Concert Films & Music Videos

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flyonthewall2983
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Re: Concert Films & Music Videos

#101 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Tue Oct 02, 2012 11:45 pm

Found a couple of gems on YouTube a few days ago. Blues Britannia: Can Blue Men Sing The Whites? is an interesting overview of the effect of the blues on the landscape of English music and the far-reaching effect it had on both the originators that had come over and found a rapturous audience for their music (not unlike jazz musicians in other parts of Europe, especially Paris), and the evolution of British Rock.

Quite coincidentally I also found this Eric Clapton tour documentary, shot in 1978. It is one of the few interviews he granted during this period of his career, but it was never released. Eric looks quite out of it and gets emotional in spots so it's a bit of a naked portrait of his emotional state at the time. It also features performances by him, and Muddy Waters who I believe he was touring with around this time.

Also, Peter Green: Man Of The World is an interesting, moving, tragic and ultimately triumphant documentary about Peter's career and the early years of Fleetwood Mac.

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Re: Concert Films & Music Videos

#102 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Sun Jan 20, 2013 5:56 pm

Don Henley at Sundance talking about the new Eagles doc, which will premiere on Showtime next month. If it's as any good as the To The Limit book, it'll be worth the four hours.

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Re: Concert Films & Music Videos

#103 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Sun Feb 17, 2013 12:27 am

Just finished it. Nothing really special if you aren't a big Eagles fan. If you are, there was some interesting live footage throughout which I don't think has been officially released (yet). As expected, Joe Walsh comes off as the most likable of the bunch.

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Re: Concert Films & Music Videos

#104 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Wed Jul 09, 2014 5:34 am

If you're into concert films and other music-related films I highly recommend Qello. It's basically just Netflix Instant for music, and is a little helpful to me since I recently got rid of cable TV since Palladia was one of my favorite channels but this is even better. A much deeper variety of music.


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Re: Concert Films & Music Videos

#106 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Tue Oct 07, 2014 8:27 pm

Former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett not happy with being edited out of a documentary that premiered on BBC Saturday and will do so on Showtime Friday, under the name Sum of the Parts. While this sort of thing falls under the "sour grapes" category, he has a point about the basic premise being of what they all did together and apart. Still quite interested in watching this, just to see the five of them together talking about their history.

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hearthesilence
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Re: Concert Films & Music Videos

#107 Post by hearthesilence » Thu Oct 16, 2014 11:03 am

Anyone ever see that Graceland documentary Paul Simon commissioned to promote the 25th anniversary of Graceland? Steven Van Zandt's in it, but he also did an interview on Dave Marsh's radio show about it.

Skipping the part about saving Simon from "assassination" (which seems a little far-fetched) and picking up from the point where Paul Simon approaches him at a party and blasts him for defending Mandela (and Marsh was there to witness it)…

Dave Marsh: What he said was, “Ah, the ANC [African National Congress, the organization of which Mandela was President at the time of his arrest and imprisonment], that’s just the Russians.” And he mentioned the group that [murdered black South African activist Steven Biko] had been in, which was not AZAPO…[Paul Simon] said, “That’s just the Chinese communists.”

Steven Van Zandt: Yeah, yeah. And he says, “What are you doing defending this guy Mandela?! He’s obviously a communist. My friend Henry Kissinger told me about where all of the money’s coming from,” and all of this. I was, like, all due respect, Paul…

I remember it very vividly, because it was aimed at everybody standing in the general direction.

Yeah, but mostly he was telling me.

Well, yeah, you were the one… Everybody knew who to get mad at first. [laughter]

He knew more than me, he knew more than Mandela, he knew more than the South African people. His famous line, of course, was, “Art transcends politics.” And I said to him, “All due respect, Paulie, but not only does art not transcend politics… art is politics. And I’m telling you right now, you and Henry Kissinger, your buddy, go fuck yourselves.” Or whatever I said. But he had that attitude, and he knowingly and consciously violated the boycott to publicize his record.

Well, to make his record. That’s the violation of the boycott — to make his record.

Yeah, and he actually had the nerve to say, “Well, I paid everybody double-scale.” Remember that one? Oh, that’s nice… no arrogance in that statement, huh? [laughter]

Now, the punchline. Cut to 30 years later, or whatever it is. He asked me to be in his movie [Under African Skies, the documentary on the making of Graceland, included as a DVD in the album’s 25th anniversary boxed edition]. I said, “Alright, I’ll be in your movie, if you don’t edit me. You ready to tell it like it is?”

He says, “Yep.”

“Are you, like, uh, apologizing in this movie?”

“Yep.”

“Okay. I’m not gonna be a sore winner. I’ll talk to you.”

I did an interview. They show me the footage. Of course, they edited the hell out of it to some little statement where I’m saying something positive about Paul. [laughter] And I see the rest of the footage, where he’s supposedly apologizing, with Dali Tambo [founder of Artists Against Apartheid and son of late ANC leaders Adelaide and Oliver Tambo]. He says, “I’m sorry if I made it inconvenient for you.” That was his apology.

In other words, he still thinks he’s right, all these years later!

You’re the only person who’s ever met Paul twice who thinks that’s surprising. [laughter]

I mean, at this point, you still think you were right?! Meanwhile, that big “communist,” as soon as he got out of jail, I see who took the first picture with him. There’s Paul Simon and Mandela, good buddies. I’m watchin’ CNN the other day. Mandela dies, on comes a statement by Bono and the second statement’s by Paul Simon. I’m like oh, just make me throw up. You know, I like the guy in a lot of ways, I do; and I respect his work, of course. He’s a wonderful, wonderful artist, but when it comes to this subject, he just will not admit he was wrong. Y’know, just mea culpa. Come on, you won! He made twenty, thirty million dollars at least, okay? Take the money and apologize, okay? I mean, say “Listen, maybe I was wrong about this a little bit.” No.

Well…unfortunately we live in a country where the money means you don’t have to apologize, and let’s leave that there.

flyonthewall2983
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Re: Concert Films & Music Videos

#108 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Thu Oct 16, 2014 11:18 am

Thanks for sharing that. I find Marsh quite boorish in some of his views (I'd bet the house that he literally loses sleep because KISS got inducted into his boy's club), but that was a nice bit of trivia. Should be no surprise that artists can be just as foresighted about politics they find themselves in as much as the politicians themselves.

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Re: Concert Films & Music Videos

#109 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Mon Mar 23, 2015 2:59 pm

Lambert & Stamp, documentary about the first managers of The Who.

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Re: Concert Films & Music Videos

#110 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Wed Aug 19, 2015 2:18 pm

There's a good doc on Hulu right now, Cant Stand Losing You: Surviving The Police, based on Andy Summers' autobiography One Train Later. It features him in voice-over talking about his early life and career, with the focus mostly on his time in the band and the wreckage it caused to his marriage. Lots of footage from the 2007 reunion tour and other present-day stuff is interspersed throughout. Provides a nice contrast to Stewart Copeland's Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out, which had more of a sharper focus on the time the band was together.

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Re: Concert Films & Music Videos

#111 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Mon Jun 27, 2016 8:01 am

Nice little tidbit of trivia, but I found J.C. Chandor's name in the credits of 2002's Rising Low, directed by Mike Gordon of Phish about the making of Gov't Mule's The Deep End and more generally about bass players. I think he's credited as one of the digital camera operators as it's shot on both film and digital. It's okay when it's a more straight-ahead documentary about the band and particularly Allen Woody, Gov't Mule's bassist who died in 2000, and the role of bass in a rock band in general. It suffers more when Gordon fools around with the form and goes a little pretentious with it.

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ando
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Re: Concert Films & Music Videos

#112 Post by ando » Mon Jun 27, 2016 4:52 pm

Thanks for the heads-up on Can't Stand Losing You (albeit, a year later :) ) on Hulu+, fly. Trying to find whatever I can that's watchable on this $7.99 a month siphoner.

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Re: Concert Films & Music Videos

#113 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Sat Aug 27, 2016 4:03 am

We are Twisted Fucking Sister! is a hell of a doc, chronicling the band's rise through the ranks of the New York rock scene in the 70's. I'm not a fan of theirs by any stretch of the imagination, but I've always respected Dee Snider for helping put the PMRC in their place. This helped me admire his and their work ethic, and I would do no justice by some of the stories contained within just talking about them.


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Re: Concert Films & Music Videos

#115 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Sun Jul 09, 2023 10:36 pm

Dire Straits’ concert film of Alchemy is a nice refresher on just how much they achieved up to the time they defined the MTV generation for better or worse with “Money for Nothing”, and the monster album Brothers in Arms became. You get the feeling here they’re in the pocket all the great bands go through when they are about to become huge, but still on the ground level of the rock circuits of Europe as it was then and in the States where they had success and Knopfler already established as a sideman and producing some of Dylan’s stuff at the time.

I could basically gush over his playing but the band is just killer, already having enhanced their sound with the two keyboardists from the more rough and tumble four piece of the first album. The metamorphosis the band has towards adding members is what diluted their sound a bit on On Every Street their final album. But here it’s at a sweet spot where it’s more piano and organ and less synth based although they are present too. The real move the band make in this is by sticking “Sultans of Swing” relatively in the middle of the set instead of the encore.

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Fiery Angel
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Re: Concert Films & Music Videos

#116 Post by Fiery Angel » Sun Jul 09, 2023 11:02 pm

When I saw Dire Straits on the '85 Brothers in Arms tour, they were still playing "Sultans" early: it was the 6th song in a 15-song set. And on the final DS tour, in '92, it was slotted 8th in a 15-song set.

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brundlefly
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Re: Concert Films & Music Videos

#117 Post by brundlefly » Thu Jul 13, 2023 12:06 am

Le Cinéma Club is doing its third annual summer music festival, and this week's film, picked by the folks at the great label Dust-to-Digital, is William R. Ferris' 1975 21-minute short "Give My Poor Heart Ease: Mississippi Delta Bluesmen." B.B. King is the marquee name, but the stars are everyone else.

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hearthesilence
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Re: Concert Films & Music Videos

#118 Post by hearthesilence » Mon Sep 11, 2023 3:17 am

Shout Factory released a DVD of the T.A.M.I. Show in 2010 (following a four-year delay brought on by the morass of music rights that had to be dealt with) and presumably the same HD master was used for the Blu-ray released around Christmas 2016. Unfortunately, the Blu-ray is not really a visual upgrade of the DVD.

I thought it COULD be, but my original hopes may have been misplaced. The show was shot with an early hi-def (!) video system that was supposedly 800 lines of resolution. However, this was always planned to be a theatrical film (for a variety of reasons, they still opted for the video system instead of shooting with film cameras, save for the intro which was shot on handheld 16mm cameras). This meant they created a 35mm negative that was essentially kinoscope where they filmed the video image. They also wanted to project the film in widescreen, and since the concert was captured on a system designed for television broadcast circa 1964, the aspect ratio of what was captured would have been 4:3 - that means they'd have to crop it to make a 16:9 image, which also means we actually lose a large chunk of those 800 lines of resolution, reduced to about 575 lines with further loss in detail due to the analog nature of copying.

Shout Factory's HD transfer/master was done on the 35mm element as the original video masters are presumably long gone or unusable. So with the Blu-ray, you get a better reproduction of the physical details inherent to the film element regardless of the image capture - i.e. film grain, scratches, etc. - but the actual data is not improved at all because what was preserved was arguably standard-def to begin with, save the aforementioned intro shot in 16mm.

It is what it is - this was a rare concert film that was commercially unavailable for decades due to the rights issues involved, so even if the image quality is never going to be great, just having it in legal form and looking far better than VHS bootlegs is a godsend.

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thirtyframesasecond
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Re: Concert Films & Music Videos

#119 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Wed Sep 27, 2023 3:05 pm

Nevermind the Straits, but Knopfler also composed great film scores and guested on a number of other artists' records - Steely Dan's Gaucho, for one. That's some track record.

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Matt
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Concert Films & Music Videos

#120 Post by Matt » Thu Oct 19, 2023 11:37 pm

Video for “God Turn Me into a Flower” by Weyes Blood, directed by Adam Curtis. Yes, the documentary filmmaker.

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thirtyframesasecond
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Re: Concert Films & Music Videos

#121 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Wed Oct 25, 2023 2:39 pm

Matt wrote:
Thu Oct 19, 2023 11:37 pm
Video for “God Turn Me into a Flower” by Weyes Blood, directed by Adam Curtis. Yes, the documentary filmmaker.
...BUT IT WAS ALL AN ILLUSION...

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