BEFORE: With two weeks of music documentaries to go, the person who's appeared in the most movies so far is Paul McCartney, with 14 appearances, if I count the ones that weren't listed on the IMDB when I put the chain together. That means he could pass Basil Rathbone as the top star of the year, remember I watched all of Rathbone's "Sherlock Holmes" films back in March, and I figured nobody could possibly beat him. Well, I stand corrected. Right behind Macca are Mick Jagger and Keith Richards with 12 appearances each (and what's strange is that it's not exactly the SAME 12 films, where one goes the other usually isn't far behind) and then there's John Lennon with 11 appearances in archive footage. But Ringo Starr is poised to perhaps make a last-minute push, I've got four films with him strung together in the 11th hour.
Both Ringo AND Keith Moon carry over from last night's film, which showed footage of them from Zappa's movie "200 Motels".
THE PLOT: From their early days to their colorful hedonistic era, The Who are seen at their most creative and destructive.
AFTER: This is the only film out of 52 in the chain that I bought on DVD. When I first started stringing the films I had access to there must have been some kind of gap, and I felt that the only way to close that gap was to order this Who film from Amazon. Everything else I wanted to add was readily available, either on Netflix or iTunes. Then, of course, after I ordered it, I re-worked the whole chain to include "Stop Making Sense", and that also managed to take away the need to watch this, I could have dropped it and the chain would still have continued unbroken, since there's now a film with Ringo Starr on either side. That's the way this goes...
I don't know why, but I thought this was a straight concert film, like a film about just one Who concert, start to finish, like "Havana Moon" was for the Stones, instead it's more like "Eight Days a Week" for the Beatles, or last night's Zappa film, where the best concert footage is strung together from different points in the band's timeline. But they didn't even go chronologically here, starting with the band's 1967 appearance on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, where they performed "My Generation", then they went backwards to 1965 for appearances on "Shindig!" and "Ready Steady Go!", then forward to Woodstock in 1969, clips from their 1975 U.S. Tour, and then near the end of the film, it's back to the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.
Sure, any Greatest Hits album might jump around in time to get the best collection of songs from a band in a particular order, but I'd hope that a documentary would help me sort out something about a band's career, and I could probably do that best if they could just start at the beginning and skip forward in one direction through the best bits. Plus then I wouldn't have to watch the band members get younger, then older again, then really young, and so on.
But the silver lining here is that by buying the DVD, I got to watch the 2003 "restored" version of this film, which is not only of better quality than the version that had been making the rounds for the previous 25 years, but also includes footage from "Rock & Roll Circus", a series of performances put together by the Rolling Stones in 1968 for a TV special, which they shelved for many years because they felt their own performance wasn't up to snuff. For that event, The Who performed "A Quick One, While He's Away", which was a nine-minute medley made up of four songs that conveniently filled up the remaining space on their second album, but since the four songs tell something of a larger story, many also regard it as the precursor to the rock opera "Tommy". It's also notable that Townshend wrote this mini-opera with thinly veiled references to his being molested as a child, which occurred at his grandmother's house when his parents sent him to stay there. So clearly he was working through some stuff.
I was going to ask here in this space why The Who started breaking their instruments in the first place, but I may have just answered my own question, at least where Townshend was concerned. For Keith Moon, I think he just liked to party, and together they went through a lot of guitars and drum kits. Today, in fact, marks the anniversary of the day in 1971 when the band's accountants determined that when you factored in the cost of the new instruments and gear needed to replace the ones that the band destroyed during each concerts, that their tours were, in fact, not making any profit. OK, I might be kidding about that last bit, but maybe you see my point.
Keith Moon died about a week after he had seen the first rough cut of this film, and then it was released theatrically just over a year after that. Hotel managers all over would have breathed a sigh of relief after Moon's passing, only by then Joe Walsh of the Eagles had taken up the challenge to trash as many of their rooms as possible. But the filmed clips of the recording of the song "Who Are You" represent Moon's last studio work.
Back on that Dr. Demento radio show I was talking about yesterday, they used to play a comedy routine from a sketch group called the Credibility Gap (whose most famous members were Harry Shearer, Michael McKean and David Landers). The sketch was an imagined conversation between a concert promoter and a newspaper advertising agent, and it also paid homage to the old "Who's On First" routine from Abbott & Costello. Of course, the promoterwas trying to take out an ad for a concert that would feature The Who and two other confusingly-named acts so hilarity therefore followed:
"What's the name of the first band?"
"Who."
"The FIRST BAND, what's their name?"
"Who!"
"Never mind, just tell me the name of the second band..."
"Guess Who."
"I don't want to guess, just tell me their name!"
"GUESS WHO!"
"The second band is who?"
"No, Who's on first..."
"Do you have someone booked as the third band?"
"Yes."
"Well, are you going to tell me their name?"
"Yes!"
"Well, what is it?"
and so on...
Also starring Roger Daltrey (last seen in "History of the Eagles"), Pete Townshend (ditto), John Entwhistle (last seen in "Janis: Little Girl Blue"), Keith Richards (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown"), Steve Martin (last seen in "Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me"), Tommy Smothers, Russell Harty, Jimmy O'Neill, Melvyn Bragg, Jeremy Paxman, Ken Russell.
RATING: 6 out of 10 windmill moves
No comments:
Post a Comment