and if so, how did he figure out that would recreate a pleasant noise, or a word from his primitive language? I've researched this before, and I just can't wrap my brain around it, it's alchemy or magic or something. Then we get into digital and now a recorded sentence or a song gets turned into a bunch of ones and zeros, but again, HOW? And how do those ones and zeros get turned back into that sentence or that song? And now my brain hurts again, I guess some things people who aren't sound engineers were never meant to know.
OK, let me try this for the final time in my life - if I don't understand it now, then I give up. To make a vinyl record, a microphone converts sound (vibrations) into an electrical signal. This signal is converted into kinetic energy (vibrations) and cut onto a record's grooves. During playback, the stylus of the turntable reads these vibrations (as the needle moves through the grooves) and the transducer of the turntable's cartridge converts this back to an electrical signal. The signal then causes the diaphragm of the speaker to vibrate, producing sound waves that mimic the original sound. I guess that answers it, except for a few lingering questions - how, how, how and HOW? And this is the simple explanation? Forget it, this is sorcery or witchcraft at its finest. It's enough that sound engineers understand this, they're the true heroes here.
(EDIT: On This Day in Rock History, Paul McCartney returned to the Cavern Club on July 28, 2018, at the age of 76, to perform a two-hour concert in front of 270 fans. Some Beatles classics as well as songs from his new album "Egypt Station". Hey, that's not much of a tie-in, but it's something.)
Also starring Dave Grohl (last seen in "Rush: Time Stand Still"), Vinny Appice, Frank Black, Lindsey Buckingham, Mike Campbell, Tim Commerford, Kevin Cronin, Rivers Cuomo, Warren DeMartini, Mick Fleetwood, John Fogerty, Neil Giraldo, Chris Goss, Taylor Hawkins, Josh Homme, Alain Johannes, Jim Keltner, Barry Manilow (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Paul McCartney (also last seen in "David Crosby: Remember My Name"), Rupert Neve, Stevie Nicks, Rick Nielsen, Krist Novoselic, Keith Olsen, Stephen Pearcy, Tom Petty (last seen in "Echo in the Canyon"), Nick Raskulnecz, Trent Reznor, Ross Robinson, Rick Rubin, Jim Scott, Pat Smear, Rick Springfield (last seen in "Ricki and the Flash"), Corey Taylor, Benmont Tench, Lars Ulrich (last seen in "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster"), Butch Vig, Lee Ving, Brad Wilk, Robert Levon Been,
with archive footage of Tony Bennett (last seen in "Selma"), Johnny Cash (last seen in "Down in the Flood: Bob Dylan, the Band and the Basement Tapes"), Kurt Cobain (last seen in "Hype!"), David Coverdale, John Denver, Ronnie James Dio, Jerry Garcia (also last seen in "David Crosby: Remember My Name"), George Harrison (ditto), John Lennon (ditto), Ringo Starr (ditto), Jimmy Iovine, Tawny Kitaen, Christine McVie, John McVie, Leonard Nimoy (last seen in "Them!"), Carl Perkins, Michael Richards, Carlos Santana (last seen in "Quincy")
RATING: 5 out of 10 dirty couches
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