Podcast Review: Broken Record (Pushkin).

I’ve been hoping to write a review of a podcast for some time, but recently thought it would be best to write about a single episode that I found compelling in and of itself, rather than just endorsing a particular podcast series.

However, I haven’t found that much time for listening to a lot of podcasts lately (especially since I don’t commute to work anymore), and in general have found that when I do, the quality and my interest in the topics from episode to episode tends to vary a great deal within any given series, even with some of the best and most informative news series I’ve found, such as Ezra Klein’s The Ezra Klein Show (New York Times News), Chris Hayes’ Why Is This Happening? (MSNBC), and Rachel Maddow’s recent MSNBC podcast history, ULTRA, about an earlier radical right upsurge in our national history.

Despite my intention to focus on a single episode of a series for my first podcast review, then, I was surprised to realize that I am now most eager to share a review of an entire podcast series, rather than a single episode. Of course, it too has the same problem of inconsistent topics and variable interest-levels as any other series with many episodes, but at least with this one, it’s pretty easy to guess which episodes you want to hear just by looking at the list of people interviewed.

This podcast series from Pushkin, which I have listened to on a number of recent airline flights, is called Broken Record. It is a collaborative effort of the popular writer Malcolm Gladwell, the famous music producer Rick Rubin, longtime Canadian journalist and New York Times media critic Bruce Headlam, and NPR arts reporter and show producer Justin Richmond.

The format and purpose of the podcast series is very simple. In various combinations, one or several of the four hosts conduct in-depth, often fascinating personal interviews with individual popular musicians.

In many cases, the interviewer(s) bring not only their own extensive knowledge of the music and arts industries and communities, the work of the artist being interviewed, and their own individual expertise and enthusiasm to bear, but also sometimes personal relationships, shared history or real friendships with the artists, which shapes the tone of the interview and the questions they ask.

This is particularly evident in interviews conducted by Rick Rubin, whose wide-ranging career in music production has put him in the studio at some point, working with many of the major artists he now interviews. I previously reviewed McCartney 3-2-1, a video documentary of Rubin interviewing Paul McCartney in a spare and darkened recording studio. The Broken Record podcast interviews he conducts have a very similar flavor, without the video aspect, as he goes in-depth with the artists into the music creation process, the history, the stories and the emotions of the musicians when they were creating their epic tunes.

Rubin also appears prominently in Somewhere You Feel Free, the Tom Petty YouTube documentary I just reviewed this morning, both as a contemporary commentator and also in the archival films from the Wildflower recording sessions era, in which he was present in his role as a music producer. He’s really like the Forrest Gump of music producers of our times, because of the vast range of the types of successful music and musicians he’s recorded and produced, which makes him an outstanding and well-informed interviewer for these sorts of conversations.

Of course, Malcolm Gladwell is also a skilled and often-intriguing podcast host and conversationalist. He has his own long-running podcast on Pushkin, Revisionist History, in which he uses the same style of counter-intuitive thinking and probing common to his bestselling books to re-examine major historical situations that we all think we understand, but maybe don’t. He is also a big fan of music, culture and the arts, so his enthusiasm and constant curiosity shine through in his Broken Record interviews.

Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond are less well known to a mass audience than Gladwell and Rubin, but they also prove to be smart, enthusiastic music fans with great interviewing skills and the ability to relate easily to their subjects. In other words, it’s an all-star team of hosts.

If this sounds appealing, I suggest you find the series wherever you get your podcasts, and then peruse the episode list going back several years, to see which of your favorite musicians and artists have been interviewed.

One nice thing about this podcast is that the recency of the interviews isn’t nearly as important as it would be, for example, with a current-events or news-related podcast. You can listen to interviews from six months or two years ago, and they’re still fascinating even now, particularly since the conversations are frequently retrospective and historical in nature. These podcasts will hold up and remain interesting for a long time.

The thing I like the most about the series and the interviews is the nature of the discussions. In all the ones I’ve heard, you feel like you’re listening in to a rich, informative and very friendly conversation between real down-to-earth people, discussing topics, music and histories that are very personal to them, although frequently part of legends, careers and lives lived in the glare of spotlights and their celebrity.

During the past few flights I’ve taken, I’ve heard lively and revealing interviews on Broken Record with Jackson Browne, Neil Young, Michael Stipe (lead singer of R.E.M.), Stevie Van Zandt (Bruce Springsteen’s friend, E Street Band guitarist and actor), and a particularly interesting conversation with blues guitarist, singer and songwriter Bonnie Raitt, which made all that otherwise monotonous airline flight time go by so much more quickly.

I had also first heard much of the news about the Tom Petty Wildflowers album anniversary re-release last year (with all the supplemental recordings, discussed in today’s other review) from an excellent interview on Broken Record. That episode also was conducted by Rick Rubin, proving that these podcasts can be an excellent source of breaking music news and trends in the industry as well as merely historical and retrospective pieces with aging stars.

There are so many more artists’ interviews in this podcast series’ archives, and they’re not just old-time Baby Boomer favorites either. There are plenty of musicians from the grunge era of the 1990s, the first two decades of the 2000s, rockers and rappers, folk singers and R&B artists. You can pick and choose whose stories you’d most like to hear, although I can almost guarantee that you’d be entertained by many of the podcasts, and would learn something new and interesting, even if the interview is with an artist you don’t know very much (or even anything) about.

This podcast series is an excellent way to learn more about popular music, and the musicians who create it, while enjoying listening in to pleasant, friendly and revealing conversations between gifted interviewers and the talented musical stars who are their subjects. Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Somewhere You Feel Free: The Making of Wildflowers (2021). YouTube Documentary.

Hello again! It’s not even Christmas yet, and already I’m back from my reluctant but much-appreciated breather and short break from The Memory Cache. It was refreshing to take a break, and spend more than a week in Hawai’i with family and friends, with the trade winds blowing, warm weather every day, and gorgeous ocean views everywhere.  I took a helicopter tour of Maui, saw a sea turtle underwater at close range with my mask and snorkel on, went to the aquarium, and appreciated my life and my closest loved ones. It was wonderful.

This has been a surprisingly active bounce-back year for travel in our family, after the past two years of the COVID pandemic and lockdown. In October, my wife and I took a trip back east for a wedding in the Cleveland area, and then on to several family visits on the east coast. One fortuitous benefit of the Ohio visit, of particular interest here since it is once again Rock and Roll Friday on this blog (the fourth Friday of each month) was that we were able to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, where we’d never been before.

It's a lovely museum, perfect for a lifelong popular music fan like me, with exhibits covering the entire history of rock since the late 1940s, including pictures, clothing, various rock stars’ guitars and other artifacts, and many explanatory articles and posters. 

The featured display at the time was one about the Beatles, tied to the recent Peter Jackson documentary about the making of the Let It Be album in 1969 (previously reviewed here), along with many other exhibits of interest, as well as mock-studio space where visitors can try playing instruments, and rocking out with a couple of on-site cover band musicians. It was a really fun museum, and if you’re ever in Cleveland, I highly recommend it. 

 

While I was there, I also saw a large poster for a new YouTube documentary I’d not heard about called Somewhere You Feel Free: The Making of Wildflowers. It’s a movie that was released more or less contemporaneously with last year’s release of the “missing” Wildflowers recordings made by Tom Petty and his collaborators, including members of the Heartbreakers, the noted music producer Rick Rubin, and other musical luminaries such as Ringo Starr (from the Beatles) and Carl Wilson (from the Beachboys).

The movie itself is not overly long at a run time of about an hour and a half. Most of it was pieced together from recently discovered 16-mm film shot during the period of the Wildflowers album recording sessions, with supplemental interviews (from both then and now) and candid conversations with some of the principals, especially Petty’s close friend, sometimes co-songwriter and lead guitarist Mike Campbell, Heartbreaker pianist Benmont Tench, Rick Rubin, Petty’s now-adult daughters, and a few other cameos.

Several people in the film claimed that Tom Petty believed that the Wildflowers solo album was his greatest work and accomplishment. That message was pushed throughout the movie, as it was in the promotions for the anniversary release in 2021 of all the supplemental recordings from that period. The film makes very clear that it was a time of major growth, change and transition for Petty, both as an artist and as a person, which had impacts on the sorts of sounds he created, and on the artists around him who contributed to the work from this period.

I’m not personally convinced that this album contained the greatest songs of Tom Petty’s long and prolific career as a songwriter and recording artist. I’ve always felt that the heavily acoustic guitar-based sound of these recordings, and the deeply personal, often somewhat somber and depressive lyrics, were not nearly as compelling or exciting as much of the other classic rock material of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

A perfect example of this is shown in the film, with the story of a short "side" recording session Petty did with the Heartbreakers while he was mostly focused on recording his own solo album. The session was needed to record two new songs for the band's last album for MCA (which was otherwise intended to be a greatest hits collection), before entering a new contract with Warner Brothers. 

One of the two new “filler songs” for this MCA-produced Greatest Hits album that Petty quickly wrote (and the full Heartbreakers band recorded) was “Last Dance with Mary Jane” – a monster hit and perennial crowd pleaser, which I believe will forever dwarf almost all of the songs on Wildflowers in popularity, except perhaps “You Wreck Me”.

Nevertheless, whatever you might think of the Wildflowers album and this stage of Tom Petty’s career and life, the movie is a fascinating, informal view into the personality, relationships, creative processes, and artistic development of one of the greatest rock stars ever, at this one particular point in the long arc of his career.  

If you are at all curious about how top musicians write and craft their songs, and how their emotional states, random events and collaborations with other musicians and recording engineers shape the outcomes of their efforts, this documentary is a fascinating and unvarnished view into the creative processes of one of the world’s favorite and most legendary popular musicians. It's also essential viewing for die-hard Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers fans. Recommended.

Movie Review: Pearl Jam Twenty (2011). Written and Directed by Cameron Crowe.

Happy After-Thanksgiving day (also known by some as Black Friday). Once again, though, it’s also Rock and Roll Friday here at The Memory Cache (which is the fourth Friday of each month).

For today’s post, I’m looking backwards again to a documentary film (and DVD) from Cameron Crowe, one-time youthful rock journalist and now grown-up filmmaker, whose earliest exploits as a teenage rock fan and talented young writer were so brilliantly and amusingly portrayed (in mildly fictionalized form) in Almost Famous (2000), which is still one of my all-time favorite movies.

I’ve always had a mixed reaction to Pearl Jam. They are certainly the most successful long-lasting band to come out of the heady times here in Seattle popularly known as “the Grunge era”. They survived the rush of sudden celebrity, massive wealth, drugs and the punk rock fear of “selling out” to corporate interests which crushed other rock stars of the times, notably their friend Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. And of course, there is the civic pride in having a world-famous band of rock musicians whose origins are here in my own city. 

At the same time, I was never a big fan of punk rock, and was too “mature” in age by the early 1990s to identify with the whole new youth music scene in town, and the new bands coming out of it. I sort of missed the whole thing due to adulthood, and never dove into the various bands, the local clubs and the epoch-defining new music that was being created right downtown by local kids.

Eventually, though, I did hear some of Pearl Jam’s early songs, and they were powerful. It was also impossible not to be drawn to Eddie Vedder’s unique voice and vocal style – a rich, expressive baritone with the ability to range from high-pitched, loud screams to the softest, gentlest soothing tones. The band had the same versatility, switching from driving, passionate powerhouse rock to soulful, quieter and more introspective slower songs. Eventually I became a believer in the band and their music, if never a truly committed or devoted fan.

This was the spirit in which I approached Pearl Jam Twenty. The “twenty” in the title is for the twentieth anniversary of the band’s formation, and in that sense, the documentary was very much about a story that was not complete, since the band continues to sing and record new songs to this day. But it does very much capture the most important story about them and their storied career, which is how did this group of talented musicians find each other at this particular time, and turn their shared drive to make music into one of the most successful rock acts of our era?

Crowe does an excellent job of piecing it all together for us, using a combination of interviews with the band members and others around them, archival footage of past performances, and new performance footage. He begins with a tour through the young rock community of the 1980s in Seattle, the lifestyles of the musicians, and how the eventual members of the band met each other and first played together in other groupings.

From there, we move to the formation of Pearl Jam’s predecessor band, Mother Love Bone, and the crushing drug overdose death of their lead singer Andrew Wood. We learn how that tragedy led to the chain of fortuitous events that brought Vedder to the band from southern California.

Crowe takes us on an in-depth tour of the personalities, the clashes, the alliances and the shifting power within the band, as Vedder’s charismatic live presence and his songwriting began to push him increasingly into the spotlight and to increase his influence within the band. We learn how he and other band members weathered the stress of their sudden success, the pressures of touring, and several cataclysmic events, including a concert in Denmark where a crowd rush caused the accidental deaths of nine fans.

It’s all there – the trip from obscurity to celebrity, from poverty to wealth, the competition, the cooperation, the drugs, relationships, screw-ups and wild successes. It’s a fascinating portrait of how a band which at one time was considered “the greatest rock band in the world” survived the perils of success, and became a band of brothers who could continue to come together regularly to create great music and put on fantastic live shows over a period that now spans more than 30 years.

If you’re a fan of Pearl Jam, and haven’t seen this documentary, it’s probably essential for you to track it down and watch it, just to gather all the inside stories and details you didn’t know before. And if you’re not necessarily a fan but want to know more about them, and the Grunge era of rock in Seattle, or about what sorts of challenges musicians in top bands must face and overcome to succeed in the music business, this is a compelling film history of one of the most successful and popular rock bands of the past three decades. Recommended.

Personal Note: Another New Song and Video Released Today!

I'm very pleased to announce that I released my seventh original music single this morning, with an accompanying lyric video, on all the music streaming services and on YouTube. It's called I'm Watching You, and (despite that ambiguously ominous sounding title), it's actually a happy love story about a young family living their dreams together, with an island sound that's quite different from any of my previous songs.

This song release follows closely on the heels of my two preceding song and video releases, Science Fiction World (released November 9th) and Canadian Girl (released October 6th). If you haven't heard them yet, I'd encourage you to check them out! 

If you'd like to see the videos of any of these songs, please just click the link to my YouTube music video channel on the right column of this page.

In related news, I'm in the process of setting up an email list service for my music audience, as well as for The Memory Cache blog. I am hoping to find new ways to widen the audience for my music and my writing, while also ensuring that I don't continue to send unsolicited announcements to personal friends and family (or anyone else) who may not want to receive them. 

I'm also hoping to find a more efficient and direct way of sharing news of my activities with an intentional audience, without having to rely so heavily on social media platforms.

The new email list service (using the Mailchimp platform) will include pop-up forms on my web sites that allow readers and listeners to join my email list to receive announcements and news from me, and also to easily unsubscribe from the list at any time.  

I promise that emails from me to my list will be brief and only occasional. I don't want to fill up anyone's inbox with spam, so I will always strive to be respectful of your time and attention with any emails I send. With that said, don't be surprised if you see a pop-up invitation to join my email list on this site, and/or an email from me via the new email service, in the near future.

In the meantime, I wish you and your families a very happy Thanksgiving!

Personal Note: My new song, Science Fiction World, is released!

In a moment of marvelous distraction from what's going on in the outer world, I scheduled the release of my newest song, Science Fiction World, for today -- the day after a momentous election, upon which almost everyone's attention has been hyper-focused (including mine). 

I just overlooked the significance of November 8th on the calendar, and didn't consider whether people would want to listen to a new song, and see a new video, the day after the election! Fortunately, though, it's a relatively calm morning after, so we'll continue on with life as usual, and hope for the best.

Anyway, I'm very excited about this new song and video release. The song has a particular retro sound from the psychedelic rock era of the late 1960s I haven't tried to create before, and I'm thrilled with how it turned out. If you haven't seen it (and would like to), just click on the link on the right column of this blog (at the bottom) for my YouTube Channel. The video is a lyric video, and it's a little more abstract than most of my other music videos, but it is very colorful. 

I wrote the lyrics and music, and I played all of the guitar parts, except one short but tasteful guitar part Matt Taylor added during the bridge. I sang the nominal lead vocal too, but for the first time I have other strong voices joining mine: my multi-talented recording engineer and friend Matt Taylor (who also produced the song, as well as mixing and mastering it), plus Karyn Michaelson, a very talented local Seattle singer-songwriter and musician with her own solo recordings.

In his role as producer, Matt also recruited two friends to add instrumental parts, Tim Delaney (electric bass) and Rich Rowlinson (piano).  I'm very grateful to all four of these fine musicians for their contributions to this song. It was just so much fun to work for the first time with other musicians (in addition to Matt, who's contributed drum parts on all my songs), and all together, I think it makes for an exciting and rich sound. 

By the way, in addition to the music video on YouTube, the Science Fiction World song is also available now on all the music streaming services, along with all my other songs.

One other musical note for the near future: even though I've released two singles already this fall, I have yet another song finished which is scheduled for release on November 22nd. It's called I'm Watching You. It too has a totally different style from any of my previous songs, with an island lilt and a story of love and family which will arrive just in time for Thanksgiving. I haven't announced this release anywhere else, so you heard it here first.

Enjoy, and I'll be back soon with more reviews!

Movie Review: Taylor Swift’s Journey to Fearless (2011). Taylor Swift.

It’s Rock and Roll Friday again here at The Memory Cache, so today I’m highlighting a decade-old documentary and concert video of one of the greatest rock stars (if not the greatest) of the recent musical past and present. I hope you enjoy it!

I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that full-length concert videos of performances and tours by major musical stars are probably becoming a thing of the past. Instead, these days we tend to get mostly brief videos of single songs performed and recorded at shows. These short live song clips usually go straight to YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, and aren't usually all that well compiled or edited.

If it is the end of the era of full-length rock concert tour videos, that would be very unfortunate. A well-made concert video captures much of the excitement of a live performance, with better sound quality and viewer-adjustable sound levels, and crystal-clear images of the performers as good as or better than the view you would get from front-row seats, especially when seen on a large-screen HD TV with a decent sound system. And these videos often capture enough of the joy of hearing one well-loved song after another, played by our favorite musicians before a live audience of their devoted fans, to convey some of the special energy and excitement of the large rock concert experience.

I have a small library of DVDs (remember those?) of concert tours by some of my favorite rock stars. One of the best and more recent such videos in my collection is Taylor Swift’s Journey to Fearless, originally released as a three-part documentary.

It begins with a bit of a biography of Swift, from early childhood to the beginning of her now-legendary career as one of the top country, rock and pop stars of our lifetimes. It is then followed by a full-length film of her performing songs in her Fearless Tour, the first tour in which she was the featured attraction rather than the opening act for more established country stars.

Ms. Swift released a new album last week, Midnights, her tenth studio album. She is by now such a megastar and mature singer-songwriter, musician, entrepreneur, producer, director, social media influencer, and artist that it is hard to believe that someone with so many professional talents and accomplishments to her credit is still only 32 years old.

I “discovered” Taylor Swift's music well along in her career. I only started listening to her in 2020, with the release of her pandemic-era smash hit album Folklore, which immediately won her a Grammy. That was the first music of hers that I’d noticed, even though of course I knew she was a huge pop star, who everyone had been talking about for a long while.

Of course, it isn’t surprising that I hadn’t paid attention to her before. She and her storied career really belong to other more recent generations, the Millennials and maybe Gen Z particularly, and her fan base skews heavily female. But even as a male rock music fan from an earlier era, I was immediately taken with her evocative storytelling, her lyrics, her voice, the range of emotions she conveys, her sense of humor, the musical styles she has embraced and explored, and the sheer magnetism of her public personality. So as a newcomer to her and her music, I bought a DVD copy of Journey to Fearless online to get more of a sense of her as a musician and performer than I could get just by listening to her studio albums.

It turned out that this video provides not just concert footage, but considerable insight into many aspects of the rise of this truly remarkable artist. The documentary begins by tracing the path she followed in becoming a star, from her childhood obsession with writing and performing songs for her family and friends, her family’s move to Nashville when she was 14 to support her relentless adolescent drive to build a life and career as a musician, her first lucky breaks, her mistakes and opportunities getting a recording contract, and the release of her first album, the eponymously named Taylor Swift.

From there, we learn about her early touring experiences opening for other country music acts, and the explosive release of her second album Fearless, which was soon charting massive sales to her increasingly energized fan base. We then discover how the success of these first two albums led to her first headlining tour, the Fearless Tour, which played at arenas around the world for more than a year in 2009 and 2010.  

At the end of the pre-concert documentary sections, we learn how much Swift participated in creating many aspects of the show and the tour, in addition to the musical performances. She apparently provided direction and inspiration for the construction of the stunning stage design and lighting, which were based on her love of theatrics and fairy tales. She is credited in the video as a producer for sets and stage design, the music, the dancing, the costumes, the video production, and pretty much every other aspect of the tour and the film documentary made about it.

When I saw the credits at the end of the video, I was simply amazed that a new artist not yet even 21 years old was so thoroughly involved in creating every aspect of a complex, sophisticated tour and multi-media production, which ultimately grossed more than $66 million, put on 118 arena shows across the USA and abroad, and was seen by more than a million fans.  

When I watched the performance portion of the video, I was similarly astonished. In performing 13 of her by-now iconic songs from the tour, we see her singing, backed by a tight band of top-flight rock and country musicians, and accompanying herself beautifully on the piano, as well as playing a large variety of acoustic and electric guitars, a banjo, a ukulele, and probably a few other instruments I’ve forgotten. She also often danced, along with a small troupe of professional dancers and backup singers, and performed some short musical theatrical scenes in support of the stories of some of the songs. At one point she even flew high over the crowd in an elevated lift, singing her parts perfectly without missing a beat.

The lighting was spectacular, the special effects continuous. She reputedly did roughly eight costume changes per show, and she was the center of attention every moment at every single concert, surrounded by her rapt and adoring fans, many of them young girls her own age and younger, who  were there past bedtime with their happy parents. It was like Disney World on steroids, combined with a fantastic rock and roll extravaganza, all as envisioned and performed by a brilliant multi-dimensional talent and precocious megastar, who was only 20 years old at the time, and doing all this for the first time in her career.

We’ve all been hearing about Taylor Swift since she was 15 years old – it’s hard to believe it’s already been so many years since she first appeared. But this powerful documentary and concert video demonstrate clearly how and why the blockbuster career of this unique pop music and cultural icon came to be, and why she continues to fascinate and thrill her millions of loyal fans around the world. Highly recommended.  

Personal Note: A New Song, and New Video!

Oh my -- it's Thursday already, and I haven't done a single post to The Memory Cache all week. It's okay, though, I hope -- I haven't gone anywhere, and I do have several new books and shows I'm ready to review, which I will get back to within the next couple of days.

But as I mentioned recently, I've been heavily focused this late summer and early fall on recording and preparing a number of new songs for release, a process which I've now chosen to make more labor intensive, but also even more artistically rewarding, by taking on the challenge of making my own music videos to go with my songs.

I learned enough about video editing and production by making the lyric video for Brand New Driver last summer to be able to at least provide a pleasing background for displaying the words of the song in a music video, but this time I wanted to see if I could actually create a visual presentation of the song's story, in music video format.

Today you can actually check out the results of my experiments. This morning, I released my latest rock single, Canadian Girl, on all music streaming services, along with not one but two Canadian Girl music videos on YouTube. They are essentially the same video, but the official lyric version includes the lyrics on screen for those who want to read along with the song.

If you follow the link on the bottom right side of this page to my YouTube music video channel, you can see both new videos, along with the others I've released since I started this mad post-retirement rock musical adventure. I hope you like the new song and video, a musical tale of young summer romance with a glockenspiel in it!  And I'll be back with new reviews here shortly.

Movie Review: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down a Dream (2007). Peter Bogdanovich.

Among the most prized DVD sets in my musical film collection is Peter Bogdanovich's Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin' Down a Dream, a 4-disc set that includes a documentary spanning 2 of the discs, plus a full-length concert video DVD of a special live performance the band played in Gainesville, Florida, their original hometown, to celebrate the 30-year anniversary of the band's formation, and a CD containing rare and unreleased songs.

Most of my friends and family know that Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers has been one of my all-time favorite rock bands since the 1980s. I "discovered" them a little late -- by the time I first listened to their music in the late '80s, they had already been making great records and building a huge following for more than ten years. But since then, I have followed them avidly, right through the release of the band's last studio album, Hypnotic Eye, in 2014, and Petty's sad death at the end of his "final" tour in 2017.

There are documentaries about many pop music bands and musical artists, which typically follow a similar format. Interviews (where possible) with the principals are interspersed with interviews with collaborators, mentors, fans, friends and family, along with snippets of live performances, and maybe some footage from studio recording sessions as well.

Bogdanovich's massive compilation follows this same formula, but it stands out as one of the best and most exhaustive such efforts I've seen. Much of its success, which included a limited theatrical release, can be attributed to the fact that Bogdanovich is a major filmmaker and creative artist in his own right, who brought his talent, resources and vast experience to the project. It was also clearly a labor of love -- there's not much doubt that Bogdanovich was also a huge fan of Petty and the remarkable group of close friends and musical collaborators that surrounded him.

The documentary takes us back to the beginning. It covers Petty's family life as a child, including his loving and supportive mother, and his rocky relationship with his father, his discovery of rock music as a young teenager, and how the band members found each other. In telling this story, we hear interviews with Petty, and all the other band members, along with family members, friends and other musicians.

From this point on, we get a very detailed and complete history of every stage of the band's history, from their Gainesville years, the move to Los Angeles, their first recordings and record contracts, live performances, tours, personnel changes, and ups and downs, through the end of the documentary period in 2007. And the interviews keep bringing in surprising new friends and admirers to the tale, including Stevie Nicks, Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, George Harrison, Roger McGuinn, Jackson Browne, and many other celebrities and music industry luminaries whose lives crossed paths with Petty and the band, and were deeply affected by it.

I'm sure this documentary is too long and detailed to be of general interest to everyone, but for the many fans and enthusiasts who have followed and loved the music of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, this is the definitive visual and musical account of their amazing career as one of the best and longest-enduring rock and roll acts of all time. I haven't checked, but it may be available to borrow through local libraries, and of course it can also be bought online. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Wild Tales: A Rock and Roll Life (2013). Graham Nash.

I saw an article this morning in The Seattle Times about an upcoming small venue local solo concert by Graham Nash, now 80 years old, who (for those who haven’t heard of him) is a famous surviving member of two of the great bands of the 1960s and 1970s, and a two-time inductee in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Since it’s once again Rock and Roll Friday here at The Memory Cache, I thought I’d take the opportunity to review his 2013 autobiography, which I read recently.

I’ll jump ahead in the story, to provide some context for those readers who don’t know: Nash first gained fame in the mid-1960s as a singer, guitarist, songwriter and founder of the Hollies, one of the more popular “British Invasion” bands, whose songs regularly soared to the top of the international charts, along with those of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.  A sample of their greatest hits would include songs like "Bus Stop", "Carrie-Anne", "Look Through Any Window", and "On a Carousel".

Nash was particularly well known for his signature high harmonies and vocal leads in many of the Hollies’ hits. But after years of rock stardom, he tired of the band’s formulaic sound and songwriting, so he moved to southern California, where in the late 1960s, he became a founding member of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY).

In Wild Tales, Nash takes us all the way back to his childhood, growing up in a slum neighborhood in Manchester, England. He talks about how he found his way to music, and the influences from late 1950s American rock, and the popular artists in England at the time that led to his love of harmony singing. He describes the formation of the Hollies, and sets it in the context of the other bands in England at the time that were vying for popularity and opportunities to perform. He also relates his family life and formative experiences, and how he came to his lifelong passion for photography, which has led him to acclaim for his visual art in addition to his storied musical career.

Nash doesn’t hold back in describing the people, places and events he experienced as a member of the Hollies, and then later in CSNY. His memories of the CSNY era are particularly salacious and gossipy. This legendary “super-group” of four established rock stars from other famous bands, with their unique complex vocal harmonies, massively popular rock hits and anthems of the Boomer generation, along with their drug use, sexual exploits, and larger than life friendships with other rockers and celebrities, has always been renowned for the instability of its internal relationships within the band, driven by gigantic egos, sudden wealth and their increasingly erratic personal behaviors as their celebrity and musical fame skyrocketed.

Nash takes us along for the full ride, not only at the moments of their greatest success, but also through their later years of repeated band reunions, break-ups, tragedies, new projects and awards. He shares details and stories about his various personal relationships with women, including groupies, his wives, and his famous but brief romance with Joni Mitchell in the late 1960s in Laurel Canyon, which he immortalized both in songs and in his photography. He also opens up about the ups and downs of his friendships, including with several of his Hollies band-mates, and with David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, and others from the pantheon of classic rock superstars.

This is definitely a “tell all” book, which should appeal to fans and historians of the age of rock and roll, as told by one of the most successful and long-lasting musical and artistic voices of the era. It’s not the most beautifully written autobiography I’ve read, but it is honest, authentic and enlightening. Recommended.

Movie Review: The Beatles: Get Back! (2021). Disney+.

Another month has slipped by, and here we are – it’s Rock and Roll Friday at The Memory Cache blog again! Today I’d like to begin by posing the question: what happens when you take more than a hundred hours of archival film of the most important rock and roll band ever while they were in the studio during the recording of their final album together, and hand it to one of the greatest filmmakers in our lifetime to make a documentary mini-series?

The very exciting answer to that question is that you get the three-part Beatles docuseries The Beatles: Get Back! by Peter Jackson, running about eight hours total, covering a 21-day series of recording sessions at Twickenham Studios and then Apple Studios in London with the Beatles as they made the Let It Be album in 1969. The mini-series is available on the Disney+ streaming service, and was released in late November of last year.

As Beatles fans and historians know, the film footage shot during these sessions was originally used to create the documentary film The Beatles: Let It Be, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. That film has long been regarded as a depressing and negative farewell send-off to the Beatles, focusing as it did on the tensions in the band that were driving it toward the inevitable breakup that followed shortly thereafter.

When Jackson, a lifelong Beatles fan, was approached about the possibility of revisiting the source film to make a new version of essentially the same subject as the The Beatles: Let It Be documentary, he was reportedly reluctant to take the project on, until he saw all the film, and realized there might be a more interesting and uplifting story to be told in retrospect than had been presented in the original documentary.

And indeed, that is what he has done. It’s worth noting there was also a formidable technical challenge involved, which was that much of the 50-year old source film was not in good condition, so he had to use the same kinds of advanced cinematic magic he had employed in restoring and enhancing 100-year old archival film for his 2018 World War I documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old, to make a movie that had the look and feel, and the visual and sound quality, of a contemporary production.

But the main challenge for Jackson, with the help of Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, and the support of Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, was always going to be to show the Beatles as they really were, together, at work and in a private setting, this incredibly talented group of four professional musicians whose astonishing history together had welded them into a close-knit family, even with all the pressures and animosities that were by then corroding their ability to stay together as a band.

I can see how this show might not be for everyone. The three episodes are each long (2-3 hours apiece), and for much of the time, not that much is happening in terms of action or plot. The four Beatles come and go, with their friends, wives and lovers, and their entourages, while the others are trying out new bits for the songs they’re writing together, or pairing up to play some of their old songs just for fun. We hear their playful banter with each other, which was real – we can see that it wasn’t something they just put on for the media in public, or created for their movies. We also hear them discussing their relationships, like an old married couple squabbling about the frustrations of a long domestic life together.

But we also get to see the miracle of their music creation process. Unlike most of the earlier Beatles albums, the songs on the Let It Be album were written in the studio, in real time. It wasn’t like most of their albums, where John, Paul and George would show up with songs already written, and ready to record. In this documentary, we watch them coming up with new lyrics, guitar bits and chords, and Ringo’s unique drum tracks, right before our eyes. And to them, these creations were all new – they hadn’t heard them as iconic sounds of the 1960s, played millions of times since around the world for over a half century, as we all have.

The documentary ends with their famous roof-top concert, where they played their last public performance together, and showcased many of the songs that would be on this final studio album they made together. It’s a triumphal moment, and another demonstration of the close bonds between the four of them, even as things were falling apart. We see the sheer joy and fun of playing for a live audience again, after more than three years of not touring, that captures for a final time the magical connection they had together as a close-knit brotherhood of legendary performing artists, which was such a powerful part of what has made them so beloved by generations of fans.

For anyone who is interested in the Beatles, this documentary is indispensable. It definitely has its bittersweet moments, and it inevitably shares some of the unavoidable facts about the state of their relationships at that time that made The Beatles: Let It Be seem like such a bummer, but it also highlights much of what the Beatles still shared with each other, particularly their joy in creating and playing their unique brand of generation-defining rock music. Highly recommended.    

Movies: Livin' Right Now (2005), and Love, Pain and the Whole Crazy World Tour (2008). Keith Urban.

Hello! It’s Rock and Roll Friday again here at The Memory Cache, the fourth Friday of each month, where for the past few months I’ve been posting reviews of books and shows about music, its history and some of my favorite artists and bands as a fan as well as a musician.

This month I don’t have any major new book or TV reviews, so instead today I’m going to talk about a couple of outstanding concert videos which are among the favorites on my bookshelf. These might be available from the library; otherwise they can probably still be found for sale on Amazon. I know that releasing full-length feature concerts on DVD is probably becoming a thing of the past for most music stars (along with DVDs!), but I want to share a couple of the best from my concert video library.

Today I want to talk about two concert DVDs from earlier in the career of my current favorite major rock star, Keith Urban. Keith Urban is technically considered to be a country music star, but his extensive catalog of music crosses over and includes influences from many strains of popular music, definitely including country and rock, but also folk and blues, pop, and in recent years, hip-hop, R&B and electronic dance music too.

I first discovered his music in 2016, already almost 20 years into his brilliant (and ongoing) career, when I took a listening foray into the world of modern country music after a family trip to Nashville. This was toward the end of Tom Petty’s career and life (my previous favorite), and I was feeling a need to explore some new music, and see if there were contemporary artists in country music that I might like, since there didn’t seem to be a lot new going on in rock music anymore. I actually listened to music from a half-dozen or so of the top country stars of the moment, including Blake Shelton, Thomas Rhett, Chris Stapleton and Brad Paisley, and liked several of them, but Keith Urban’s music stood out as utterly unique among them. It immediately caught my attention.

His songs had plenty of country elements, particularly during the early part of his career, like the sound of banjos and mandolins mixed in, but the songs were more complex in structure than most 3-chord country songs, the lyrics told emotionally appealing and relatable stories, Urban’s wonderful voice and delivery were captivating, and the lead guitar playing (also Urban) was absolutely thrilling to hear.

After I started collecting his albums, and becoming more familiar with my fast-expanding library of his amazing, memorable and addictive songs, I became aware of two full-length movies he had made of earlier concert tours, as his career was on the rise and gathering momentum. The first, Livin’ Right Now, was from 2005; and then he released another one, Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy World Tour, in 2008. I immediately ordered them both, and they were a revelation to see.

The thing I’ve come to believe about Keith Urban is that he is perhaps the most completely realized male rock star of my lifetime, in that he is the whole package of rock star skills and abilities in a single individual. If all we had were the large catalog of his songs and his studio recordings, we would already have more memorable and well-loved music than we have any right to expect from an artist or band. But to see him in a live concert performance setting is even better (even if on a DVD), because then you see the full range of the tools he has as a performing artist with which to work his magic on adoring crowds.

He is a charismatic showman. He is the riveting (and yes, very attractive) front man and leader of the band, generous and sharing with his audience, full of joy, funny, and energetic, running around the stage and out into the crowd, giving off so much warmth and fun, and singing those great songs, with his fans singing along to every word. That in itself should be enough to satisfy any rock fan or concert goer.

But then you see him playing his stunning guitar solos, like on the records but even better, often while he is also singing the lead vocals. I can’t remember ever seeing any other lead singer and front man for a great band who could also seemingly effortlessly play such dazzling guitar parts at the same time he was singing. It is awesome to behold, and I only realized that he could actually do that when I watched these two excellent concert videos.

A lot of folks by now are content to hear the classic songs from their youth (whenever that was), and maybe don’t believe there’s much new out there worth hearing or seeing. But I don’t agree. I believe that some of the greatest performing and recording musicians today, like Keith Urban and Taylor Swift, in fact put on much more amazing shows, and have much higher levels of individual artistic talent across a wider variety of media than the rock stars of decades ago, precisely because they are standing on the shoulders and the achievements of those great artists and music creators of earlier generations.  It also helps that they have far more and better technology at their fingertips, technology they've also had to learn to master.

Keith Urban regularly continues to deliver new bestselling albums, wonderful singles, and YouTube music videos, and continues to play sold out tours around the world. But for a time-capsule view of his live concert performances as a young breakout star, these two concert videos, Livin’ Right Now and Love, Pain and the Whole Crazy World Tour, are a treat. Highly recommended.

From Wayne: Blog News and Brand New Driver Song Release.

As most readers know, The Memory Cache blog is my personal platform for sharing my writing, ideas, useful information and reviews with a reading audience.

Since I launched it back in February, I've been very pleased to see that there does appear to be a small but regular group of people who are coming back regularly to see what's new, and what books, movies and TV shows I've reviewed recently.

I noticed the other day that the site's page view count has gone over 2,500 since I launched it. It's not millions, but it's still gratifying!

Thank you so much for your interest, and please let your friends and family know about the site too, if you think they might enjoy reading it, and using its categorized lists of different types of content to find good books to read, good shows to see, and interesting topics to discover and learn about.

Meanwhile, some readers may not know that the other creative project I started early in the pandemic, as a new hobby, was writing and recording my own original rock, country and folk-influenced songs.

I released my first three singles last year, with music videos, which you can hear on all major music streaming services, and also see on my YouTube channel, which you can find by clicking on the link to my music under the Favorite Links heading on the right side of the page. You can also find my artist social media accounts on both Facebook and Instagram at @wayneparkernotes. Please feel free to follow me there if interested.

In that vein, I'm delighted to announce the release today of my latest song, Brand New Driver, which is now available or arriving soon at all major music streaming services, as well as on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Check it out! And I do hope you enjoy it.

Have a great day, and rock on!

TV Review: McCartney 3,2,1 (Season 1, 2021). Hulu.

I recently had the opportunity to watch a marvelously understated little documentary mini-series on Hulu called McCartney 3,2,1. The “McCartney” in the title refers to Sir Paul McCartney, one of the two surviving Beatles, Wings bandleader, genius songwriter (with and without John Lennon) and legendary solo artist throughout the past fifty years of rock music history.

The documentary itself is incredibly spare in action, setting and appearance. It was shot in black and white, mostly in a simple music studio with a mixing board and not much else, and features nothing more than two people talking for the entire six sessions of the mini-series. One of them is McCartney, as he is now, the elder statesman and extraordinary maestro of the rock and roll music world that he and his band-mates in the Beatles played such a profound role in creating.

The other person is the interviewer, Rick Rubin. Many readers may never have heard of him, but for popular music historians and enthusiasts (present company included), he is also a legendary figure, for Rubin has produced best-selling records for and by many of the top stars of rock, country and hip-hop. He is a brilliant sound engineer, with a deep appreciation for the artists, studios, recording history, sonic qualities and music trends which have shaped popular music over the past 50 years, many times with his hands at the controls of the mixing boards during the recording sessions.

Rubin is the perfect interviewer to ask McCartney fascinating and in-depth questions about how some of the greatest Beatles’ songs and albums were created. He has a warmth and sense of humor which draws McCartney out, leading to fascinating personal anecdotes, and so many surprising stories about how iconic sounds in different Beatle songs came into being.

The two of them are also aided in this exploratory process by the fact that Rubin has some of the Beatle's multi-track song recordings loaded into the mixing board, so he can actually play and separate out the sounds in particular song mixes, and then talk with McCartney about how and why things were done as they were.

There are also plenty of personal reminiscences from McCartney about the Beatles’ experiences and influences at different stages of their years together, and their relationships within the band, especially his close personal and creative connection with John Lennon.

This may not be fascinating to people who aren’t Beatles fans, and particularly not if they also don’t know or care anything about the creative process by which original music is made. But for anyone who loves the Beatles and their music, and wonders how on earth they were able to write and record so many different kinds of timeless songs in a few short years, this is all very revealing, and it's an amusing, animated conversation between two old pros that we are privileged to see and hear. Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Storyteller (2021). Dave Grohl.

For those who don’t know who Dave Grohl is, he might say facetiously that he “was that other guy in Nirvana”, that is, the power drummer behind the drum set, who provided the pounding beat while Kurt Cobain was out front, playing guitar and singing the generation-defining Nirvana songs he had written, for those few short years until Cobain took his own life at the peak of the 1990s Seattle-based Grunge rock era.

As the band-mate and close friend to a tragically and prematurely deceased rock superstar, Grohl could easily have self-destructed, retired and vanished from the music scene, or chosen to switch to a different career. But he did none of those things. Instead, after a brief hiatus, he re-created himself as a guitar player, lead singer, songwriter, front man and bandleader for another top rock act of the 2000s era which he founded, The Foo Fighters.

Along the way, he did quite a few other interesting things too. He has produced several music-related documentary movies and TV shows, including a fascinating movie he made for Netflix, Sound City (2013), about a legendary old Los Angeles music studio, the stars who had recorded there, and the marvelous obsolete analog mixing board he ultimately rescued for his own home studio; a TV mini-series, Sonic Highways (2014) documenting a 20th anniversary recording tour for the Foo Fighters, during which they recorded at eight famous studios across the country; and a mock horror movie with the band, Studio 666 (2022).

He has also had various collaborations with other famous musicians, including a memorable performance on Saturday Night Live playing drums with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, which led to an offer from Petty to join the band, but which he ultimately declined in order to pursue his plans for the Foo Fighters band he had just started.

In The Storyteller, Grohl doesn’t write a straight narration of every twist and turn along his path, or provide a precise chronological account of his career and life. Instead, he tells stories: anecdotes of different things he experienced, and things that happened to him that impacted him personally, emotionally and professionally. It’s occasionally a little confusing, because he sometimes jumps back and forth in time, but ultimately it allows him to connect the dots, and paint a convincing picture of himself as a man and an artist.

This is a worthwhile and self-reflective autobiographical sketch by one of the leading and most popular men of the contemporary rock music world, who survived a devastating personal and professional loss early in his career, along with outsized fame and celebrity at an early age, only to start over and succeed again on his own terms. Recommended.

Book Review: Unrequited Infatuations (2021). Stevie Van Zandt.

This rock and roll autobiography is an unusual one, in part because it is told by someone who is not the “front man” for a band, or a major solo act himself.  This is a “sideman’s” story.  

For those who don’t know, Van Zandt, also known as “Little Stevie”, is a close friend and confidante of Bruce Springsteen.  He became a founding member, guitarist and backup singer of Springsteen’s E Street Band, and Springsteen’s right-hand man in the early years, only to quit in the 1980s, just as the band was reaching its peak years of popularity. 

As he recounts, he returned to the band many years later, but only after building his own separate life and identity as a musician, political activist, actor, script-writer and producer, as well as a celebrity gadfly, solo artist, band-leader, project organizer and friend to many other stars.  

His style of story-telling seemed to verge at times on the bombastic, self-admiring and grandiose, and might have been intolerable except for the fact that all the outrageous claims he makes and the crazy stories he tells are apparently true, and are often very funny.  It also helps make it more bearable that he openly shares his failures and insecurities too.  

But yes, he did play a huge part in organizing financial, political and celebrity support in the U.S. against South African apartheid, and in support of Nelson Mandela.  He did become an actor, and a major star in The Sopranos, one of the top TV series of all time.  He did star in and help produce another improbable but popular gangster-related Netflix show set in Norway, Lilyhammer.  And he does seem to know just about everyone in the celebrity world, and has wild stories and gossip to share about his interactions with many of them.  

If you’re looking for a fun read, and lots of tall tales from the life of a high-powered Forrest Gump of the entertainment world, this book might fill the bill.  Recommended.