The world has always been gifted with music of all kinds of genres that have slaked the thirst of music lovers. But they not been satisfied only with the music and have been curious the artistes as well: how their minds worked, their lives and loves, their struggles, and what drove them to compose the pieces that they did. Some documentaries and docu-series have opened the windows into musicians’ minds. t2 picks a handful of them on World Music Day.
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story
In 1975, Americans weren’t feeling that great in general. The US had pulled out of the Vietnam War some time ago and the nation was rocked by scandal, leaving public opinion very divided in a number of ways. Plus, there was a fire in the then new World Trade Center, which was a symbol of American economic clout. It was in the backdrop of this tumult that singer and songwriter Bob Dylan, whose music was one of the brighter spots then, decided to go on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour with a group of fellow musicians. Director Martin Scorsese’s 2019 docu-film, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story is primarily about this tour that included lots big names such as Joan Baez, Sam Shepard and Larry Sloman, among others, with and is interlaced with clips from interviews, some real and some fictional, as well as outtakes from Dylan’s 1978 film Renaldo and Clara that was filmed with the tour. Scorcese blurs the lines between fact and fiction in Rolling Thunder Revue, leaving the audience wondering which parts are real and which aren’t.
Love After Music
Love After Music (originally, El amor después del amor), an eight-episode docu-series is based on the real-life of an Argentinian rockstar Fito Paez. The biography traces the wild as well as grotesque facts about the musician’s life. The takeaway: no one should live a life without love. Ivan Hochman as Fito nails it in the 2023 docu-series and captures the essence of Fito’s creative space, mind and behaviour.
End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones
The 2003 documentary by Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia on one of the most important punk rock bands in history, The Ramones, dives into the rocky two-decade saga of their performing career. Starting from the complicated lives of the members and more, the film goes deep into why the band couldn’t be a very big commercial success despite staying together for a long time and touring prolifically..
Leonard Cohen:Bird on a Wire
The 1974 documentary was shot when Leonard Cohen was on his 1972 European tour. The raw footage was never used until director Tony Palmer was given the opportunity to create the movie that he always wanted to make. Until then only low-fi bootlegs had been shown on German television. It sets the tone with the riot during a tour in Tel Aviv and Cohen stoically dealing with pushy fans.
The Carter
This 2009 movie talks about Lil Wayne’s rise from a New Orleans boy to one of the leading hip-hop artistes of the world. It shows some hostile interviews of Lil Wayne, a distribution he had prevented once.
