Night #1 was Sound City Movie at the Lagoon.
Dave Grohl has, over the years, proven himself to be the King of Wit Rock. His who-the-hell-cares brand of self-satire (see: Foos' Learn To Fly video) is every bit as clever as Timberlake's on SNL, and we saw more of that early this directorial debut as Dave pokes fun at his own perceived lack of intelligence while talking to the creator of Sound City's famed Neve console, Rupert Neve:
"I think he knows I'm a high school drop out...." reads the screen as Grohl smiles politely and nods his head in clueless agreement with Neve.
As the show went on, I sat with buttery, popcorn hands thinking how lucky I was to expand my music history knowledge in a significant way. Should I have brought a notepad, I wondered? I thought I was simply going to learn the history of a renowned recording studio where multi-platinum classic albums were recorded, but it was so much more than a Dewey Finn Rock 101 lesson. In fact, it could've inspired a whole new School of Rock course in and of itself--It's Complicated: the relationship between technology and rock music.
Sound City Movie takes a hard look at analog recording and its demise, owed in large part to the advent of digital recording techniques in the 1980s. As one Sound City Movie interviewee put it, digital techniques "allow people who have no business being in the music business to cut records and become huge stars". Analog recording does not--and cannot--hide the imperfections. This spawns two important outcomes:
1. artists are forced to be good at what they do because repeated wrong notes and irreparable sloppiness can't be hidden
2. the sound and artistic products are richer for both the experience that analog recording demands and for the minor imperfections one hears from time to time (ie: the human element)
This film became a story of the interconnectedness and shared passion that went into making music from a place where you had to be talented at your craft instead of relying on machines. Sound City studio was a place of warmth, as Tom Petty said, and it was pivotal in creating music that was warm as well, music that had a soul and bared it. That precise sentiment was echoed again and again during interviews with artists like Stevie Nicks, Rick Springfield, Lindsey Buckingham, Trent Reznor and (a very tan) Rick Rubin.
As a huge fan of last year's Best Rock Album Grammy winner, the Foo Fighters' Wasting Light, I knew that analog recording techniques were a significant part of the theory and the process that went into that album. After this film, I became an even bigger fan of Butch Vig for daring to go there as a producer using the Neve, both with Nevermind and with Wasting Light.
When Sound City closed, Grohl purchased the Neve console for himself, disassembled it and had it installed in his own recording studio at his home....which led to the star-filled jam sessions that closed out Sound City Movie. Seeing Paul McCartney rock out with the three surviving members of Nirvana was nothing short of a magical look inside what working with such a influential legend does to an artist:
Pat Smear: "God, why can't it always be that easy?"
McCartney, ever-so-chill: "But it is!"
I lost track of how many times I caught myself with a dorky, ear-to-ear grin during Sound City Movie at the Lagoon, though I think it had to have been at least equal to the number of audible sighs and semi-inappropriate (in public, anyway) moans I heard from women's voices throughout the theater ogling the splendor of sheer rock and directorial sublimity that is Dave Grohl.
Let it be known that one friend even coined the word "Grohlgasm" as a result of Thursday night. Go ahead and use it in a sentence today--this one could go viral.
-E
*Total lie.
