From the Band to Beyoncé: concert films to fill the live music black hole
You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Since live music in the UK entered suspended animation on 16 March, even the most mundane aspects of gig-going have acquired an exotic tang. While revisiting the concert movies below, I found myself gazing longingly at arena corridors, stadium loading bays and festival burger vans, let alone musicians and crowds. I get giddy at the thought of watching a mediocre band play an early afternoon slot on the third stage of a minor festival. The noise, the spectacle, the people, the ritual of it. Spirit me to a performance by someone I genuinely love and I might faint.
This is live music’s lost summer: a packed calendar wiped clean in one swoop. The festival season is a black hole. Shows that were optimistically shunted back to autumn have now been kicked into 2021. The concert industry is worth more than $30bn a year, so its temporary disappearance is economically devastating for musicians and worse still for road crews, stage designers, caterers, venue staff and so on. For punters the loss is more intangible: an absence of joyful new memories; the phantom sense of what might have been. Every week my Google calendar tells me about another great night out that I should be having. Next weekend was meant to be Glastonbury. So much for that.
In this unprecedented drought, concert movies become precious escapism. Many are aimed at the fanbase and add nothing to the form, but the ones I’ve chosen tell stories – about historic events, or Herculean achievements, or bittersweet swansongs, or the white heat of fandom – that will hold your attention even if you can take or leave the music. They reveal what it takes to put on a memorable show and how it can become more than just a show. These documentaries have never been as transporting as they are now. For the first time ever, they are the only access to live music that we have.
Monterey Pop
Directed by DA Pennebaker, 1968
I’d say we wouldn’t be talking about Monterey today without the movie,” said festival promoter Lou Adler on its 50th anniversary. In 1967, Adler and John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas staged the first rock festival, with the goal of giving rock’n’roll the same artistic status as jazz and folk, and hired Pennebaker, hot from his Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, to film it. Pennebaker allowed his crew to film whatever they liked, however they liked, and collaged their different perspectives, during a marathon, sleepdeprived editing session, into a kaleidoscopic narrative that became the perfect advertisement for the concept of the rock festival and an inspiration to the organisers of Woodstock. It’s especially moving because its standout performers were all gone within four years. Janis Joplin holding Mama Cass spellbound;Otis Redding vibrating with charisma; Jimi Hendrix humping his amp with such gusto that ABC television dropped the movie like a hot rock – all memorialised in their glorious prime.
Watch it on: Criterion DVD (UK), HBO Max (US)