Adding Transparency To A Critical Process: Let's All Go To The Rock 'n' Roll Movies
Give Arthur Lee credit for keeping his stories straight. The late legendary leader of Love was a voracious storyteller, the sort of man who could tell you three different tales in three days – all of them plausible – and ultimately only repeat the one that most closely resembled the truth.
It dawned on me while watching “Love Story,” a film Chris Hall and Mike Kerry that makes its DVD debut on July 29. Here was Arthur tooling around L.A. talking about walking from Dorsey High to the Capitol Records tower to deliver a demo tape; Bryan Maclean providing an anecdote about the Ben Frank’s diner; and orchestrator David Angel talking about Lee’s ability to verbalize how strings should sound despite his ignorance regarding musical notation. And then there’s the issue about the band members being underage when they signed their contracts and the day the session musicians showed up at a studio to replace the band.
The stories all align with anecdotes Lee gave me when I profiled him for LA Weekly and then wrote liner notes for Rhino’s Love boxed set. For a guy whose mind was allegedly messed up by copious drug use, when he stayed focused he had a remarkable ability to deliver specific details, often quite colorfully. 
The Love DVD is part of a July deluge of documentaries on fascinating rock n’ rollers: Kerri O’Kane’s “The Gits” comes out July 8 on the heels of a theatrical release in several cities; the Joe Strummer film “The Future is Unwritten” is released the same day; and "CSNY: Deja Vu" hits theaters July 25.
All four films admirably cover their subjects; while “Love” and “Future” are purely musical, “Gits” chronicles a band and examines the murder of singer Mia Zapata and “Déjà Vu” weighs heavily toward anti-Iraq War efforts in the U.S., a number of which involve Neil Young and Stephen Stills.
The Love and the Gits movies concern possibilities more than celebrate achievement. Conversely, the Strummer and CSNY movies explore the adverse effects of success, from the sense of loss and isolation as fame creeps in and the expectations of fans. Strummer is a mess once the Clash conquer America; he gets worse in the years after the band imploded. CSNY evolves, during a tour that finds many of its performances critically maligned, from a confused and bloated lot to a band unified around a concept and a leader. The reviews get better as the band takes greater control of the material and the message.
The eras covered tap recent history without slipping into the “Behind the Music” formula. The “redemption” chapter of “BTMs” would have some shifting definitions in these four pics. Lee’s incarceration in the 1990s is not mentioned so his return to the concert stage to celebrate “Forever Changes” is not as dramatic as it could have been. Zapata’s bandmates and family get a taste of closure when her murder is sentenced but the coda is not celebratory. The Strummer doc is remarkably invigorating — the sadness is his death at 50. By the end of “Déjà Vu,” on the other hand, the first three letters in CSNY are not in Young’s ballpark musically, a gap that does not close enough between the film’s beginning and conclusion.
All four of the films concerned eras of interest that have occurred during my lifetime. Naturally, I wish I had been a L.A. teenager in Love’s heyday; “Déjà Vu” and “Future is Unwritten” touch nerves that fuse the musical and the political as well provide nostalgia trips to my teen years; the Gits emerged at a time when those of us obsessed with rock ‘n’ roll were turning over every stone to find the next great American band. Each of them are inspiring in their own way: Artists who blaze their own paths wind up being the leaders who become memorialized. And it can still be done today.
Album list is getting too numerous due to a week's vacation. Concert list, however, is now at 63/179 in my quest to hit 100 concerts/300 acts.
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