Review: Melody Makers: The Bible of Rock n’ Roll

Text © Robert Barry Francos / Indie Horror Films, 2020

Images from the Internet

Melody Makers: The Bible of Rock n’ Roll (aka Melody Makers: You Should’ve Been There)

Directed by Leslie Ann Coles

2053152 Ontario / Eggplant Picture and Sound; Film PaniK /
LA Coles Fine Art Films / Cleopatra Entertainment / MVD Entertainment

78 minutes, 2016 / 2019

www.facebook.com/MelodyMakersthemovie/

www.cleopatraentertainmet.com

www.mvdb2b.com

During the mid-1960s through ‘80s, if you wanted to learn about music in the States, you had to turn to mainstream magazines like Rolling Stone, which tended to be more corporate (just look at how badly they’ve mishandled the selections for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum over the years). Sure, there was Rock Scene for the New York Dolls, the Ramones, Blondie, and the like – and I’m grateful for that – but it was only in smaller mags like Crawdaddy to cover the newest and upcoming groups. Also, those were monthly. To get info from weeklies like The Village Voice, it was just a small section of the entire issue.

It was different across in England where there were a number of weekly papers focused mainly on music, such as Sounds, New Music Express (NME) or Melody Maker (MM). Many of us picked it up as often as we could to find out the latest and greatest of the obscure and mainstream scenes.

Melody Maker is older than rock and roll, and that’s for certain, first publishing in 1926 and lasting until 2000, when it merged into NME, essentially killing it. But, as usual, I’m jumping ahead of myself.

Essentially, until the mid-1960s, MM was a musician’s trade magazine, listing gig for various types of music (including – gasp – jazz), a place for musicians to find each other to form groups, and musical instrument for sale. This all changed with the inclusion of a cover story about some upstart band called… oh, what was it now?... The Beatles (Paul McCartney, specifically). After that, they introduced a lot of groups or solo artists that are part of the culture now, such as the Rolling Stones, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and the like.

One aspect that made MM important was their respect for the musician, and especially the message that they were presenting in their music, to almost a political level. Luckily, in this well-put together documentary, we are introduced to the people who worked there in the “golden age” of the paper, namely the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, when it began its natural decline. But more on that later.

Barrie Wentzell with his final pics of JImi Hendirx

Rather than presenting just talking heads discussing the glory days, we see the staff interviewed now, though mostly we see photographs of various bands in the 1960s and 1970s during their rise to fame and their heydays. Bowie (who is often called “BOW-ie” here, rather than “Bow-IE”), Jimi, and mostly British bands are shown in glorious black and white stills (and the occasional film footage), mostly taken by Barrie Wentzell, who really is the center piece of this film. Why? Simple: he moved to Toronto, and this is actually a Canadian film, so it had to have a certain amount of Canadian content.

Much of the staff is interviewed throughout, such as writer Christopher Welch (who worked there 1964-’79), and editors Christopher Charlesword (1970-’77), Richard Williams (1970-’80), Alan Lewis (1969-’73), and Alan Jones (1974-97). Also contributing are a bunch of musicians from the period, including Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull), Eric Burdon (Animals), Judy Dyble (Fairport Convention, etc.), Dave Cousins (The Strawbs), Chris Squire (Yes), Rick Buckler (The Jam) and a couple of members of Nazareth. There’s also a bunch of industry types including band managers and record execs, among others.

As you may have noticed, there are not many women represented here, barely even Janis or Diana Ross (Supremes era), other than Sonja Kristina of Curved Air, and photographer / founder of Rockarchive Gallery, Jill Furmanovsky, which seems odd to me considering this is by a woman director. Note that I am not pointing fingers since at the time, this was what it was like: testosterone heavy music and writing (though NME infamously had the great Caroline Coon); that being said, in my own ‘zine which ran from 1977 through ’88, I had more female writers than male.

The point is that all of these accounts are firsthand. I’ve always been annoyed at documentaries that interview writers who have written books and discuss second-hand events. These people lived the moments, and have the stories to back it up. I’m also grateful that the people are often identified by subtitles, rather than just a couple of times. That makes for easier viewing and comprehending, especially when it’s been so many years and people don’t look like they did back when.

But not just stories about musicians, we hear how the internal creation of the paper worked, such as when in meetings it was discussed, “Who’s going to be the main interview of the week?” This was important because whomever was on the cover could help make the band and/or sell a lot of records. They use Genesis as the example, here. It was also amusing to hear that they would occasionally make up sensational stories to sell copies (oh, those Brits!), such as how Springsteen would supposedly open for the Strawbs, or the Beatles were planning to reform (I remember those rumors right until Lennon’s assassination).

The film is loosely broken up into segments, including one I really enjoyed about interactions with musicians and their bands. For example, one of the writers talks about how he was in the recording studio with the Rolling Stones when they all found out about the death of Brian Jones, and what was their reactions. Others include tales of Jimi, Syd Barrett and Bowie.

Now I have said this before about particular local music scenes, how they would start small, blow up to become huge, and that would end up being the death knell of that very scene, drowned in its own success. That was kind of what happened to the MM. As the bands became mega-stars, and the rest of the British press started honing in on them/hounding them, the groups would close ranks and start to bar the very journalists and photographers that helped make their careers in the first place. Around that time, punk started to rise (about 1 hour into the film), and the musical taste of the MM audience began to change, leading to staff leaving (much in a mirrored way they first came in as rock’n’roll was on the rise and the old staff left in the mid-1960s in a huff).

The DVD extras are the trailer for this film, and some other music-related Cleopatra Entertainment coming attractions.

The director (and sometimes actor), Leslie Ann Coles, does a magnificent job in her first full-length feature, keeping the pace fast without quick edits, and lets us see the bands through the eyes of the people who wrote about them, and also those who snapped some pictures that have become iconic. There are also many here that have never been printed before. I’m not a fan of many of the bloated bands that are covered here (e.g., Tull, Nazareth, Zeppelin), but still found it compelling and fascinating to watch. That says a lot.

DVD Review: The Advocate for Fagdom

Text © Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2015
Images from the Internet

The Advocate for Fagdom

Directed by Angelique Bosio
Le Chat Qui Fume
91 minutes, 2011
www.thedavocateforfagdom.com
www.lechatquifume.com    
www.mvdvisual.com

Usually it’s the second wave that is more adamant, and more militant that what preceded. For punk, the British scene blasted through the American predecessor; in feminism, the second wave presented the angry side with the likes of Andrea Dworkin as its poster child. For transgressive media, the roots of this documentary had its nascent rising with filmmakers Richard Kern and John Waters, and the No Wave movement of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and the Contortions.

From the foundation of transgression came Bruce LaBruce, blasting out of the furnace of a place that started building by breaking through fear, and into the face of society in a way no one could have predicted. In many ways, one of the focal points that made LaBruce such a powerful force was his consolidation of many difference scenes and genres, and laser focusing them out through a queer prism.

Hailing from Ontario, LaBruce started making small films with gay themes that were grainy 8mm, which somehow made enough of an impact that Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain (from whose quote the title of this film was taken) was known to have said that LaBruce was his favorite filmmaker. LaBruce also produced a Queercore (aka Homocore) fanzine in the ‘80s that promoted a scene that didn’t exist, with enough energy that an outburst of the style arose from it. A hardcore fan (or, as is commented here, a fan of hardcore boys), he wanted to acknowledge a level of queerness that was in the music that was not being noted because of the scene’s violently homophobic element. At this point, I believe it would have been good to interview members of the Pansy Division , or MDC (Millions of Dead Cops, or Multi-Death Corporation), who could tell stories about being on the road with some of those gay-bashing bands (e.g., Bad Brains).

However, it is his cinema of transgression that has made Bruce LaBruce not just famous, but infamous. They look a bit like real-life aspects of ‘60s Warhol mixed with the bizzaro unexpectedness of John Waters. Using both script and improvisation, LaBruce shows a world of hustlers, S&M/B&D, and a copious amounts of graphic M2M sex; it should be noted here that he also shocks his regular audience by having W2W, on which some of the audience walked out). And, please note, that this documentary has some of these clips included in this doc, so if you are a right wing religious nut, you may not want to watch this or it may recruit you to making the choice to go to the other side. Yes, that’s sarcasm.

Okay, back to the serious review. As someone points out in the doc, this isn’t just anti- to be different: having studied deconstructionism via Foucault and Derrida, he uses it to express his agenda, in what seems like crude attempts, but is actually quite astute. And as Waters says in one of the interviews, LaBruce also having fun (Waters tells quite the amusing and telling anecdote about when he stayed at Waters’ house).

I believe it’s true, as is noted on the DVD, that when you make a hardcore gay porno film – especially if you star in it like LaBruce has done numerous times – it probably is harder to get funding to reach the level of Waters or especially Gus van Sant. Even Richard Kern, who directed a number of violent and (straight) experimental films is acknowledged as an auteur and somewhat respected on a cult level, probably will never reach the A-Line. That being said, there probably would be no Shortbus (2006) or arguably The Brown Bunny (2003) without people like Bruce LaBruce breaking the barriers on the micro-budget end. And I would like to point out that the directors of both those films, John Cameron Mitchell and Vincent Gallo, respectively, have not done much feature-length film directing since those releases over a decade ago. For LaBruce, however, his biggest budgeted film came after this documentary.

The third act here is an in-depth look at his insertion of – er – insertions, blow-jobs, and what makes this art with some pornographic images rather than being dismissed as porn. This is, to me, an important topic that deserves to be discussed, especially in today’s world of right wing religious fanatics around the world, and in the West, who are intent on going Biblical and - Koranical? - on all things gay, explicit or a quarter of an inch beyond the ken of their interpretation of “moral.”

But that is not what makes LaBruce so interesting to me. What I find fascinating is a two edged sword that he wields so sharply and intensely. On the one hand, he is bringing homosexuality to the forefront in a way none of the other directors have before, even with Waters’ touchstone being the amazing Divine (d. 1988), mixing transgression with usually leftist politics.

At the same time, he holds up the gay lifestyle to the queer population themselves, showing their own weaknesses by focusing on explicit lesbian sex in The Raspberry Reich (2004), or cultural and material consumerist mentality (borrowing Romero’s zombie = consumer from Dawn of the Dead [1979]) in Otto; or, Up With Dead People (2008). By wagging his finger at both sides, his statement becomes all the louder.

Angelique Bosio keeps a very balanced film going here. There are clips from many of LaBruce’s films, including the explicit scenes; we see the action from his public photographic art performances, and interviews with most of the writers and actors in this film to talk about both LaBruce what it means to them to be involved in a hotspot political movement. There are also a number of directors, including those mentioned beforehand, like Waters, Kern and van Sant, writers such as Bruce Benderson, and even performance artists, including Vaginal Davis. Susanne Sachsse also gives some pointed feminist notes as being one of the few females in the group.

The world is swinging ever further to the Right, and it’s good to have a strong voice pulling in the opposite direction in a way that is so extreme to make its point. This film is both exquisite and at times anguish to watch, which is to say, that it represents Bruce LaBruce and for what he stands. This should be in Gender, Queer and Film Studies departments/programs around the world.

 

Trailer HERE

 

Bonus video HERE