More Great Music Documentaries

     The world of music is a fertile ground for documentary makers. There are thousands of interesting stories that resonate deeply with music lovers. Many of the performers and genres have been around for decades, long enough to create a chronological sweet spot. Enough time has passed to allow for thoughtful and objective evaluation of the subject and its importance, but there are still people around with firsthand involvement and connections. Here are a few great documentaries that I've watched recently.

Little Richard: I Am Everything

Little Richard: King and Queen of Rock 'n' Roll

    It's only fitting that the true King, Inventor, and Architect of Rock and Roll gets not one but two great documentaries. I Am Everything and King and Queen of Rock 'n' Roll both tell the story of Richard Penniman, aka Little Richard, from his beginnings as one of 12 children in a shotgun-style house in Jim Crow Macon Georgia until his death in 2020. There is no doubt that Little Richard has a strong case to make as the inventor of rock and roll. Without Little Richard, there may never have been the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, James Brown, Prince, Michael Jackson, Lizzo, Beyonce, or Beyonce. And he never got his due. He was cheated out of his money by record company executives, oppressed by the racism in the country and industry, and his legacy was overlooked for decades. On top of all that, he had serious personal mental health issues, chiefly deriving from struggles with his own sexuality. Tormented by his homosexuality or bisexuality, he did everything in excess - drugs, alcohol, and sex. It's amazing that he lived as long as he did. Both documentaries do a great job of exploring everything about him.

    

Love to Love You, Donna Summer

    From the King (and Queen) of rock and roll to the Queen of Disco, Donna Summer. Few performers dominated the industry like Donna Summer with hit after hit. One of her daughters produced Love to Love You, Donna Summer which incorporates a lot of home movies. As it turns out, Summer was an aspiring filmmaker and often had a video camera in hand. The documentary gives viewers a real glimpse into both her professional and personal life, and viewers might be surprised to learn that she had a real sense of humor and was always "on" in one way or another. On stage and in music videos, she was playing a role, or many roles, creating characters for her songs. Off stage, she was making family videos and being generlly goofy. It makes for a charming depiction.

    

Fanny The Right to Rock

    Raise your hand if you've ever heard of Fanny? I never had, and I know a lot about rock music of the 1970s and 1980s. Fanny was the first great American all-female rock band and the first ever Filipino-American rock band in history. They recorded five albums from about 1969 to 1975, while The Go-Gos only recorded 3 in their career, and had numerous chart hits. The documentary includes lots of commenting musicians who are much more famous than Fanny but who were hugely influenced by their music. This documentary was a great discovery, and I am so glad I saw it. I became a huge Fanny fan. Look up their music. It's amazing. They deserve much more attention than they ever got.

    

Moonage Daydream

    HBO is now airing Moonage Daydream the 2022 David Bowie documentary approved by his estate.  For Bowie fans like me, it's a must see. The music and cinematography are unbelievable. Unfortunately, I didn't see it in in a theater during its original run, but I'm glad I can now catch it on my small screen. 

Netflix Documentaries, Part Two

     Here are some more documentaries currently available on Netflix.

    The Silence of Others is about the ongoing push for justice for those who imprisoned, tortured, and murdered opponents of the fascist Francisco Franco, the dictator of Spain from 1939 to 1975. In 1977, the Spanish legislature passed a law that granted amnesty to anyone for any crimes committed on behalf of Franco and his government. The purpose, according to supporters, was to forget the past terrors - which continued throughout the entirety of Franco's rule - and move on. The effect has been that people who were tortured, imprisoned, and killed have gotten no closure or justice.  One of the major subjects of this documentary was a man who took part in anti-Franco demonstrations as a student. He was arrested and tortured by "Billy the Kid," one of the most notorious fascist interrogators. Today, they live a few blocks from each other on a street named in honor of one of the most brutal fascist generals. A couple of elderly women featured in the documentary have spent their lives trying to recover the remains of their executed parents for proper burials. Instead of forgetting and moving on, the crimes of the regime continue to divide Spaniards. The focus of the documentary is the effort to seek justice through a doctrine called "universal jurisdiction," a new concept to me. The Spanish victims group, blocked from using the courts of Spain, has turned to a judge in Argentina to collect evidence. The idea of universal jurisdiction is that in cases of war crimes and crimes against humanity, charges can be brought by any jurisdiction. This idea comes from the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials following WWII and has been applied in more recent cases like that against Chilean dictator Pinochet and various other war criminals. It really is a moving an enlightening documentary.

    Back to music with Trainwreck: Woodstock '99. Full disclosure: I was not a fan of 90s music. I am hopelessly stuck in the 1980s, and I dislike almost all "Hit" music since the 90s, so the 30th anniversary of the original Woodstock concert did not register on my radar when it happened. I knew almost nothing about the huge fiasco that it was. The promoters, staff, and even a few of the musicians acted out of total stupidity, incompetence, and possibly criminal negligence. the hundreds of thousands of clueless and horribly behaved people who attended were lucky to leave with their lives. (Actually, three people did die sadly, of heat exhaustion, heart attack, and being hit by a car.) There was a lack of water, a lack of adequate security, extreme heat, and arson, not to mention reports of rape. Yet, the promoters intentionally covered up and evaded questions about any negatives, even as the venue (Poor decision #1) burned.

    Back to 1990, and This Is A Robbery: The World's Biggest Art Heist . In the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as Boston policemen walked into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Art Museum in Boston, a quirky little private museum in the mansion of the quirky little Boston socialite Isabella Stewart Gardner. Thirteen works of art, with a value today estimated at between $250 and 500 million dollars, were stolen, seemingly singled out specifically since the robbers had over 80 minutes to "shop" for the articular works they took. The works have not been recovered, and no arrests have been made, 32 years later. The documentary series goes through all the theories and suspects, leading one to drawing conclusions. Unfortunately, it still looks like neither recovery nor prosecution will ever be possible. However, the documentary was extremely interesting as experts explained the world of art thieves and heists. 

    So who the heck is Jimmy Savile? I'd predict well over 90% of Americans were like me and had never heard of Jimmy Savile, who was treated as a British national treasure for well over 50 years. Maybe imagine Walter Cronkite, Dolly Parton, and Betty White, and Mr. Rogers level fame and love combined. He was a radio dj, tv presenter, and eccentric who was knighted for the many, many works he did for charity and philanthropy. He died in 2011 at age 84, and the entire UK mourned. Then, the next year, people started coming forward to accuse him of pedophilia. As it turns out, there were occasional accusations throughout his life, but these accusations were swept under the rug, and accusers were discredited. Since 2011, however, hundreds of charges have been investigated. This short documentary series examines the whole shocking episode.

        Finally, there's Final Account. As the WWII generation leaves us, this is an important documentary to watch. Released in 2020, it consists of interviews with Germans who lived in Nazi Germany. They were Hitler Youth Members, Brownshirts, SS soldiers, concentration camp guards, civilian workers in concentration camps, and citizens living near camps. They tell their story, and Germany's story during the Nazi years. When I visited Munich several years ago, I loved sitting in an outdoor cafe in the afternoon with an iced coffee or something, and I found myself watching older German me as they walked be and asking myself "What were you doing in the 1940s? Did you know about what went on at Dachau, about twenty or thirty minutes away?" Many of the subjects interviewed denied knowing what was going on. Some admitted that they had witnessed some of it. One SS and flat out denied that the Holocaust happened. Other SS men swore that the SS wasn't involved. A bookkeeper at a concentration camp said "but as I was a bookkeeper, I had nothing to do with it." Another SS man said he fully supports Hitler and all of his goals today. It was really disturbing, but a compelling watch.

Different Genres, Different Stories?

     Last month, I got involved in two different true crime stories. They were totally entertaining and thought provoking from beginning to end, and I actually explored each one through two different media formats.

    The first was Under the Banner of Heaven, a book by John Krakauer and the dramatic series of the same name on Hulu. 

    Krakauer's book, first published in 2003, tells the story of the gruesome 1984 murders of  Brenda Lafferty and her 15-month old daughter in Utah. Their killers were two of her brothers-in-law who targeted her because they believed that she was preventing their wives and her husband, their brother, from living the moral life that their fundamentalist Latter Day Saints demanded. Krakauer juxtaposes the murder and its investigation with the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, from its founding by Joseph Smith to the fundamentalist sects that started breaking away from the orthodox Church. There were some fractures within the Church immediately following the death of Smith in 1844, when there were a few men who announced that they were Smith's chosen successor, but there were even more in the late 1800s when the LDS Church leaders agreed to strip polygamy as a tenet of the Church, in exchange for statehood. Several groups condemned this blasphemy and created their own communities in Canada, the US, and Mexico where they continued, and continue to this day, practicing polygamy. These groups have officially been excommunicated and condemned by the orthodox LDS Church.

    The Lafferty brothers found themselves drawn to the ideas espoused by some of these fundamentalist prophets, and they began living by what they called the "true" principles of Mormonism. This led them to murdering Brenda and Erica Lafferty.

    Both the book and the series were incredibly enlightening and stories well told. It was interesting that the makers took different approaches to telling the story. Krakauer spent a large portion of the book, close to the first third, delving into the history of the Church and of the fundamentalists. The tv series is more focused on the murder and the investigation, but there are flashbacks to moments in Mormon history.

    The Staircase is an even more recent story. In December 2001, writer Michael Peterson found his wife Kathleen dead at the foot of the staircase in their Durham, North Carolina home. Police quickly discounted the accidental fall and charged Peterson with murder, theorizing that the motive was Kathleen's discovery that he was secretly having sex with men. The revealed secrets and the murder trial, of course, took their toll on Michael and Kathleen's children. Kathleen's daughter from a previous marriage sided with her mother's two sisters against Peterson, while his two sons and two adopted daughters stood by their father. After his conviction and imprisonment for 8 years, it turned out that a couple of the state forensic scientists who had provided damning testimony were guilty of manufacturing harmful evidence, hiding exculpatory evidence and committing perjury, not just in his trial but in numerous other trials. He was finally freed, pending a retrial, but the wheels of justice turned very slowly over the next several years, and he decided to take a plea that allowed him to avoid a retrial.

    So there are two series on the case you can watch and they are somewhat intertwined. During the trial, Peterson agreed to allow a French documentary making team to cover everything. The team followed him around for years and years, and they had access in the courtroom, jail, his home, and prison that no other documentarians have ever had before or since. They interviewed everyone on his side, they filmed defense strategy meetings, they saw everything. And they added more material as events occurred. That documentary can be seen on Netflix.

    Just recently, HBO Max has created a dramatic series starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette as Michael and Kathleen.  It's obvious that the creators of this series saw the documentary because there are lots of scenes that replicate the documentary scene for scene and word for word. Also, the actors cast to play the real people are dead ringers for those people, with one exception. For some reason, the drama producers cast the part of the defense private investigator - an older white guy in real life - as a young black man. The drama producers also took some other liberties with the story which haven't made the documentarians very happy, and the makers of the documentary have taken to the press to denounce these changes and to demand that disclaimers be added to the series. It's a dynamite story, and I'm still not sure what really happened that night. Maybe we will never be.

REAL MTV: Music Documentaries, part 3

 Continuing my look at some really good music documentaries that I've watched in recent months, here's my last batch of reviews.  

    Few stories are as compelling as Tina Turner's. She truly has lived a dozen lifetimes in one. She's known extreme poverty and enormous wealth. She's found herself at professional lows and highs, lower and higher than only a very few people have experienced. She's endured racism and violence. The HBO documentary Tina tells her story, with her full participation, and without pulling any punches. She goes there; she goes into detail about her relationship with and abuse by Ike Turner, who discovered her as a young and naïve backup singer and then realized that she was a bright star that could take him to heights that he had never dreamed. After she escaped, quite literally, that relationship finally, she still had to endure the press questioning her about the relationship and about subjects that he wanted to keep to herself. The performance bits are great, the interviews are direct and honest. I highly recommend watching Tina. 

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    INXS was a huge band in the late 1980s and 1990s, and the Aussie band's frontman, Michael Hutchence, was a superstar frontman. Handsome, sexy, talented, mysterious - he seemed to have it all. Then, in 1997, he was found dead in his hotel room, a suicide. Mystify looks at the career of the band and the man himself, revealing Hutchence's true character. Hutchence was quiet, introspective, sensitive, and very reserved. He didn't like all the attention. One of the interesting things I picked up from the doc was that his vision was extremely poor; he usually didn't wear glasses or contacts when he performed, so he rarely saw his audience, and he liked it that way.  

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    Duran Duran is one of those 80s bands that has persisted into the current day, still touring and still releasing new, good music, always evolving.  There's Something You Should Know covers the history of the band and their music, focusing on seven albums and how they were made and how they grew with each release. 

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    Rick James was one of those performers whose talent and accomplishments were overshadowed by the negatives - drug use and criminal charges. Did you know, that early on, he was a band mate, and roommate, with Neil Young? He started his musical career in Canada because he had crossed the border to evade the Vietnam-era draft. He dreamed of becoming a rock star and had moderate success. Then he left that band and eventually created the character of Rick James, and his music combined funk and rock. He became a superstar performer and producer. Unfortunately, he also became a major drug addict, leading to some very low spots in his career and personal life. He was an extremely talented man, and he deserves respect for his musical accomplishments.  He really is under-appreciated. Treat yourself to this doc, Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James,  and dig in.  

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REAL MTV: Music Documentaries, Part 2

     Here are some more really good music documentaries that I've seen in the past few months.  And yes, they're pretty 1980s heavy, because that was and is my decade of music. However, these documentaries are so well done that you don't have to be a superfan to enjoy them. A lot of these appeared on HBO or Showtime, but you can search for them on your favorite platforms.

   

    Do you know Sparks?  That's OK. I was only vaguely familiar with them because of their collaboration with Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Gos. I never bought their music, and probably only ever heard one or two songs. However, they were huge in Europe for decades starting in the 1970s, and they are considered a hugely influential band amongst pop and rock musicians. Musician Beck said in the documentary, The Sparks Brothers,  that anytime he's around other musicians talking about music, Sparks is always mentioned. Sparks was/is essentially two brothers, Ron and Russell Mael, who grew up in the Los Angeles area and became enamored with movies and then music. They formed a band called Halfnelson in 1966 and took off from there, becoming leaders in the art rock/pop or glam genres. They were maybe a little too far out there for Americans, never really having huge chart success in the U.S., but they developed a huge and devoted following abroad. The documentary tells their story, and it includes interviews with a lot of 80s music figures. Their story was quite entertaining, and the two brothers are quite entertaining. My only quibble is that the doc is  a tad long, clocking in at 2 hours and 20 minutes. 

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    Speaking of Jane Wiedlin, her group The Go-Go's are the subject of another documentary (The Go-Go's) that aired on Showtime, and they were just inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in October 2021.  I was a fan of The Go - Go's, but I wasn't fully aware of their backstory.  The band formed in 1978 as a punk band, and they became a sensation because they were an all-female group that played their own instruments and wrote their own songs. A few years later, they decided to go more mainstream, and the rest is music history. Along the way, however, there was a lot of backstage turmoil, with jealousies, drug and alcohol abuse, and personnel changes, and clashes with their own management and record company. 

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    Grace Jones is one of the most iconic 1980s figures there is. She is a superdiva. Her striking and uncommon look got her into the international modeling scene in the early 1970s. She was signed to a recording contract in the mid 70s and became a fixture in the disco and club scene, a fixture at the famous Studio 54 in New York City, and an intimate of Andy Warhol and other chic celebrities. She then transitioned into films, but she was always as famous for her "private" life - which wasn't very private - as for her professional career. Today, at age 73, she is still performing on stage. Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami  captures Jones on stage and off. There is no narration, and there is no mention of timelines. The movie was filmed over several years, following her working, recording, performing, negotiating her own contracts, and following her home to Jamaica, interacting with her extended family. The movie is as mesmerizing as she is.

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        What comes to your mind when you hear the Bee Gees? Kings of disco, of course. Saturday Night Fever. The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart proves that they were so much more.  The Brothers Gibb (hence Bee Gees) were born in the U.K. but raised in Australia. The trio became a recording act in 1958, releasing 12 singes in Australia before returning to the U.K. in 1967. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, they had several hits in the U.K. and the U.S.  Then Saturday Night Fever happened, exploding their career. Altogether, they've sold more than 120 million albums, and they are third most successful band on Billboard  charts, after The Beatles and The Supremes. The brothers, especially Barry and Robin, also wrote many hit songs for many different artists over the years. Unfortunately, the brothers also had lots of tragedy along the way. Maurice died during a medical procedure at age 53. Jealousy between Barry and Robin broke up the brothers for a while. Robin himself died in 2012 at age 62. And their youngest brother Andy, who had a big solo career in the early 1980s,  died at age 30 in 1988. Their story is quite a compelling one, and, of course the music is great.

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    Documentaries, part three, coming soon.