Imagine, if you will, a place where music and love fill the air, and every person works for free to build a utopian kingdom.
Imagine a secret island hideaway whose location is only shared to people who’ve earned an invitation by a lifetime of good deeds.
Imagine a wonderland forest filled with fluttering fairies and giggling mystics who make magic happen with the tap of a wand.
Fantasylands do exist beyond fiction and films — where living breathing human beings practice the supernatural for the benefit of all.
I was invited to such a place and can confirm its existence if not its location. I remember tall trees and a lake. I remember wandering for hours through campsites so elaborate you’d think they’d been built over months, not in a day. I remember multiple stages — from the base of a Yasgur’s farm-like natural amphitheater to hidden-away cabanas in the woods on the edge of cliffs with a dozen master musicians playing together in one-time-ever ensembles sharing Marley and Dylan and the Beatles and the Dead.
I saw an army of carpenters — not a one of them paid — building out of a love of creation a giant stage befitting a dream — then breaking it all down in one afternoon so we could scatter and leave no clue anyone was ever there. I saw the best minds of my generation forging friendships out of thin air that change lives forever, and crafting art that changed perception in the present. I saw costumes that coulda been in blockbuster movies, brought from a thousand closets, envisioned for a year, sown and woven together, from Dr. Seuss hats & lit-up umbrellas to painted feet & Gandalf staffs.
The first two hours, I walked around jaw-dropped, unable to speak. I heard the best music ever recorded wafting over the lands from giant sound systems to homey campsites. I met the friendliest people beaming like they’d just drank from the fountain of ecstasy and were sharing their joy breathlessly. I spoke to the ghosts of Bill Graham and Jerry Garcia and they were just as ebullient as you’d imagine they’d be.
And if all this magic had a source, I noticed an inordinate number of Irish leprechauns seeming to be in charge. The Irish — the poets — the pranksters of history. The playful, the giggling, the masters of mischievous — the spinners of language and tellers of tales — the roaming mistrals of old playing songs in the present to collectives of children no matter their age.
I jammed with 90-year-olds and 9-year-olds and couldn’t tell the difference. I talked old verities with teenagers and young music with seniors. I saw a 12-year-old boy buy Abbey Road from a box of old albums and walk down the path staring wide-eyed into its cover like all us old-timers grew up doing. I talked to people who long ago brought their young children to this . . . and now were there with their grandchildren.
.
Imagine a festival where every penny of the ticket sales is given to charities for kids with special needs — to help not only the children but their parents as well.
Imagine a festival where everyone from the rock star performers back stage to the front gate ticket-takers were equally as friendly — and equally paid not a cent.
Imagine all the people sharing all the work, living for today, and living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
Soundswell on the main stage — photo by Joel Werner
Poster by Frank McTruck — who did ‘Pokes posters in the ’70s
.
The Central Continental Cowpokes — Winnipeg Folk Festival, 1977
Laney Hunt, Rick McGhee, Sue Hodgson, Bill Hodgson, Andy Roblin
.
Sadly, regular Cowpoke drummer, mandolin player and singer Brian Ridd was in Europe this month, but he was ably filled in by longtime drummer friend-of-the-family Ron ‘Deep Torpedo’ Torpey.
Here’s the sweet opening ‘soundcheck’ — Friend of The Devil — including a video tour around the first flush room — thanks to Ann La Touche —
.
==================================
Here’s the opening few songs thanks to Leora Kamehanaokala Almstrom —
You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere — (The Byrds) Dark Hollow — (Bill Browning, made popular by The Grateful Dead) I Am A Pilgrim — (traditional, via The Byrds) I’m Going Back To Manitoba — (Andrew Roblin) Why You Been Gone So Long — (Mickey Newbury, via the Country Gazette)
.
=================================
Here’s the bulk of the first set thanks to Brian Humniski —
Dark Hollow — (Bill Browning, made popular by The Grateful Dead) I Am A Pilgrim — (traditional, via The Byrds) I’m Going Back to Manitoba — (Andrew Roblin) Why You Been Gone So Long — (Mickey Newbury, via the Country Gazette) Andy’s three hammer dulcimer songs:
Lucky Trapper’s Reel — (Andy Dejarlis) Ti-Jean Bouribale — (Reg Bouvette) Red River Jig — (traditional, arranged by Andrew Roblin) Honky Tonkin’ — (Hank Williams) Cut It Loose — (Robert Zaporzan) — Hodgson lead vocal Bobby Starr’s first song — Trouble In Mind (Richard M. Jones, a blues standard made popular by Bertha ‘Chippie’ Hill, Dinah Washington & Nina Simone) Bobby Starr’s second song — Every Dark Cloud (Has A Silver Lining Shining Through) — with a Rick bass solo, then Andy takin’ it on the pedal steel Bobby Starr’s third song
END OF FIRST SET — SHORT BREAK
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere — (Neil Young) Freeborn Man!! — (Jimmy Martin) — with Rick’s monster vocal performance!
.
====================================
Here’s a stand-alone clip of Bobby Starr’s second song — Every Dark Cloud (Has A Silver Lining Shining Through) — thanks to Ann La Touche —
.
===================================
Here’s the killer juice of the show — the bulk of the second set — thanks to Brian Humniski —
Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms — (traditional, via Flatt & Scruggs) In My Hour of Darkness — (Gram Parsons) — Zap vocal Tennessee — (Bill Monroe) — King vocal Wake Up Little Susie — (Everly Brothers) I’ve Just Seen A Face — (The Beatles) Travelers On The Road — (the Andy Roblin masterpiece and title song of the new album)
How Can She Love Me When I Don’t Have A Car — the Ron Torpey hit This Gettin’ Old Is Gettin’ Old — the new classic by Will Hodgson Manitoba — Andrew’s homage to to our home Henry (!) — (New Riders of The Purple Sage) Love Is a Rose — (Neil Young) I Can’t Hold Out (Talk To Me Baby) — (Willie Dixon) — a Dave Zilkie shines song Not Fade Away — (Buddy Holly) —> Call Me The Breeze — (J.J. Cale) — anutha Zilkie-friendly numbah Sweet Choral (!) — Hodgson’s early classic Band introductions — “Let’s make this an annual event!” Up Against The Wall Redneck Mother — (Jerry Jeff Walker) [first minute]
The show’s conclusion — the final 1:36 of Up Against The Wall Redneck Mother —
— video will turn regular horizontal in 20 seconds —
Dave Zilkie, Rick McGhee, Andrew Roblin, Ron Torpey, Will Hodgson
photo by Brian Humniski
My rock ‘n’ roll mom Enid ended up having a pretty close relationship with many of my musical friends — so here’s A Song of Enid I Sing I wrote for her.
And since this is about great music played in the ‘Peg — here’s the feature story I wrote for Relix magazine about the Festival Express tour and movie when The Dead, Janis Joplin, The Band and many others played there in 1970.
The Art of Glass, the Art of Business, and the Art of Love
.
One day a hundred years ago, or maybe it was five, I noticed this store called the Squisha House opened around the corner with insanely cool glass pipes! What the hell?! In little Bronte Village?! I had to investigate!
After keeping an eye on the place for a couple of weeks, I finally went in, and the proprietor Cameron Stubbins & I began such long conversations he had to bring in a chair so I could keep the jam goin’. He taught me about the history of glass pipe art, and I shared the history of the counterculture it grew out of.
Matt Robertson’s Cow Over The Moon
One day, after months of us talking, a blond babe came through the front door and went straight to the stool behind the cash register. I figured Cam prolly knew her. 😁 That was my first intro to the Cam & Kate duo. In that moment, they never said a word to each other — it was all understood.
This is a story about love.
Cameron & Katelynn
They met in a seeking sort of way . . . and Katelynn was infatuated by his Camaro. That’s the funniest thing to me — the stereotype of the car attracting the girl. I already had a girl, thank god, when I bought my first car — a 1967 Dodge Fargo van.
It probably kicked things up a notch, but I never thought the “car thing” actually worked. Yet it most miraculously did here.
Then they formed a business together championing all the glass artists across Canada. And here’s the amazing thing — they’ve become the most successful retail store in the history of this waterfront neighbourhood on the shoulder of Toronto! In fact, it’s the only store that ever has lineups of people stretching down the sidewalk before they open!
Many small businesses fail within a year, and fully half within two — but these guys are rockin it five years out and have stacks of boxes shipping all over the world every day.
I came of age in Greenwich Village in NYC, and now find myself in Bronte Village in the GTA, and this little artists’ hive is the only place that would be at home in either Village.
Oakville The Good is one of the few towns in Canada that doesn’t allow marijuana dispensaries, but this glass pipe store brings in people from all over the world!
It’s so crazy how these two youngins from out of town realized how cool Bronte could be. Now I can’t imagine the place without them.
They planted the flag of playful weirdness on July 21st, 2018, and the Village has been alive with art and youth ever since!
Or here’s one about some fireworks shenanigans and how some folks can be too quick to jump to conclusions.
And since we’re in the middle of the summer movie watching season — here’s my Master Movie List with over 800 films sorted by Auteurs, Comedies, Dramas, Documentaries and such.
In my never-ending search for Adventure I stumbled into the coolest little enclave in the harbourfront park in front of my house — an astronomer’s meet-up digging infinity (to riff on Lord Buckley’s line). And these people are really doing it!
Whenever there’s something special going on in the sky and the conditions are clear, a whole bunch of science buffs drive in from towns all around with massive telescopes and point them at the sun (using filters) and the planets (when it’s dark), and the coolest thing to this novice’s eyes — the moon!
We’ve all seen great photos of our closest orb, but it’s nothing like looking at its surface live in real time through 200-times magnification. You can almost see the dune buggies NASA left behind!
And what’s extraordinary about it is the camaraderie of the assembled, and how popular it’s become. The main organizer, Marc Fitkin, just started doing it six months ago on kind of a lark. He let his network of fellow astronomers know, and a couple more joined him, then a couple more, and now there’s about a dozen who all bring different types of telescopes and gather in the Bronte Heritage Waterfront Park whenever there’s a cool astronomical event.
He just started by making a post in a Bronte neighbourhood group on Facebook, and there was such a reaction he created his own Bronte Astronomers group that quickly grew to nearly 1000 people in just a few months. For the full ‘Strawberry Moon’ on Saturday June 3rd, several hundred people came by over the few hours they were out there.
In this picture you see a 1903 Marsh Refractor telescope owned by a 19-year-old future Carl Sagan named Matteo Statti.
You know when you go to a sporting event and can discuss the minutiae of the game with everyone around you? Or to a concert of a band with passionate fans whose eyes light up when you talk to them? It’s that same kind of knowledgeable passion . . . except it’s about space! Suddenly you’re hanging at a party full of Neil deGrasse Tysons who not only know the name of every dot in the sky, but can tell you how far away it is and how it’s related to the cosmos!
And speaking of concerts, a night with this crew has the same dynamics — the sun as an opening act, and the evening modulates in a steady build to a crescendo as the sky grows darker and the atmospheric conditions change. Plus you’re experiencing a natural symphony in a collective and can turn to one another and share beams of joy at the magic you’re all dancing to.
In this crazy ol’ world of outrage culture and polarization and high prices for everything . . . looking through a telescope and talking to smart people is still free and fun!
When I spoke with founder Marc about the group, the first thing he said to me was it was based on four founding principles. I expected him to say something like — science, discovery, investigation and education. But instead he said — accessibility, dignity, respect and safety. Did I suddenly slip through a wormhole into theology class? No! Even though these guys are dealing in hard science — the things that are most important to them are that their events are accessible to all — including them bringing ladders and chairs so little kids can reach the eye pieces. And that everyone who comes into their orbit is treated with respect and made to feel safe. It reminded me of Einstein’s line — “The more I study science, the more I believe in God.”
founder Marc and protégé Matteo
So, the whole scene has this solid foundation of love . . . and on top of that you can have every question about the universe answered!
And this study of deep science has inevitably morphed them all into philosophers. As another of their founding members, Peter West, said — “A park that is used is a park that is safe.” I love that. And also their playful poetic foundational tenet — “Keep looking up!”
This isn’t just about celestial phenomena — it’s a philosophy of life. And it’s grounded rock-solid on intangibles. They may be calculating degrees and adapting for the rotation of the earth and positions of the stars — but at its base it’s about hope and optimism.
And it’s about curiosity and passion and knowledge.
It’s about what is . . . and what might be.
And all day and night long it’s attracting people from little kids to octogenarians who stop and talk and look and learn. And it’s about human traits that are common the world over. In an hour of looking at a full moon I talked to people who started this journey from probably a dozen different countries.
If this was a restaurant — it would be the kind of place that opened six months ago and has a line out the door. Except it’s people waiting to look through a telescope!
These folks have got a hit on their hands. And next April there’s going to be a total eclipse of the sun . . . and Oakville is going to be an hour from dead center in the path of totality!
In this crazy ol’ world, if things are bringing you down, know that there’s a community nearby where things are always looking up.
A buncha teenagers came to my little harbourfront neighbourhood cuz it has a corner Variety store that’ll sell anything to anybody including fireworks to kids. We had a little to-do here a couple years ago on Canada Day (July 1st) when the same thing happened — a buncha kids gathered outside the 7-11 & McDonalds and were settin off fireworks and having a rowdy time of it.
My home office window looks out on this very street behind my house, and when it started (two years ago) I went out and got right in the middle of it as I usually do and hung with the kids and got transported back to my own youth in Winnipeg in the ’70s.
One of my takeaways was how multi-racial the collective was — from Swedish white to Kenyan black — and how everybody got along so naturally. There were a few rabble-rousers, like there were in my teenage gangs, but in the main they were all nice friendly open-minded kids just out for sumpthin to do on a summer holiday night.
When the crowd dispersed and I got home I was stunned to read on this local Facebook group all these old people just railing against these kids — even though not one single one of them spent one single minute with any of them.
This year, around 9PM on the Victoria Day holiday (May 22nd), I heard fireworks starting up from around the same location, so I headed out my door and was in the middle of it 90 seconds later. The crowd was 3 or 4 times the size of the last one — maybe 200-300 kids — but this time they were armed with a bunch of M-80-type explosives — not so much the “fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars” as Kerouac famously described the light-up-the-sky kind.
This time the cops were there waitin for ’em from before it started and when one kid allegedly shot a bottle rocket in their general direction they moved in and arrested him, and began a general dispersion maneuver shooshing the kids along the road.
What was so funny to my American eyes was how polite both the cops and the kids were. There were no billy clubs being swung or rocks being thrown — it was just a bunch of cops politely telling a bunch of kids to move along . . . and the kids moving along. No shop windows were broken, no epithets hurled, no anger, just a buncha kids being shooshed along the sidewalk on a holiday weekend in the summer. It was so Canadian.
While I was out there with them, surfing the wave as it rolled down the road, I thought about that neighbourhood Facebook group and figured they’d be up in arms about this like they were last time, and when I got home after the neighbourhood was cleared by 10:30 — boy they did not disappoint! Literally hundreds of comments from people who’d never set foot outside of their house just shitting on these kids . . . and all their parents! It was the most despicable behavior I’ve seen ’round these parts since, well, probably those anti-science yahoos tried to take over Ottawa a year ago. And of course I don’t mean it was the kids who were despicable — I mean how mean these holier-than-thou Facebook warriors were being towards the kids & their parents in their own community . . . without having spent so much as a split-second with any of them.
It was a non-event for the police. They issued one short statement about a disruption in Bronte resulting in one arrest and no property damage or injuries to anyone — but the way these old bitties on Facebook were raging you’d think it was the Watts riots!
I’m really pro Canada and quite fond of the people who live here. We all treat each other with respect and politeness — just as I’d seen the police treat the kids and the kids treat the police — until I got home and saw this firehose of hatred from uninformed people hiding behind their doors & keyboards yelling “Get off my lawn” in the most ugly vitriolic way.
It was so striking that these adults — who thought they were so superior to everyone else — would behave so disparagingly towards these kids who were a thousand times more polite and less judgmental than this self-appointed judge-and-jury who were convicting them.
I sure hope as a species we can stop hurling hate at one another . . . and maybe go out of our houses and engage with people we don’t know about. 💖
The new Bob Center is in Tulsa Oklahoma because the Woody Guthrie Center is there, and because both were paid for by the OK billionaire philanthropist George Kaiser.
Tulsa is remarkably like the midwestern town of Winnipeg I grew up in — flat farmland, low-rise, about a half-million people — and both with active supportive arts communities. Winnipeg had the fertile musical garden that bloomed Neil Young, Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman . . . Tulsa birthed Leon Russell, J.J. Cale and Garth Brooks.
What everyone sees upon first arriving at the Tulsa airport.
Besides the Bob and Woody Centers, there’s Leon Russell’s recently restored Church Studio (which is in a church) and there’s an annual April festival for all things Leon; Cain’s Ballroom (which is so historic they offer tours besides regular concerts); The Gathering Place park (in every Top 10 list of most beautiful parks in America); a vibrant local music club scene including the Colony (in continuous musical operation since 1958) and the beautiful Maggie’s Music Box; as well as many miles of the original Route 66.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
The new Bob Center is right across the street from the Guthrie Green and right next door to the Woody Center, and as soon as you walk through the door you’re greeted with a 16-foot high site-specific iron gate sculpture created by Bob . . .
Then you walk up a few steps and you’re in a giant welcome room with a gift store full of all sorts of Bob gems and a friendly staff where you pay $10 if you’re over 55 and $12 otherwise, and get your free audio guide with 52 different touch stations to hear versions of songs being played, or sometimes interviews and audio backstories, and in a couple cases Sean Penn reading Bob’s memoir Chronicles or Martin Scorsese reading Bob’s speech from the Tom Paine Awards in 1964.
The curved hallway into the film room
The first room of the museum proper is a giant space with a 23-minute (and growing) immersive film by Jennifer Lebeau about Bob’s career playing on three different walls and innumerable screens. No two walls are showing the same thing as images are collaged on screens from wall-sized to tablet-sized. Wonderfully indicative of the whole Center — it’s overwhelming.
Jack Kerouac in the Dylan film
The first time you experience it you get blinded by the light of all the truths & quotes & images spanning a 60+ year career. I was so blown away and realized I was digesting so little of it at first glance, I had to come back a second time. That visit I approached it methodically and was only able to get through the first floor in five hours. (!) If you really wanna do this, it’ll probably take three visits — cuz two wasn’t enough for me.
The ‘screens’ that the opening doc plays on are pages flowing out of a notebook and a typewriter, and off the music stand on a piano. It’s brilliant interior design. I lived in Manhattan for 30 years and have toured museums there and all over the world all my life — and I’ve never seen so beautiful and apt an architectural creation for any artist.
After the surreal swirling movie you enter the main room of the center, which they call the Columbia Gallery. Along the four walls they chronicle Bob’s life in sequence from roughly 1957-ish when he first started to play guitar with others including a couple of cool audio recordings of folks he knew back in Hibbing . . .
… and continuing through him receiving the Medal of Freedom from Obama and the Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as his late-life iron sculpture work.
One revelatory inclusion from the early years was some found 8mm footage from Woodstock in 1964, well before Bob had taken up residence there, featuring Joan, Albert, Mimi and Al Aronowitz!
In the center of this giant old industrial building are six big cement pillars. If you were the interior designer — what do you do with those? The brilliant team Olson Kundig out of Seattle chose to surround each pillar with an exploration of a different song. And of course what they’ll do is rotate the six songs over time. For the inaugural installation they focused on Like A Rolling Stone, Tangled Up In Blue, Jokerman, Chimes of Freedom, Not Dark Yet and The Man In Me. It’ll be cool to see the songs they choose in the future.
Bri & Sky in the six-pillar labyrinth, photo by Gubba Topham
One other highlight of the main room is a small alcove with a faux recording studio you can sit in behind the mixing board. Through the glass looking into the recording studio they use multiple projections to create a diorama of each unique session covering five songs and studios where he laid down the historic tracks — Like A Rolling Stone in New York in 1965, I Want You in Nashville in ’66, Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door in Burbank in 1973, Most of The Time in New Orleans in 1989, and Mississippi in 1996/7.
Producer Tom Wilson in the Columbia Studio in 1965
On I Want You and Knockin’on Heaven’s Door you have the option to play with a 4-channel mix so you can raise or lower different instruments or hear them isolated.
ADD VIDEO OF TANGLED UP IN BLUE NOTEBOOK
Another installation is the Elvis Costello-curated jukebox that has a bunch of songs by Bob, and songs that influenced him, and interpretations of his songs by others, which is a great idea, but I didn’t see many people actually using it because there’s just so much else to experience.
Some other highlights that jumped out from the hundreds of artifacts displayed include — this postcard from Pete Seeger explaining to Bob how he did not in fact object to him going electric in Newport in ’65.
“My big mistake was in not challenging the foolish few who booed. I shoulda said, ‘Howlin’ Wolf goes electric, why can’t Bob?'”
Or Lenny Bruce’s phone number in Bob’s old address book …
Or there’s the note from George Harrison to Bob in 1969 …
Or Bob and my fellow Kelvin High School alum Neil Young playing together in Golden Gate Park in 1975 …
Or this collection of some of Bob’s books including Jack’s Mexico City Blues and Allen’s Howl …
Or a copy of the greatest music journalist ever Ralph J. Gleason’s early review of Bob …
Or this On The Road windshield drawing that should be used for the next edition of Jack’s book …
.
One of the artifacts they show in the opening movie that I really wanted to see but isn’t on display is the sheet from the yellow pad where Bob wrote his first original song — Song For Woody — but to me is particularly interesting because he cites writing it at Mill’s Bar on Bleecker Street in the Village. This was a dive bar on Bleecker that was still there in the early ’80s when I was living around the corner — a woebegone joint that has long since been lost to history. I sure as hell didn’t know Bob wrote there back then — and I bet they didn’t either.
This original copy is owned by some huge Woody collector in Colorado, but it’s in the office of one of the people working at the Bob Center where I was able to sweet-talk my way in to see a reproduction of it.
And then there’s the whole second floor.
Photo by Sky Lyons
There’s another long wall of chronological archival stuff including Bob’s costume from a personal favorite creation of his Masked & Anonymous —
There’s also a special exhibition space where they feature different prominent photographers with some connection to Dylan, and a 55-seat theater with a 45-minute documentary collage of different specific aspects of his career.
One omission to an otherwise masterpiece of a design was not including more places for its older demographic to sit and rest and soak it in. But other than that, this whole place rocks like a multi-song encore.
Admission is $10 if you’re over 55, $12 if you’re not.
.
Bob Dylan by Ralph Steadman
.
===============================
.
If you want a great account of Dylan at the 25th anniversary of Woodstock plus tons of other great musical Adventures check out my Holy Cats! Dream-Catching at Woodstock book.
.
The Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role is *the* story of the 2023 Oscars.
I’ve seen all the nominated performances, and thought un-nominated Margot Robbie sure as hell should have been in the mix for Babylon.
Her co-star Eric Roberts, he of the 621 on-screen acting credits, compared her performance to Liz Taylor’s (Oscar-winning) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe — and he’s right.
. Ana De Armas is appropriately cast in Blonde because, like Marilyn, you can’t take your eyes off her in any scene she’s in . . .
but she’s young and is gonna be around for a long time so she doesn’t really need it now.
. When I saw Michelle Williams with the Best Leading Actress nomination I thought it was some ridiculous insider industry prop-up. What the hell is that Dawson’s Creek kid doing at the Oscars? But she gives a glorious riveting performance as Steven Spielberg’s complicated mother in The Fabelmans.
.
And it would be great (and at this point is expected) for much-beloved and largely unheralded Michelle Yeoh to win for her multiple characters in Everything, Everywhere All At Once.
But she and this movie have already won shelves full of awards — and there’s gonna be more coming on Oscar night — and I’m into spreading the wealth … as well as the attention and the spotlight and the future jobs. .
I gotta tell ya . . . you have to see Andrea Riseborough in To Leslie before you make a call in this category. It’s kinda no question the single most gut-wrenching jaw-dropping performance of the year.
And here’s where it gets really interesting — on IMDb, this movie currently has a worldwide gross total of . . . $31,543. (!) 😮
If you don’t know about it, there’s a wild story behind how the performance got nominated … overcoming millions-of-dollars in campaigns for others. You can watch this to get the backstory —
but what this is is independent filmmaking making either its last hurrah in a world that now makes them all but cost-prohibitive . . . or . . . a low-budget indie film could possibly win the Best Lead Actress Oscar. (!)
If it did, it would change how films are made (ie; financed) in America — much like the success of Pulp Fiction did in 1994. This is a helluva story. No other actor winning would cause more films to get green-lit than this one.
And it symbolizes and brings into focus the fact that brilliant films are still being made that, basically, nobody sees. I’d have never even heard of it let alone seen this if it wasn’t nominated for Best Lead Actress.
I think this is an important storyline to be aware of. Even being *nominated* is HUGE (and almost unheard of) for small indie films . . . but if this were to win . . . and all the other nominees did indeed deliver fantabulous performances . . . but honestly . . . this weird indie no-budget movie has a more gut-wrenching performance than any of the A-listers laid down. And speaking of A-listers, you get to see her working scenes with two of them — Alison Janney, and Stephen Root, who is, as he so often is, nearly unrecognizable. The comedian / podcaster /actor Marc Maron is the male lead and proves he has a whole other level of talent nobody knew about before.
I hope Babylon deservedly sweeps its three nominations — for Best Original Score, Production Design and Costume Design — but other than that unheralded masterpiece getting recognition . . . for all my friends who *are* underdogs … or who *root* for underdogs … you’ve got one in this hunt. 😉
You wake up one day and your whole life changes just by the chance seeing of a picture.
Much the way it might with a chance spotting of a poster on a bookstore wall.
As Jack says, “My books are my children.” And as Mama always preached — pregnancy can happen in an instant.
Unlike most books, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac had a precise Birth Day.
I had no plans to become a parent when I got up on Tuesday, February 19th, 2013, but it was then that I saw a photograph posted to an online Beat group that featured a bunch of the Founding Fathers of the Beat Generation hanging out on a porch at a gathering I went to in 1982.
Peter Orlovsky, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, John Clellon Holmes, Allen Ginsberg, Carl Solomon, with Robert Frank seated, on the front porch of Allen’s house in Boulder, July 1982. Photo courtesy Jerry Aronson from “The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg” 8 hour DVD set.
It was just like that inexplicable flash vision of seeing the conference poster in the sixth bookstore in Vancouver that prompted the entire adventure. You never expect your future to show up in front of you, but BAM! there it is!
Everyone in the online group was agog at this large gathering of giants, and how everybody looked so young, and that they were all together, and what an amazing collection of spirits this was.
To me it was just an old picture of my summer vacation. As it turned out, not a single one of these myriad scholars or fans in the online group had attended this legendary Woodstock of the Beats.
A flow of online comments ensued, and since I’d been to it, people started saying, “I bet you’ve got some great stories, Brian!” And “I hope you brought a camera!”
“Well, now that you mention it . . . “ I hadn’t looked at those pictures or thought about this thing in years. But being a conscientious contributor I thought I’d chime in with some memories.
“This’ll just take a few minutes to write,” I thought.
I started fresh the next morning — February 20th, 2013. “I’ll just whip this off then go run some errands” — even though I didn’t even have an “E” key on my new but broken MacBook! Had to push the little knobby thing down below!
Somehow I didn’t get it finished that first day. “Well, for sure I’ll finish it up tomorrow. Gawd, I can’t believe this is taking so long!” I started in that second day, but as it kept rolling down the road more and more memories kept coming into focus — and I was transported back to that time, as happens when you write — you begin to live in that world and not the physical one you’re sitting in.
The next day I thought, “For sure this’ll be done by tonight, damn it.” But more photo albums and cassette tapes and notebooks and such kept tumbling off the mountain onto the path, more doors to open, more surprises, more memory boxes, more road going, until . . . “Well, for sure I’ll have this done in a week.” Then . . . “Well, make sure you’re finished in 10 days. It can’t take more than that!!” And this daily delusion of finishing it “tomorrow” went on for eleven daze, every single one of them thinking it would be done the next for sure. But it took eleven for the arc to be told from inception to curtain.
Of course, all sorts of other memory triggers and picture painting and fact checking and fine tuning and stuff continued for weeks, … and then months, until it was finally published two years later.
But I had no concept of telling this Adventure Tale when I woke up this February morning ten years ago, and after eleven time-traveling days in labor this baby was bouncing. And boy, they grow up fast!
.
=========================
You can order a colorfully signed copy from me (except mailing from Canada is a costly). You can also order it from Amazon or any place you get books.
When the book first came out, raving reaction came flowing in from all over the world. You can read the first batch here.
Then I had to start a second page because the first one grew too large.
And then I started to perform it all over — from New York to L.A., from San Francisco to Lowell. Here’s a playlist from several different shows with the clips in the order they appear in the book . . .
In fact, in keeping with our Canadian heritage, we met after a ball hockey game and then went to Tim Hortons. 😄
Turns out we were both born the same year as The Beatles, both dig into research with the same tenacity, and both love weaving great artists of the past into the present.
I’m not much one for distinctions over national boundaries, but what a hoot it was to read all the different connections between the Canadian colony and her royal master’s voice.
Did you know the first pair of Beatle boots came from Ontario? 😲 George’s mother bought them for George while visiting her brother in Ontario in 1960. The rest of the band were so impressed they went and found some in London. Or the first time the band topped the charts in North America was Sept. ’63 in Canada with She Loves You. Or that the first time a Beatle — or any rock star — met with a sitting head of state.
There’s 300 pages of other cool details, but one thing I loved learning about was how Capitol Records in Canada got behind the band from the get-go — and how mind-blowingly dysfunctional and out-of-it their U.S. counterparts were. Did you know, that time they famously had the top 5 songs on the Billboard chart in April ’64, that they were on four different labels? 😲 It was because Capitol U.S. didn’t think the band would amount to anything and sold the songs to small labels for next to nothing. 😱
.
Another joy of the book is that it’s written by a precision-sharp journalist who’s spent decades in the high end of the corporate world where one has to be letter-perfect and detail-oriented. He’s not writing in generalities, but paints with Realism’s precision. He’s also a lifelong musician so he’s bringing that to the narrative — comfortably conversational with song structure and their ever-changing insgtrumentation. And I don’t know if he’s a songwriter but he’s certainly got a poetic flair for phrasing — “somewhere left of Greenland” … “far from simply lazy rivering in the sack” … or following a lead down a rabbit hole that was “a delightfully difficult task.”
And something else this reader appreciates is his sense of what to put in and what to leave out. That sounds kinda basic, but so many nonfiction authors are painfully bad at this. I’m sure any avid reader has had the experience of skipping paragraphs or pages until a book gets interesting again. But that doesn’t happen here. He’s got a professional precision with a glued-to-your-seat storyteller’s sense of the juicy.
Did you know that Maple Leaf Gardens was the only venue in North America that the band played on all three tours from ’64 to ’66? Or that at one point in 1964 The Beatles Fan Club in Canada had more members than either the U.S. or U.K.?! Or that the last time John Lennon was ever paid to play a live performance was in Toronto in 1969? Or that there are a ton of connections between The Beatles and The Beats?
It was when The Beetles backed up British Beat poet Royston Ellis in 1960 that they were prompted to change the spelling of the band’s name to reflect their mutual interest. As Royston remembers, “Since they liked the ‘Beat’ way of life, were ‘beat’ musicians, and would be backing me as a ‘Beat’ poet, I suggested to him why not spell the name with an ‘A’?”
And it was Beat confidant and journalist Al Aronowitz who brought Bob Dylan to The Beatles’ Delmonico Hotel suite in New York in the summer of ’64 specifically to get them high on marijuana for the first time. And you might say that had some effect on their music. I’m tellin’ ya — these Beats are nuthin’ but trouble!
As everyone knows, marijuana is a gateway drug … and before you know it you’re reading poetry! So the band decided to start a spoken-word record label as part of Apple, called Zapple, and although it was short lived and didn’t release much, some of the first people they signed up were Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Richard Brautigan and Ken Kesey.
McCartney would later famously and wonderfully perform and record with Allen on his 1995 poem “The Ballad Of The Skeletons.” “I wrote Skeletons because of all that inflated bull about family values,” Ginzy told the L.A. Times. “The ‘contract with America,’ Newt Gingrich and all the loudmouth stuff on talk radio. It seemed obnoxious and stupid and kind of sub-contradictory, so I figured I’d write a poem to knock it out of the ring.” The Beat and The Beatle would get together in England later that year when Allen was there to do a Royal Albert Hall show. Macca liked the poem so much, he showed up to accompany Allen on it at the reading (also attended by Carolyn Cassady), then contributed guitar, drums, organ and maracas to the recorded version the following year.
And that same sacred majestic Royal Albert Hall was also packed to its very high rafters for one of history’s pivotal (and largest) poetry “happenings” —
The International Poetry Incarnation, in June 1965 — staged with good old Allen organizing and headlining the night, and including a restrained Gregory, a playfully political Ferlinghetti, and Burroughs on tape, joining all sorts of British Beat Bohemians like Michael Horowitz and Beatle bud Adrian Mitchell in a moment of group enlightenment for Londoners that the Human Be-In would be for San Franciscans 18 months later in the way it brought out of the basements and into the light thousands of underground artists of varying disciplines (including a young Jimmy Page) who suddenly realized they weren’t alone in their pursuit of the unknown. As The Clash’s Joe Strummer laid it down — “… you can mark the beginning of the British underground scene of the 1960s to that particular night.”
And then there’s William Burroughs on the cover of Sgt. Pepper. He was probably on their mind since at the time they were letting him use the rehearsal studio they’d built into Ringo’s unused London apartment on Montague Street in the spring of ’66 — when there was music in the cafés at night and revolution in the air. Bill was there experimenting with backward tapes, recording things at different speeds, and dropping in random radio broadcasts or reading newspaper reports into the recordings. And yes, all of that should sound familiar to Beatles fans. Over the next year the band would run all those same studio experiments as they recorded Revolver, Yellow Submarine, Strawberry Fields Forever, and Sgt. Pepper, then The White Album the year after that.
William did some cut-ups and we did some crazy tape recordings in the basement,” McCartney remembers. “We used to sit around talking about all these amazing inventions that people were making, like the Dream Machine that Ian [Sommerville] and Brion Gysin had made. It was all very new and very exciting.”
And ol’ John, he carried that Beat spirit with him across the pond when he famously emigrated to New York in 1971, making sure to meet up with Allen Ginsberg when he landed, including inviting Allen to John’s 31st birthday party at a hotel in Syracuse, New York, where they were for a Yoko art exhibit opening, and a camera was rolling and there’s actually footage of them all partying together. John also asked Allen to be a part of the only full concert the former Beatle ever staged after he left his band, the One To One benefit at Madison Square Garden where Ginzy joined John on stage for the climactic “Give Peace A Chance,” just as John had him join in on the original live recording of the song in Montreal in 1969.
.
I dunno how we’re gonna end up collaborating, but we’re gonna do sumpthin. 😍 We’ve already got a show hatched at a local music venue where we’ll both jam and be followed by Paul Dante’s Beatles band.
Here’s to lots more Beats and Beatles bringing joy to this crazy ol’ world! 💕
The most important musical event that ever occurred in Canada — and one of the most important concerts in history — took place at a university football stadium in downtown Toronto in 1969. It’s true!
London had The Beatles’ farewell on the rooftop, Woodstock had “breakfast in bed for 400,000,” Newport had a little issue with electricity in 1965, and Toronto saw the birth of a solo Beatle lifting off from a one-time-ever launchpad full of the founding fathers of rock ‘n’ roll.
Never before or since did Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley and Gene Vincent all share the same stage — and following in their footsteps in more ways than one, John Lennon took the next leap on his culture-changing path.
Lennon, McCartney & Harrison had been playing in the same band since 1958, but after years of being “more popular than Jesus,” and each evolving, by ’68 / ’69 they were starting to drift away from being a Fab Four together to four strong winds blowing in different directions.
As fate would have it — and this new Revival ’69 documentary captures — by September 1969, with their final masterpiece Abbey Road laid down in the namesake’s room, the future was wide open.
Cue: synchronicity, fate, karma, luck and happenstance meeting youthful confidence and good timing clicking in a country that had already been friendly to John & Yoko’s crusade for peace.
In June ’69, two young promoters, John Brower (22) and Ken Walker (23), booked the Toronto Pop Festival. With the geyser of popularity of pop music in the mid-’60s, a natural outgrowth of the phenomenon was to put a bunch of artists together at a ‘festival’ to attract fans of individual bands and expose them to other acts.
DJ Alan Freed was the first to start packaging multiple rock ‘n’ roll artists on the same stage as early as 1955. By ’58 he put together traveling shows with a dozen or more bands that were effectively traveling rock festivals — wonderfully portrayed in Tom Hanks’ fictional version That Thing You Do.
The first location-specific rock festival was the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival held on Mount Tamalpais just north of San Francisco on June 10th & 11th, 1967, featuring 20+ bands including the Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, The Byrds, Country Joe and many others.
The festival that put the concept on the international map was of course Monterey Pop, held the following weekend in ’67, filmed by D.A. Pennebaker, and propelling artists like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and The Who into the popular mainstream.
By 1968, the festival seed had spread and started to sprout all around America, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and perhaps most importantly the Miami Pop Festival, which was co-produced by Michael Lang who would go on to put on Woodstock the next summer.
Over the winter of ’68 into ’69, promoters (and agents) all over the continent began planning ways to do multi-act multi-day festivals in their town, and many actually did it. Seattle, Denver, Atlanta, New Orleans, Atlantic City, Harlem and lots of other cities and towns (like Woodstock) pulled them off around America; Essen (Germany), Bath (England) and the Isle of Wight happened in Europe; and both Vancouver and Toronto staged them in Canada.
Besides the stellar lineup of the June 21st/22nd Toronto Pop Festival which included The Band, Sly & The Family Stone, Blood Sweat & Tears, The Velvet Underground, Dr. John, Johnny Winter, Procol Harum etc. etc., one weird twist was Brower/Walker’s inclusion of Chuck Berry. Most of these late ’60s rock festivals shied away from booking stars from the ’50s — except for Toronto.
And not only that, but by many accounts, Chuck’s set galvanized the crowd and changed the event from a sequence of individual concerts into a collective festival. And … the promoters caught Chuck’s set! If you’ve ever worked on a festival, or even attended a festival, you know you’re not able to be fully present for every act over multiple days. But luckily for history, Brower caught the old-timer’s set on Sunday afternoon, and said in a Welcome to the Music podcast —
“Chuck was so good in June at the Pop Festival, he had 25,000 people trying to do the duck walk and falling all over each other and laughing and just loving him, and despite the fact that we had Sly & The Family Stone and The Band and Steppenwolf who all put on incredible shows, Chuck Berry stole the zeitgeist of the moment. And that was the inspiration to think, ‘If Chuck could do that, what would it be like to have all of them on the same show?’ And that was the inspiration for it. And how about this cosmic giggle — that all of those guys were available on the same Saturday! That was a confirmation that we were on the right track.”
Problem was, concert-goers flocked to the two-day current-superstar-rich Pop Festival in June, but a ’50s show in September after schools were back in full swing was a whole different thing. Tickets were $6 — for the mathematically challenged, that’s about 50 cents a band! — but only 2,000 had sold in a stadium that held 20,000.
In a late attempt to be more current, the promoters added The Doors, and brought in two colorful scenesters form L.A. (where Brower had spent some time in ’67), Kim Fowley and ‘The Mayor of Sunset Strip’ Rodney Bingenheimer. But even that didn’t work. However, it did spark something that would.
With the show on the verge of being cancelled, it was the prankster hypester Kim Fowley who badgered Brower (or, “preached” to him, as the promoter recalls it) into calling Apple in London to invite John Lennon, knowing the walrus loved Chuck Berry and Little Richard, who The Beatles opened for in England and Hamberg and where he taught them the high screaming “ooouuuu” vocals they’d become known for. On Thursday, two days before the Saturday show, Brower & Walker phoned Apple, and miraculously got John & Yoko on the phone . . . who even more miraculously agreed to come over — as long as they could play!
In a matter of hours Lennon put together a Plastic Ono Band lineup with two future Hall of Famers (Eric Clapton & Alan White) and one founding Beatle brother, Klaus Voormann. The next day they were rehearsing on an airplane crossing the Atlantic, and the stadium sold out in a matter of hours when the local rock radio station started announcing (every 15 minutes) that they were coming after finally getting confirmation of John boarding the plane at Heathrow.
This whole wild story is told in a new fast-paced visually-rich documentary using contemporary interviews, archival footage and enhanced audio, all augmented by additive animation — called Revival69.
This is history on the stage becoming history on the screen.
As great as the original Woodstock festival was, it was the lucky last-minute afterthought fluke of Michael Wadleigh filming it that transported the world to that Catskills dairy farm forevermore. In this similar Rock-Gods-Supervised event, it was no less than the guy who invented the music documentary, D.A. Pennebaker, aka Penny, who came on board just nine days before the show — honoring the rock ‘n’ roll rule of Everything Last Minute.
“Everybody wanted to go everywhere with Penny.” Molly Davis
Many know I’ve been a promoter/producer of concerts & events since I was a teenager — so I’m gonna love a story with a dream-driven gets-things-done promoter at its core. And anyone who’s ever been in any place I lived has seen John Lennon pictures everywhere. But what most don’t know is I consider D.A. Pennebaker one of the greatest artists who ever lived.
Penny was to film what Chuck Berry was to music.
Not only did he invent and set the high-bar standard for rock documentaries, he hand-built the cameras that connected to a recording source, and thus was one of the handful of people who invented cinéma vérité — from French, meaning “cinema truth” — also known as “direct cinema.” Part of my affinity and connection is — the books I write are cinéma vérité on the page — capturing what happens, then editing the sequences into a story. And Penny is a master of that on the screen.
Pennebaker with his homemade camera
and the coil cable to the Nagra tape recorder at his waist
He got a degree at Yale in mechanical engineering and began his adulthood as an inventor/developer. By the early ’50s he’d become friends with the multi-disciplinary artist Frances Thompson in New York where he began building lenses, distortion devices and cameras for him, including collaborating on his groundbreaking masterpiece N.Y., N.Y., which was finally finished after 10 years of work in 1957. Thompson never told anybody how he did it, but D.A. Pennebaker was in the thick of it.
Not only did Aldous Huxley write about this film in Heaven and Hell, but when he saw an early screening in Thompson’s apartment, it was shown on Penny’s screen and with him as the DJ on the turntable providing the soundtrack. Can you imagine Pennebaker, Aldous Huxley and Francis Thompson all hanging in an apartment in Manhattan?! Penny cites his time spent with Thompson as when he changed his focus from being a mechanical engineer to a life an artist — just one more of the endless examples of that city in that time changing everything about every form of art. (see, also: “Abstract Expression: From Beat to Brando” about 1945 to ’55 in New York City, from The Rolling Stone Book of The Beats)
If you’ve never seen the 15 minute N.Y., N.Y. day-in-the-life masterpiece, stop reading this and watch it on the biggest screen you can right now! 😉
One other incredibly cool tidbit — Penny was coming of creative age in Manhattan at the same time as Jack Kerouac, and they actually met through The New School, and Jack tried to enlist him to make a movie of On The Road. (!) Penny had to explain to Jack that the only way he could do it was if he’d been next to him on the highway as it happened. But how extraordinary that these two artists who both revolutionized their mediums — and both created art out of capturing real life — overlapped as their revolutionary lives exploded like spiders across the stars over America.
Two huge supporting characters who are not mentioned in the new Revival ’69 doc are D.A.’s right-hand rock ‘n’ roll man Bobby Neuwirth; and the pioneer of remote recording, Wally Heider. Neuwirth and Penny first connected during the Don’t Look Back Dylan tour of England in ’65. When accepting his Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 2012, Penny said, “One person that was very instrumental in my education as a filmmaker was Bobby Neuwirth. He knew how to function in a group of people without disturbing them and yet watching what they really did, not what they pretended to do.” Bobby was Penny’s go-to guide at Monterey Pop, telling him which songs he needed to capture by each artist. And when the Toronto Revival came up two years later, the director wanted his rock n roll soulmate with him, so he brought him along as a cameraman, but I’m sure he was a lot more than that. In fact, I’d love to watch a 2-hour documentary on just what Bobby Neuwirth was up to that weekend! 😀
Neuwirth & Pennebaker at Monterey Pop, 1967
Wally Heider is not a household name, but he recorded a bunch of the albums in your collection — from the Grateful Dead to Van Morrison to Aretha Franklin. Just as Necessity Is The Mother of Invention that led Penny to invent a handheld camera with portable audio recording, Wally invented high-end remote music recording because nobody else was doing it. He started with Big Bands in the ’50s, and by ’64 was recording The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl and Ray Charles at the Shrine. Thus, when Monterey Pop came along in ’67, he was the go-guy who recorded every pristine note you ever heard from there. As festival producer Lou Adler reflected later, “Wally Heider had the only remote in town — two complete sets of eight-tracks.” “And good mics,” D.A. chimed in. Once Penny was in for a pound on Toronto, he hired Wally to truck his gear across the country to secure solid live audio.
The Monterey Pop film came out in December ’68, and suddenly the rock concert film was ‘a thing’ — prompting every prospective festival promoter to want to have theirs filmed, and a lot of the calls went to Pennebaker’s office — but he felt he’d already made his rock festival film and wasn’t interested in repeating himself.
Then this call came in from some promoter in Toronto with the prospect of capturing the founding fathers of rock ‘n’ roll on a multi-camera shoot on a good stage with natural lighting — now, this was something that piqued Penny’s interest. As with nearly everything with this show, it happened last minute — just over a week before the gig — when John Lennon wasn’t even a glimmer in anybody’s eye.
Another cool karmic twist — silent 8mm film cameras had been around since the 1930s, but in 1965 Kodak came out with the Super-8 — with sound! For this show, with Penny’s new-found stature as a hit filmmaker, he charmed (Christgau’s word) Kodak into lending him a bunch of the new cameras, with one of the ideas being to give them to the musicians to shoot their own footage, thus furthering the idea of direct cinema — making the subject also one of the filmmakers in real time. Two hours of unprocessed Super-8 footage was found in Penny’s storage boxes. Besides all the backstage footage, there’s a great scene in Revival69 where Alice Cooper’s on stage with a Super-8 filming Pennebaker filming him with a 16mm! 🙂
Jump-cut 50 years, and the spiritual grandson of Papa Penny, Ron Chapman, is paying respect with this film to his forefather just as John Lennon was there paying his respects. Chapman has been longtime friends with the Revival promoter, John Brower, who’d regaled him with the stories of the ’69 festival many times over the years. Brower had long been mulling ways to get this movie made, but as he shared on Bill King’s podcast, everything changed one night —
“It was at a New Year’s Eve party seven years ago at my place in Toronto. Everybody was shit-faced out of their mind, and Ron shows up a little after midnight and starts yelling at me — ‘You need to let me make this movie! You’re never going to get this movie made. You’ve been trying for three years — you’ll never do it.’ And I’m going, ‘Ron! Ron! Quiet, please!! Just be quiet! If you stop yelling, you can make the movie!’ And that was it. I gave him my story rights — ‘Just stop yelling, please!'” 😀
And that’s how Chapman, the director of a half-dozen prior music documentaries, finally took the reins and began to craft this visual story of musical history. As he told Welcome To The Music —
“I’m interested in doing Canadian stories of international significance. And I wanted to do this particular story because it’s just incredible. Rolling Stone called this ‘the second most important event in rock history.’ So you have to ask yourself — if this is the second most important event in rock history, and it happened in Toronto, and if it wasn’t for a Canadian, John Brower, this would never have happened. It’s the biggest rock story in Canada’s history — and nobody knows about it!“
Varsity Stadium, Toronto, Sept. 13th, 1969
And that’s one of the beautiful things about this film — the story. We’ve all seen a million rock doc concert films, from Wadleigh’s Woodstock to Scorsese’s Shine A Light, and in the main, they’re multi-hour live-performance music videos. What’s so refreshingly different here — perhaps inspired by the natural narrative spirit of D.A. Pennebaker — is that it’s the storytelling of the event that really sets this movie apart.
Director Chapman could have just grabbed a few talking heads to stick in between all the hall-of-fame performances, but instead enlisted his frequent collaborator and a filmmaker in her own right, Phyllis Ellis, to tell the complex story with more improbable twists than an Agatha Christie Knives Out thriller. Who’s going to believe that a 22-year-old kid in Toronto phoned Apple in London and got John Lennon to form a new band in 24 hours and fly across the Atlantic to perform at his festival? The local radio stations sure as hell didn’t believe him!
Besides the actual events of history, and the priceless live-action footage from the original King of Capture, what glues you to your seat is the storytelling.
I asked Ellis how the heck she did it.
“It’s an incredibly fertile story with so many detours. The real challenge at the beginning was the digging to lock down the Lennon story. Once we knew that was solid, we could rock ‘n’ roll. Once I can see the story — once the material starts talking back to me — I know I’m on a roll. Then it’s like a fast moving train — wrapping narrative around narrative, seeing them all in motion, and then finding the visual language to match the stories the characters tell.”
The storytelling has such a clear and cohesive arc, and it moves so smoothly, even with all these complex characters and almost unbelievable twists and chance events all happening ratta-tat-tat — so I asked her how she saw the straight road of the story amongst all the fireworks going off simultaneously in all directions.
“Massive discipline frankly; heavy, heavy lifting from transcripts, knowing what we wanted to achieve and committing fully. Not that there weren’t false starts and some pretty hilarious missteps, but that’s the process of writing anything. The more fulsome and fat you create a story, it’s so much easier to cut it down then breaking your brain to fill in something that isn’t there. I must say also, Ron’s concepts and visual approach with Mathew den Boer doing the animation really filled in the gaps narratively and we were thankful to have that other element.”
And, boy, animator den Boer created beautifully conceived, period-driven visuals that amplified key events and surfed the viewer back to 1969. As director Chapman pointed out, it was no less than The Beatles who pioneered animation to tell a rock ‘n’ roll story with Yellow Submarine.
I asked den Boer what drove him on this project —
“The main thing with the animated scenes was to make them feel continuous with the story. We needed a way to visualize moments that were not captured in footage while striking the right balance between reverence and playfulness. It was kind of heavy to be drawing these legendary figures, but it’s also a rock ‘n’ roll story and a bit of a caper. Ron created an atmosphere for some pretty wild exploration when we started out, and that eventually led to the hybrid of the illustration, photography and psychedelic graphic elements you see in the film.”
Another key reason this works so well is the film editing, in this case by Eugene Weis. Editors are rarely mentioned by name in film reviews, but so much of the audience’s experience stems from the choices they make. To play on Kenny Rogers, you have to know when to hold ’em, and know when to cut ’em. And what’s wonderful here is how editor Eugene has been careful with that axe, not only included the exposition, but a bunch of the comic asides and blooper moments a lot of other editors would have left on the floor. This is rock ‘n’ roll, not Wikipedia. This documentary manifests the playfulness, joy, chaos and kiss-ass confidence of everything rock has been from Chuck to John to Alice.
And before I get off the production riff — the score by Richard Pell and Pierre-Adrien Theo is sublime — used only when needed, but perfect when applied. Every note of this symphonic collaboration is perfectly in harmony.
And then there was the concert.
Besides the mastery of the filmmaking, this was one of those live shows that all concert-goers hope to be at. We’ve all attended hundreds or thousands of them, but there’s those rare few when everything comes together and all the performers are in the zone on the same night.
One of the afternoon lead-off bands was no less than Chicago Transit Authority, as they were known then before they shortened it to Chicago. Everybody’s familiar with their sound now, but with only one barely-charting single out by Sept. ’69, almost no one knew who they were, and here was this 7-piece jazz–soul–R&B–rock band with one of the great powerhouse tenors of all time, Peter Cetera, and a 3-piece horn section blasting out brass across the grass. If your body moved to music, this was the spark that ignited the day.
Robert Christgau, who was embedded with the Pennebaker crew writing a profile on him for Show magazine, described in detail how they had no signed rights release from the first main act, Bo Diddley — nor did they even have the cables plugged in or electric outlets available to film him. But mid-set, one of Penny’s business guys appeared with a last-minute signed release, so they jumped into action — running on barely-charged batteries with nobody in position. Miraculously, even though festival acts are never supposed to do encores, just as Janis did a second set at Monterey when Penny wasn’t allowed to film the first one, Bo came out for an unplanned encore, and by then Pennebaker’s team were in place and caught a classic, joyous, call-&-response Hey Bo Diddley for eternity. Penny gets so into it, his camera almost becomes an extension of the guitar. And Bo is positively testifying by the end — a male Aretha — taking the blaringly white Toronto audience to church.
And then — Killer phuckin kills!
One of the great things about the booking of this show (and John Lennon causing the stadium to be full) was that all these legends who invented the medium missed out playing to crowds this size. For the most part, by the mid-’60s they were in lounges and ballrooms … while the newspapers were full of pictures of young rock bands with audiences going back as far as the eye could see. What’s wonderful here is that every one of these nearly-forgotten giants seized the moment and laid down career-defining shows. And extraordinary point #2 — D.A. Pennebaker was there to capture it all!
Jerry Lee Lewis comes out wearing a plain brown turtleneck and slacks like these kids’ parents mighta bought after seeing in an Eaton’s catalog — and he blows up the idea that you couldn’t trust (or rock to) anyone over 30. ‘Dad’ is confident, in control, and like Bo Diddley, positively schools these kids in rock ‘n’ roll — all while rockin’ an instrument they’d only seen Liberace play on Ed Sullivan!
One of the most rewarding aspects of this and Pennebaker’s multiple Revival films is experiencing these guys performing to a real audience — not on a TV or film set — which is the only way most of us have ever seen them perform. But here they are, in color for one thing, and interacting with an exuberant and engaged audience. And to be completely confessional, it was watching Penny’s film of Jerry Lee’s set that I finally ‘got’ what his buzz was all about.
And then, The founding father of rock ‘n’ roll, Chuck Berry, kicks it up another notch.
Chuck aficionados say this is one of the best shows he ever played. All these old ’50s brothers were in the same place at the same time, and they were all damn-sure gonna be the one people walked away talking about! It’s so great they all got to have their moment in the (literal) sun of a beautiful September day — and with a great filmmaker capturing it.
Had these guys ever played full sets to full football stadiums? They were playing theaters at their peak. Then after those Moptops appeared on Sullivan and sold out Shea Stadium, and the baby-boomers came of age en masse, and the Summer of Love happened, and record stores started opening in every neighborhood in the land, well, these founding rockers missed all that and were left in the fifties with Bing Crosby and Doris Day. . . . But not on this day.
Chuck was swingin for the fences. And, being one of the greatest natural showmen in all rock history, he knew a moment to grab when he saw it. And boy, does he grab it.
Including grabbing some local cats hanging backstage to be his band!
It just so happens, a young jazz-fusion Toronto combo called Nucleus were one of the early opening acts and were hanging around backstage, when, without a moment’s notice, the bassist & drummer were enlisted to hold down the tracks that Chuck frickin Berry was gonna be rolling on! An historic day of music that bassist Hughie Leggat and 18-year-old drummer Danny Taylor were never gonna forget anyway — suddenly got kicked into the surreal!
Here’s D.A. capturing the kid on drums . . .
And here he is in 2022 after he retold me the whole story at the premiere afterparty a half-mile from the original venue . . .
And here’s D.A.’s film of Chuck’s set — click on the photo below and it’ll open and play . . .
And THEN — as if this backup band story wasn’t wild enough! — young unknown Alice Cooper band backed up Gene Vincent! It’s true!
I’ve been an Alice Cooper fan since Billion Dollar Babies was the first rock album I ever bought, Christmas 1973 . . .
Yours unruly — Halloween ’75
Of course I knew he played at this Revival, but never knew until this movie that he & the band backed up Gene Vincent!
A few years after this concert, when John Lennon recorded his tribute album to the early rock ‘n’ roll songs that inspired & ignited his life (Rock n Roll, 1975) three of the songs he covered were played by the originals at this show — Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen, Little Richard’s Rip It Up, and the song he chose to open the album — Gene Vincent’s Be-Bop-a-Lula. As John tells the story, the first time he sang this song in public was the day he met Paul, and it was so beloved by the band it remained in The Beatles’ live repertoire all through the early years. Fortunately, Pennebaker was on hand to capture its ‘revival,’ including when a bunch of the Vagabonds Motorcycle Club decided the stage was the best place for dancing and some wonderful rock ‘n’ roll chaos ensued — all with the appropriately unhinged Alice Cooper band playing through the mayhem.
And sorta surprisingly, Toronto’s Vagabonds ended up playing a big role in both the original event and the film. They leant the promoters the 25 grand to book The Doors, but more visually wonderful was how they organized 80 bikes to be the motorcade for John Lennon from the airport to the venue on the day of the show! Penny immediately saw the cinematic possibilities, and sent young Molly Davis & others out to accompany them, armed with the new super-cool Super-8 cameras! Not only do they get tons of wild footage both on bikes and off, but somehow Penny managed to place cameras along the route so we see this comical motorcade of leather-clad bikers escorting white-suited peacenik John Lennon & company riding in cartoonish old-timey black stretch limos that look like the prototype for the Batmobile!
And then “the ninth wonder of the world” Alice Cooper hit the stage — in the early spectacle daze when they were still signed to Frank Zappa’s appropriately named Bizarre Records and who couldn’t find a hit song if they stumbled over it. In fact, it would be a 19-year-old aspiring record producer in Toronto named Bob Ezrin who, a year later, would take on the Coop and whip them into a cohesive recording band that then produced a nonstop string of hit singles and albums through the ’70s. Alice called Ezrin “our George Martin,” and just as the producer of this concert changed the course of Beatle history, a different young Toronto producer changed the course of theatrical shock rock.
This was also the show where Alice famously threw a live chicken into the audience. “It seemed, in the mayhem,” he remembers, ” … it had wings, it should fly. … But chickens don’t so much fly as they plummet.” — which led to headlines all over the world about Alice Cooper biting the head off a live chicken. Zappa wisely advised them to not refute any of the accusations, and the band got the most press in their career to that point! Their legendary manager Shep Gordon confesses here on camera for the first time that it was he who put the chicken on stage, and added, from a 21st century distance, “That moment lit the path for the next 25 years of his career.”
And boy, between Alice and Yoko’s performances, the audience that day sure got exposed to some pretty wild avant-garde music!
Here’s 13 minutes of Coop’s set via D.A. Pennebaker’s cameras —
Although the show’s operating motivation was for everybody to try and top everybody else, Little Richard practiced that with every gig he ever played! He had the stage lights turned off so there was just one spotlight on him in his mirrored vest — which he showed off dancing on top of the piano for much of his set. During this period, he had another guy playing Little Richard-style grand piano, while the original went out front and did a Tina Turner routine.
30 years after this Toronto show, I saw him perform up close in a small room in New York during the MTV daze, and he still had this same energy, chops and showmanship at age 70.
Here’s D.A. Pennebaker’s joy-jumpin’ Little Richard: Keep On Rockin’ 28-minute film of the Toronto set. As Doors guitarist Robbie Krieger recalls in Revival69 — “I was standing with Jim, and he goes, ‘Man! We gotta follow that?!‘” 😀
The John Lennon set is of course historic and the reason there’s a movie about this concert. And it never would have happened . . .
If the promoters hadn’t booked Chuck Berry at the Pop Festival in June. If Chuck hadn’t positively slayed on stage that day. If John Brower hadn’t caught his set. If he & Ken Walker hadn’t hatched the idea to do a ’50s show. If all the ’50s performers had not all been available on the same day. If the Revival had advance sales of 20,000 … instead of 2,000. If their rock journalist pal Ritchie Yorke hadn’t talked them into bringing in Kim Fowley from L.A. If Fowley hadn’t insisted on Brower calling John Lennon. If Lennon had been recording or out of town. If Ritchie Yorke hadn’t have been hanging around Apple at the time to vouch for Brower. And nobody in Toronto would have believed John was coming if he hadn’t have done a quick press gaggle at Heathrow on the way out of town.
Young future Yes (and Lennon solo) drummer Alan White (20 years old at the time) didn’t believe it was John calling to recruit him, and Lennon had to ring back a second time to convince him.
The number of crazy improbable events that all had to happen in the 48 hours prior to this show may be the single greatest streak of jackpot wins in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.
Those of us of a certain age all had that blue-sky-covered Live Peace in Toronto in our record collections — it being the only live album of a solo Beatle playing rock ‘n’ roll on a stage — but the backstory was never well documented until now.
The band was put together in an afternoon — worked up a set list on the plane on the way over — and had one quasi rehearsal through a single amp in a cinder-block football players’ dressing room.
Mal Evans, The Beatles’ invaluable ever-present all-purpose roadie, made the trip to make the staging happen, and noted how they set up like the Fab Four always had with the bass on audience left, the lead guitar in the center, and John where he always was on the right.
A 16-year-old Geddy Lee was there blazing on some “Owsley Purple Haze,” as he told us at the premiere Q&A.
Canadian music historian Alan Cross moderates a post-screening talk with Rush’s Geddy Lee and director Ron Chapman, with The Doors’ Robbie Krieger and promoter John Brower Zooming in.
Geddy described the moment: “The light shining from John Lennon left you with your jaw dropped. He was a Beatle, and that had an aura about it, and imbued everyone with a kind of awe — the fact that we were in the same vicinity as him and he was playing for us!”
For Lennon’s first-ever post-Beatles live show, they got themselves grounded on stage and kept the theme of the festival going by playing three rock ‘n’ roll classics the band all knew — Carl Perkins’ Blue Suede Shoes . . . about which Mal Evans shared — “I remember turning around on stage during the band’s performance and finding Gene Vincent next to me with tears rolling down his cheeks, saying, ‘It’s marvelous. It’s fantastic, man.'”
And then the Motown hit Money that The Beatles rocked live regularly circa 1962–63 . . .
and the Dizzy Miss Lizzy cover that the Fabs played since their earliest days, recorded for the Help! sessions, and was part of their live repertoire through ’65. These last two were always Lennon lead vocals which he clearly felt comfortable with and show why he’s one of rock’s great male vocalists.
Then things really got interesting — the only Beatles song they’d play all night — Yer Blues — the heart-wrenching John song (“I’m lonely, want to die”) from the White Album. This was also Lennon’s go-to when he appeared in another one-off band he put together a year earlier, The Dirty Mac, for The Rolling Stones’ Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus, in December ’68. Although John technically played that show without The Beatles (with Clapton, Keith Richards on bass and Jimi’s Mitch Mitchell on drums) it was on a soundstage for a TV show with only a few invited friends as an audience — not a paying crowd of 20,000.
And then homie drops the first version anybody ever heard of Cold Turkey! It was so new that Yoko had to hold up the lyrics on a sheet of paper in front of him!
This song was recorded 5 times. It debuted in Toronto on Sept. 13th; then was recorded in Abbey Road two weeks after this show with Eric, Klaus & Ringo; and he played it once in both the afternoon and evening One To One concerts at Madison Square Garden on Aug. 30th, 1972; but the hair-raising bone-chilling shiver-inducing definitive version was live at the Lyceum Ballroom in London for a UNISEF benefit on Dec 15, 1969, and was included on the live disc with Some Time In New York City. The last three minutes of the withdrawal are insane. It’s the original Toronto Plastic Ono Band reunited, plus George Harrison (who arrived with Eric, Delaney & Bonnie), and would be the last time John would share a stage with a Beatle; Keith Moon joins in banging on Alan White’s toms; Billy Preston’s on the keys; Bobby Keys is on the preston … I mean the sax; with Delaney & Bonnie on guitar and tambourine. The song was written about quitting heroin — but I wonder if some of the subtext angst was also about quitting The Beatles?
And then of course John climaxes with Give Peace A Chance. “This is what we came for, really,” he says, before doing a live version of the hit song he recorded in a Montreal hotel room three months earlier.
John & Yoko had first flown to Toronto back in May to do their second bed-in for peace (following Amsterdam in March), and it’s where 14-year-old Jerry Levitan met and interviewed them, which became the I Met The Walrus book and DVD.
Their week-long bed-in for peace in Montreal (following their short stay in Toronto) was when they hung with Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Dick Gregory, Tommy Smothers and a bunch of other voices for cultural change and recorded Give Peace A Chance in their pajamas.
Shortly after the Revival concert, in December ’69, John & Yoko flew back to Toronto to launch their “War Is Over! If you want it.” campaign that included billboards being put in a dozen major cities around the world. This is also when they went and stayed at Ronnie Hawkins’ ranch, which would make a whole other great documentary!
Canada played a pretty big role in John Lennon’s life, and you can read about all the Beatle–Canada connections in John Arnone’s excellently written, deeply researched and highly recommended book Us and Them: Canada, Canadians and The Beatles.
Here’s The Plastic Ono Band’s entire set via D.A. Pennebaker —
The Rock ‘n’ Roll Revival ended with The Doors, who, like some artists back then, were suspicious of people filming them, and never signed a release, so Penny & his crew packed up early. But good ol’ Wally Heider got the audio, and one of the last things you hear in Revival69 is Jim Morrison saying from the stage —
“I can remember when rock ‘n’ roll first came on the scene, and for me it was a very liberating experience, because it opened whole new strange catacombs of wisdom that I didn’t know about and I couldn’t see any equivalent for in my surroundings. And that’s why for me this evening it’s been a really great honor to perform on the same stage with so many illustrious musical geniuses.”
You can see the beautifully assembled 97-minute Revival69 film of this whole improbable story starting in February 2023 on Crave in Canada, and coming soon to the rest of the world.
With director Ron Chapman at the premiere afterparty —
a half-mile along Bloor Street from where the concert happened
======================================
Here’s the 2-minute trailer for Revival69 . . .
This new doc is the natural sequel to Peter Jackson’s 2021 Emmy-sweeping masterpiece The Beatles: Get Back — picking up the story seven months later. Both were made from 1969 film footage preserved in storage but untapped for 50 years. Both were digitally upscaled to 4K and the audio completely remastered. Both feature new songs the audience hears shortly after they were written, and classic rock ‘n’ roll covers that the band was born out of. Both show John & Yoko as inseparable and in love, and both feature live outdoor performances. If you haven’t seen the Revival69 prequel, you need to. Streaming on DisneyPlus.
And if you love great documentaries about historic music festivals that were overlooked at the time but were in fact captured by multi-camera professional crews, you gotta see Summer of Soul, about the Harlem Cultural Festival. Both festivals took place in 1969 in the largest city in their country (Toronto and New York), featuring the founding giants of their musical idioms, and both had the original footage sitting untapped in storage boxes for decades. It won the Best Documentary Oscar and tons of other awards, and features live performances by Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, the Staple Singers, B.B. King, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, Sly & The Family Stone, Max Roach, Hugh Masekela, The Chambers Brothers and many others. Also streaming on DisneyPlus.
================================
Some other pages you might enjoy —
The promoters were bringing giants of the past into the present, including those who changed the world forever starting in the 1950s, and that’s something I’ve also been doing with my work — bringing Jack Kerouac and the Beats into the present day. I’ve written several books on the matter, but The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac is particularly to the point.
Here’s a fun, informative, rollicking Welcome To The Music podcast featuring promoter Brower and director Chapman —
Here’s D.A. Pennebaker’s full Rock ‘n’ Roll Revival documentarySweet Toronto —
And here’s Penny’s brilliant & beautiful first real film Daybreak Express made between 1953 and 1957 — an impressionistic take on life in New York City at that time, with a Duke Ellington soundtrack . . .
And here’s where Best Documentary Oscar winner Michael Moore presents Penny with an honorary Lifetime Achievement Oscar. “Pennebaker did two very simple things. First, he took the camera off the tripod! That’s it. In that one moment when Penny unscrewed the camera from its stationary position, the world of filmmaking changed — nonfiction and fiction. Second, Pennebaker and his friends invented the first portable synched sound mechanism where the 16mm camera could move, and sound would be in synch with it. He invented this apparatus back in the ’50s and it changed everything for filmmakers, regardless of what kind of films they wanted to make — cuz sound could now match the picture.”
==========================================
And in the spirit of this festival of riches, you might also enjoy . . .
I was in Manhattan the night John was killed. It took decades before I could revisit it, but I finally did.
I also saw Festival Express at its premiere in Toronto — the other great Canadian rock festival documentary, produced by Ken Walker the co-promoter of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Revival — and I ended up writing the feature story on it for Relix.
In fact, there’s a whole Movie category on my website that’s got dozens of film stories.
Including the unknown gem My Dinner with Jimi — which is set in 1967 and premiered at this same Hot Docs theater, and I got to spend some time afterwards with the funny raconteur creator Howard Kaylan.
And in fact The Wrecking Crew movie premiere was also at the same place!
