BEFORE: This is film #36 in the Rockumentary chain, I've got 16 more to go. So it looks like I'll watch the last one on September 7, then it's back to narrative material - and I've already got the link back all planned out, in fact I've got the rest of my schedule for 2018 planned out, even Christmas. Someday I'd like to meet somebody else who plans out their movie schedule months in advance, or maybe I'm the only person crazy enough to do that. I'm still reserving an option to change around my October horror-movie schedule, once I see what TCM is up to this year. I just recorded a couple of TCM's films with Peter Lorre, like "M", that aren't really Halloweeny, but have something of a horror nature to them - I'm not sure when I'm going to watch them, but "M" is something of a classic that I should probably cross off my bucket list.
The Beach Boys carry over again, notably Brian Wilson and Al Jardine, along with other members of the Wrecking Crew who were seen in yesterday's film, working on "Pet Sounds". This could not have worked out better, so maybe I am getting good at this scheduling thing. It stands to reason, right?
THE PLOT: A celebration of the musical work of a group of session musicians known as "The Wrecking Crew", that provided back-up instrumentals to such legendary recording artists as Frank Sinatra, The Beach Boys and Simon & Garfunkel.
AFTER: It could have been the biggest scandal in 1960's rock music - maybe it SHOULD have been - that the Beach Boys didn't play on many of their own records. As I saw last night, the work in creating the phenomenon that was SoCal-based surf rock got divided between the faces of the band, who went out on tour, and Brian Wilson and the studio musicians, who stayed in their little beach homes and spent the majority of their time in the studio, crafting the next masterpiece pop album. And then they'd have to make a dumbed-down version of the guitar solos for the band to play on stage, because who could re-create the exact sound of that brilliant record. But it worked because the teen girl fans were probably screaming so loud in the presence of their idols that nobody could really hear the guitar work very well.
Oh, you can see how this all started, very easily - somebody like George Martin says, "Hey, I think that a string quartet would work really well on this new song, "Eleanor Rigby", it could really class the thing up." But he can't teach the Beatles how to play the violin and the cello, that would be ridiculous - so he calls in a professional string quartet to play as studio musicians on the record, and the record is a hit, and even though the fans love it, suddenly you've got a record that can't be replicated in concert (they didn't have a "strings" button on their keyboards back then...) but there's a disconnect between who played the music, and whose faces are on the cover of the album. Sure, the musicians got paid and MAYBE they even got credited, but that would be inside the album cover, down the bottom, in very small type. Meanwhile "THE BEATLES" appears on the front cover, in super-large type, and everyone rushes out to buy it.
When I was maybe six or seven years old, the Monkees had been a thing just a few years before, their TV show was in reruns but I still never missed an episode. When someone told me that they weren't really playing their instruments, I dismissed that theory immediately because I watched the show, I could SEE they were strumming their guitars and hitting notes on the piano. I didn't understand back then what lip-synching was, or that a music video was put together from hundreds of shots from three different angles, or that if Davy Jones kept walking backwards on those colored lines that seemed to stretch into the vanishing point, he'd smack into a wall. So I certainly didn't understand what "session musicians" were, or that the guys holding the guitars on camera were not the same people who played the licks on the record that I was listening to, over and over. It's a Monkees album, so that must mean that the Monkees were playing the music, right?
Little by little, we all came to terms with the truth - I heard Neil Diamond singing "I'm a Believer" one time, and when I asked someone why he was singing a Monkees song, I was told, "Oh, well, he wrote it..." and thought, "Hmm, that's interesting." And then through watching film credits I learned that Mike Nesmith got into producing, and I thought, "Hey, maybe those four guys don't live in a beach house together, and maybe they didn't share a car or have weird "Austin Powers"-style spy missions. Oh, right, it was a show and they were acting, so maybe nothing I saw on TV was real.
So now I look back on it and I wonder how the Monkees, and by extension, the Beach Boys, didn't suffer the sort of scandal that later came about in the early 1990's with Milli Vanilli. The answers, of course, have everything to do with money. Now, the Monkees did have SOME musical talent - they did at least sing on the records, and Nesmith and Tork could play the guitar. Micky Dolenz learned to drum over the course of a year, enough to play on stage anyway. But since those guys basically made it into a band via a casting call, the whole thing was like one of those Greg Brady/Johnny Bravo deals, these guys fit into the costumes, rather than the other way around. And the factory that produced them needed a hit record FAST, so there wasn't even time to teach them how to play their own songs, so they called in the studio musicians to knock them out, probably in under a week.
There were other reasons that the entertainment factories never let people see how the sausage was made, of course. When you were watching "Mission: Impossible" on TV, for example, there was a certain mood that the show wanted to give off, and if you were focusing on the name of the bass player who played the opening theme, then that could interfere with the mood, of course. Same goes for the saxophone solo in the "Pink Panther" theme. Other music in sitcoms was called "incidental", or background music, and you were supposed to hear it without really noticing it. (again, think of "The Brady Bunch"...). The Wrecking Crew supplied some of that music, and a whole lot more, essentially becoming the greatest band that never went out on tour.
Touring is a separate beast, I get that. And not everyone has the look that the public wants to see on stage, having paid thirty or fifty or a hundred dollars for a concert ticket. This guy over here might be the best drummer in the whole world, but he's got a pot belly and a thinning hairline. And that girl can play a mean bass, but she's got a lazy eye and a very toothy smile. They've got better musical chops than anyone else, can sight-read and even come up with their own arrangements, but they'd never look good on an album cover, with a "face for radio", as they say. Or maybe they've got a couple of kids and they don't even WANT to go out on tour, so they make their rent or their mortgage payment doing session work, and once they've got a resumé and reputation built up, that phone would start to ring, or producers wouldn't dream of booking the session until THAT drummer and THAT guitarist were both available at the same time.
The Wrecking Crew was a loose affiliation of these L.A.-based musicians, who kept turning up in the same studios, day after day, because they were part of the pool that the record producers were drawing from. And the mid-1960's was the heyday of the studio album, once the record companies started moving out West to tap into the SoCal sounds like the Beach Boys. Then when the movie industry, TV shows and recording artists started working together (more or less) it was the place to be. And when the Gold Rush comes to town, the only thing better than being a prospector is to be the guy who's selling shovels.
And of course, I realize the need for efficiency in all things - the time it would have taken to get the Monkees or the Beach Boys to master their instrument was not as solid an investment as paying some musicians to get the record out quickly and efficiently. Plus, there was a lot of copying going on, as some producers were trying to mimic Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, or if the Beach Boys wanted to start a song like "Surfin U.S.A." with a Chuck Berry-style lick, the quickest and easiest way to get that was to tell a professional guitarist what they wanted, and he could just DO it in a couple tries. Or if he couldn't do the drum beat you wanted, maybe the guy in the next chair was the guy who worked on that record you were ripping off, and he remembered how to do it.
But I still can't help but feel that the whole business was built on smoke and mirrors, an unspoken industry-wide deception that sold a bill of goods to the record-buying public, along with the feeling of euphoria that goes along with liking music, liking a particular BAND'S music, even, and now when we pull back the curtain and see the lies of omission, it's like seeing that a builder didn't use the right materials, or he cut some corners and the property therefore isn't up to code. So, naturally that building can't stand up for very long, and slowly the industry turned more toward the singer/songwriters who also played their own instruments. I get it, everybody did it - like even the Beatles used Eric Clapton as the guitarist on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" or Billy Preston for the keyboard solo on "Get Back", and then just let everyone assume that George or Paul played those bits. But a lie of omission is still a lie, and these recordings just represent very entertaining lies. And just because "everybody did it", that doesn't make it right.
I would have left out the bits about the Mar-Kets (or is it the "Marketts"?) and the T. Bones, because who cares? The first band just released a couple of throwaway surf tunes, and the other had something that began as an Alka-Seltzer commercial that turned into an accidental instrumental hit. Neither one had anything close to an impact on the history of music, not on the same level as the Beach Boys or The Mamas & The Papas, anyway.
This film was completed in 2008, and played at some film festivals then, but not released theatrically until 2015, because there weren't enough funds to secure the music rights. Finally a Kickstarter campaign raised those funds, but it took an extra 7 years to clear everything. Wow, I get antsy when my boss finishes work on a film, and it takes us TWO years to run the festival circuit and then get it on a theater screen somewhere, I can't imagine a 7-year wait for a release. My hat's off to whoever had the patience to see this one through. I was going to catch it on Netflix - it was there when I planned the chain - but then I saw it was running on PBS during pledge season, so I recorded it on my DVR. Thank God I did, because it was off of Netflix before I was ready to watch it in my chain. You can't be too careful with streaming these days.
Also starring Hal Blaine (also carrying over from "The Beach Boys: Making Pet Sounds"), Carol Kaye (ditto), Don Randi (ditto), Glen Campbell (last seen in "Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me"), Al Casey, Bones Howe, Plas Johnson, Joe Osborn, Earl Palmer, Bill Pittman, Tommy Tedesco, Herb Alpert, Cher (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Dick Clark (ditto), Micky Dolenz (last seen in "27: Gone Too Soon"), Peter Tork (ditto), Lou Adler (last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Leon Russell (ditto), Nancy Sinatra, Jimmy Webb (last seen in "Joe Cocker: Mad Dog with Soul"), Gary Lewis, Roger McGuinn, Frank Zappa, H.B. Barnum, Chuck Berghofer, Snuff Garrett, Dave Gold, Larry Levine, Lew McCreary, Stan Ross, Joe Saraceno, Carmie Tedesco, Julius Wechter, the voice of Denny Tedesco, and archive footage of Mike Love (also carrying over from "The Beach Boys: Making Pet Sounds"), Carl Wilson (ditto), Dennis Wilson (ditto), Phil Spector (ditto), Ronnie Spector (ditto), Sammy Davis Jr. (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: the Rise of James Brown"), Dean Martin (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Frank Sinatra (ditto), Davy Jones (last seen in "27: Gone Too Soon"), Michael Nesmith (ditto), John Phillips, Michelle Phillips, Denny Doherty, Cass Elliot (last seen in"Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Carole King (ditto), James Taylor (last seen in "History of the Eagles"), Stephen Stills (ditto), David Crosby (last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Graham Nash, Frankie Avalon, Chuck Barris, Sonny Bono, Sam Cooke, Annette Funicello, Jan & Dean, Bobby Hatfield, Bill Medley, Ricky Nelson, Kurt Loder (last seen in "Hype!"), Eddie Albert, Eva Gabor, Adam West (last seen in "Hooper").
RATING: 7 out of 10 boots (made for walkin')
No comments:
Post a Comment