GROUNDBREAKING MUSIC DOCUMENTARY ON DVD
There have been many documentaries on television over the years on the history of rock and pop, jazz and blues, even show tunes and vaudeville. Usually, these are clip shows: snippets of performances, videos and interviews with a narrator providing the links and commentary. They might be on one group, such as The Beatles, or cover a genre, such as Ken Burns' Jazz.
In the case of 20th-century popular music, it all started with one of the best documentaries ever, in any field. Acclaimed British filmmaker Tony Palmer made an incredible work in the mid '70s called All You Need Is Love. It aired all over the world, but in Canada, most of us didn't see it because only TV Ontario picked it up. Since it has never before been out on VHS or DVD, it's a new find.
It's a bit like finding the guide book to how to understand modern music and how to put it all into context. There are 17, 50-minute episodes, spread over five DVDs. You will be tempted to try to watch them all in a single weekend. This isn't just about rock 'n' roll, it's about everything in the 20th century, and how popular music got to rock, how it all came together. Each episode looks at a particular style: blues, ragtime, jazz, musicals, Tin Pan Alley, country, swing, rhythm and blues, and then how it all merged in the various styles of rock 'n' roll. It first aired in 1976, but the roots of the film go back to 1963, when Tony Palmer made a surprising friend.
"It was one of those curious flukes of history," said the jovial Palmer on a recent promotional trip to Toronto. "I was in Cambridge University and the Beatles came to play. They'd had a number one hit, but they weren't the international stars yet."
Palmer said he went to the press conference representing the university paper.
"Lennon came up afterwards, and said, 'you didn't answer any questions.' I said I thought it was a bit silly. He asked me what I did, and I said I was a student. He said that's a bit silly too, and we had a laugh about it."
Palmer showed Lennon around the quadrant and the singer scribbled his number on a piece of paper, telling Palmer to call him when he came to London.
"Well, a couple of years later, they were intergalactic stars. And I finally got to London," he said. "So I had kept the piece of paper. I called, and I could tell it was about the 400th phone call that day. I left a message. And later (Beatles press officer) Derek Taylor called me back and said, 'John wants to know why it took three years for you to call?' "
There friendship was based around interest in music. Palmer was working at the BBC, and Lennon had some programming ideas.
"What Lennon was preoccupied with was that there was a great number of musicians who couldn't get on TV then, including Hendrix, Zappa, Pink Floyd, et cetera. We had discussions about it, and that kept the friendship alive."
In the meantime, Palmer became a filmmaker of impressive talents, eventually making work that won awards around the world, including Stravinsky, Maria Callas, and a seven-hour work on Wagner starring Richard Burton. Then, another chance meeting occured in the early '70s.
"I was walking down the street in New York, and completely by accident, who should appear but John Lennon? I can still hear his words, like it was 10 minutes ago. 'Are you doing anything useful these days.' "
A dialogue started about music again, about what could go into a history of popular music.
"There really wasn't a coherent overview about how this thing came about. We arbitrarily made a list of what type of things should be there, ragtime, blues, music hall. We set the list over a long, long meal of brown rice."
Lennon was too busy to be involved, and Palmer never traded on his name and fame to get the film made. But he did take one piece of advice from him.
"As he was leaving, he turned and said, "Oh, by the way, I've got a great title for you. Why don't you call it All You Need Is Love?"
Those looking for a strict run-down of all the big names in music over the years will have to go elsewhere. Palmer isn't that type of filmmaker. As director and editor of the series, he was looking to help people understand how rock 'n' roll, the music of that day, had developed. Also, he felt strongly that the impact of popular music had not been taken seriously, as an art form or as defining the culture of the era.
"Nobody had done it," he said, referring to the lack of documentaries about music. "Arguably the most important movement of the 20th century, it wasn't thought of as important. Well, we now know it is. What the series did, originally, was to wake people up to that."
The episodes explore and expose the roots and explode some long-held myths. Palmer shows how blues wasn't directly imported from Africa, and jazz wasn't created and discovered in New Orleans. Each grew from other forms and included some copying of existing styles, even European and white ones. People in the know or people with valuable opinions speak their minds and are not edited into tiny portions. It's a style that is at odds with most television today, but is far more valuable.
"Of course I have a point of view and of course I'm fashioning the material to what I want to say," said Palmer. "The current fashion is dumbing down, assuming the audience isn't capable of making up their own mind. You don't have to give people soundbites all the time. I've never deviated in my view that the audience doesn't need to be told what to think. And what is incredibly important is not to resort to soundbites. People do have important things to say, and you have to give them room to say it."
Palmer's job, one he did with great dedication and success, was to find the right people, and the important ones.
"Looking at it now retrospectively, it's value, if I can use that word, we got to a lot of people in a very short period of time, that are gone. Bing Crosby, Hoagy Carmichael, (late critic) Lester Bangs, Eubie Blake actually talked to Scott Joplin. It's an important source of archive. Not just people, places. Sam Phillips took us into the original studio where he recorded Elvis. It's now a Wal-Mart. Beale Street in Memphis, gone. The Cavern, gone. We were in the right time at the right place."
Some of the footage is familiar but much of it is new, such as the crumbling hospital where Scott Joplin, the greatest name of ragtime, died in the throws of mental illness, of syphillis. Or a violent confrontation featuring fans, police, and none other than Leonard Cohen, captured only by Palmer on film.
"The cause of that particular riot was that he was giving a concert in Tel Aviv, in a brand-new basketball hall. The audience was seated around the edge of the new floor, and Leonard said you're very far away, can you take off your shoes to not hurt the floor, and come up to the front? So they did, very nicely, but then all these Israeli guards started beating up the kids."
It's an unsettling and fascinating scene used to open the show on Songs Of War And Protest. Palmer, who did a full film on Cohen, describes him in those days as highly political.
There are interviews with and performances by Dizzy Gillespie, Muddy Waters, Rogers and Hart, Artie Shaw, Cab Calloway, Stevie Wonder, Bill Monroe, Paul McCartney, Elton John and The Rolling Stones. No, it's not all-encompassing, but getting 17 hours for a TV special was amazing then, unheard of now. Its value is just as strong now as it was in the '70s.
"The thing that we tried to do was put this phenomenon of popular music in some sort of context," said Palmer. "This is an introduction. It's not the whole story. It says what you have is incredibly important. This thing called popular music is not just the Spice Girls. It's important and central to the type of culture you have. The ignorance of cultural history, of the things that have gone into the making of the world as it is today, is appalling."
All You Need Is Love is available from Universal Music at a list price of $99.95.
Bob Mersereau is a music writer and the arts reporter for CBC in New Brunswick.
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