Profonde Musique
March 10
I rarely have the time to catch one music documentary when it’s released, much less three. But this past week-plus, I’ve had the pleasure to take in a trio of gems, all of them presenting the stories of worthy subjects – the life and music of Billy Preston, Paul McCartney’s journey from the Beatles through his years in Wings, and Elvis Presley’s late 60s Las Vegas residency. Each of these films tell their tales in far different ways, but all three are compelling, educational, and entertaining storytelling.
The music doc has evolved over the past decade into several incarnations, from a bevy of distended voices filling out the visuals (2024’s compelling One to One: John & Yoko, Todd Hayne’s stellar, The Velvet Underground from 2021) or using talking heads (Questlove’s dynamic,Summer of Soul, Netflix’s comprehensive, The Greatest Night in Pop from 2024 covering the “We Are The World” recording). There is the fly-on-the-wall cinema verité of Peter Jackson’s rightfully heralded The Beatles: Get Back from 2021, which restored countless hours of footage of the Fab Four’s creative process through painstaking experimentation of AI technology, and 2018’s Amazing Grace, which took good old-fashioned human elbow-grease to rescue the original film from technical difficulties that shelved the telling of Aretha Franklin’s 1972 live recording of gospel standards in a Los Angles church. There are tell-alls, Amy (2015) covering in painful detail the rise of tragic fall of Amy Winehouse to comprehensive four-hour band epics, Long Strange Trip (2017), an exhaustive chronicle of the Grateful Dead or Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men (2019) that tracks the story behind one of the most influential hip-hop groups of all time.
For the record: I do not necessarily consider a straight concert film a documentary, unless it includes interviews, backstory and perspective. Interestingly, I think Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz as both a doc and concert film manages to balance indisputably the greatest concert movie of all time with commentary but falls short as an inclusive a documentary as one would hope on the band or their times. Yet, the medium in the hands of a unparalleled fictional storyteller like Scorsese, who unfolds a sweeping aural guidebook to an entire era through the performances, and one of the directors of these three new documentaries I cover here, can artfully infuse a thematic edge to the process. I’ll elaborate later.
No matter their agenda or process, these three films tell a larger story about each artist in original and captivating ways. In two, the voices of the dead testify to their experience from random, edited interviews to wrest a tired narrative from the clutches of history, and in the third, a man in his eighties tries to make sense of a life lived in the spotlight he simultaneously strived to remain in and sought shelter from.
Let’s do them in order of my seeing them.
BILLY PRESTON – THAT’S THE WAY GOD PLANNED IT
Thanks to my dear friend, the inimitable singer-songwriter deluxe, Eric Hutchinson, who got the tix and invited me along, we checked this out at the legendary Film Forum three weeks back. Directed by industry veteran of film and television, Paris Barclay, That’s The Way God Planned It, titled after Billy Preston’s first big hit as a solo artist, chronicles the truly extraordinary, six-decade career of the Grammy-winning keyboardist from his incredible rise as a child prodigy on organ appearing on the Nat King Cole variety show through his touring work backing such legends as Ray Charles and Little Richard, which had him crossing paths with the Beatles and the Rolling Stone, both of whom he would record with and in the case of the Stones tour with, to his inevitable chart-topping stardom.
Barclay depicts Preston, as he was known in his lifetime, as a cheerful, ebullient personality that enlivened every session or show he participated in with as humble a reserve as could have possibly been displayed by someone so musically gifted. This was, sadly, a front for a person in great pain, which the film explains covering his conflicted childhood in Baptist churches joyfully singing and playing, set against alleged sexual and violent abuses from family members. This left Preston closeted from not only his homosexuality and proclivity for young boys later in life but displayed how folding into himself kept those close to him or his musical collaborators from seeing his trauma. This, Barclay surmises through dozens of interviews, led to Preston’s future drug and alcohol abuse as a kind of self-loathing penance.
The true highlight of the film is the archived footage of the dynamism of Preston’s amazing performances soundtracked by commentary from those who knew and loved him from family to friends and famous musicians whose music was enhanced by Preston’s work, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Mick Jagger, and more. It’s quite moving to hear how deeply the usually reserved and off-putting Eric Clapton speaks so emotionally about trying to save Preston from his addictions, relating to his demons as a former heroin addict, paining to keep his friend from falling into ruin.
And this is where the complicated legacy of Bill Preston is written in That’s The Way God Planned It, ultimately, with crimes including drug possession, insurance fraud (in which he was eventually convicted and served time) and being caught time and again with teenage boys. The film doesn’t redeem or excuse any of this, of course, but in its coda and summation, Preston turns his life around, cleansed of substance abuse, to return from prison a man understanding his talent had always been his true refuge from the pain and sorrow he kept hidden, filling out his days not as a cautionary tale of someone who’d reached the heights and lost everything to someone who still cherished his music (the man had a ton of hits, many of which I bought at the time) and the roots of his culture to finally admit out loud his sexual truth a day before he died at 59-years-old.
MAN ON THE RUN
When I reviewed Tom Doyle’s wonderfully written Man on the Run – Paul McCartney in the 1970s in 2013, I was convinced it would make a great movie. I wasn’t thinking documentary, but considering the state of music biopics these days, I’m glad it went in this direction. Oscar-winning filmmaker, Morgan Neville’s Man on the Run, like his 20 Feet from Stardom (2013), which for the first time covered the unsung life and times of backups singers, neatly combines the music of Paul McCartney with a portrait of his life and times. Despite being hounded throughout his career as both a Beatle and a solo artist for not using his music as biography, as his songwriting partner, John Lennon was lauded for achieving, Neville finds that there was, indeed, a narrative forming behind McCartney’s most beloved pop hits.
Beyond using the songs as guideposts to McCartney’s resurrection from the ashes of his band’s demise – one that he tried like hell to keep together but was forced to abandon and then blamed for breaking up – we hear the 83-year-old composer speak candidly about what he was going through at the time deflecting the misconceptions of his lawsuits against the Beatles and his fight to reinvent himself as a solo performer.
The ghost of the Beatles, particularly Lennon, haunts McCartney during the initials days of the breakup in which the film does a terrific job of depicting with archived and recent footage of he and Linda’s run-down Scottish cabin he retreated to in order to heal his emotional wounds. And from this blessed isolation, Paul begins to make music again and most importantly reignites his passion for live performing, which the Beatles, much to his consternation, refused to do after 1966.
And that is the other interesting slant to Man on the Run: McCartney’s struggles to recreate in some way a band construct for him to once again find comfort to produce and eventually perform his magnificent songs. Choosing his wife, Linda to build this new group, a boldly controversial move at the time, and what turns out to be another spiritual connection like he had with John as a teenager, Paul pieces together as best he can a democratic unit. From its perceived humble beginnings, that band, Wings was a rag-tag experiment that never seemed to come up with a solution of whether they were there to serve the main man’s wishes or add viable input.
Neville masterfully takes us on Wings’ ascent from this underappreciated and poorly marketed unit to one of the most celebrated and successful (if not critically harangued) acts of the 1970s. And just like the Beatles neatly tied up its 1960s story, the journey of Wings spans the decade, wrapping up with the same anticlimax as his previous band by 1980. Throughout there are many twists, turns, and personnel changes – Paul and Linda, along with their kids, quite literally on the run constantly stitching together sustainable combos to present their music, beyond lifer, Denny Laine (late of the Moody Blues).
And as Paul McCartney remains the greatest living songwriter and one that with his long list of hits and albums has, when combined with his Beatles output, continued to enthrall us, having a portion of his ouevre – and this is some heady portion – dissected is welcomed by fans and the curious (is there still people unaware of this?) alike.
EPIC
Baz Luhrmann, yet another Englishman obsessed with the complicated balance of the ancient American deep south, its voices, its music, its traditions, its sins, its magic and the grotesque exploitation of showbiz, has put a new coat of glittery paint on Elvis Aaron Presley. Like the British Invasion before him, his reverence for the image and texture of Elvis as a heroic if not damaged figure of American myth is both inspiring and irreverent. The director already made an uneven if not entertaining biopic of the King of Rock and Roll, with 2022’s Elvis, and with the same fervor for meshing myth with reality and modernity with the stale echoes of American schlock, his EPIC (Elvis Presley In Concert) is a rousing tribute to a rarely examined portion of Presley’s career – his post icon-shapeshifter early mid-1950s period into the army and then out to Hollywood live performance era. What Luhrmann’s frenetically paced film (and I use that term adoringly, as I love his style), does best is circles Elvis as the ultimate musical archetype and exceptional stage performer, but despite what the trailers promised of letting the King tell his own story, he, in fact, tells Luhrmann’s story of how he views Elvis – with the same nods to painting Colonel Parker as the devil as his ’22 biopic did (the film’s graphics are the same, denoting this is a companion piece).
Luhrmann, in many ways, is in his films, something critics debate over incessantly – should we notice the filmmaker in the story he is telling? It is impossible for me to separate those aspects of filmmaking. Part of the draw to see EPIC was Luhrmann for me. But he cannot escape himself – the hyper-editing, tricky audio devices like repeating sung or spoken lines for maximum thematic effect or morphing old into new footage, as he as he did with music in his previous films like Moulin Rouge, The Great Gatsby, and the first Elvis flick, including mashups of traditional songs with modern sounds.
It is through this aural and visual prism that Presley becomes a man stuck in a time capsule, forever bedazzled in polyester jumpsuits with his awkward karate moves and sweaty scarves tossed to frantic middle-aged women. As he was in his many kitschy 1960s films, which Luhrmann drives home was Elvis’s ultimate prison, he traps him again in the garish ballroom of the International Hotel, singing his hits with a smirk and a wink. Hey, look at me when I was young and dumb. And that is always been my fuck-you! to the smarmy 1960s Elvis. That is until EPIC’s new footage found from the 1972, Elvis on Tour film set against his 1950s TV appearances revealed that Elvis always thought what he was doing was goofy, but not in a self-mocking way, but as a not-taking-this-too-serious way that ironically EPIC with its grotesquely over-hyped title suggests. Just as the bounding “Also sprach Zarathustra” heralded his highness to the stage bloated with three-dozen musicians and singers. But in masterful surround sound and through mesmerizing cutting, Luhrmann supremely resurrects what made Elvis special: he was a natural.
One key highlight from found 1972 cutting room floor footage is how utterly joyful and lost in the music Elvis always was and would be until his dying day. His most honest and relaxed interplay is during rehearsals with his incredible band, which in every incarnation during this period is fire. An incredible ensemble with the Sweet Inspirations singing their hearts out is mind-boggling stuff. This is what cuts through all the playful Luhrmann pomp, and it is where Elvis lived. So, in essence, he didn’t need to “tell his story.” His voice, his passion for the stage and to envelope song is what tells that story best.
Recent Comments
Categories