Rock's Legends Were Messy. You'd Never Know That From Today's Movies.

New York Times

4 days ago

Like any qualified rock 'n' roll dork, I began consuming the lore around the music early. I was a tenderhearted tween Beatlemaniac when I picked up Albert Goldman's 1988 biography, 'The Lives of John Lennon,' still a landmark of salaciousness. There followed, in some rough order, 'The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones,' by Stanley Booth; 'Hellfire,' Nick Tosches' incendiary character study of Jerry Lee Lewis; and 'Hammer of the Gods,' Stephen Davis's blow-by-blow exegesis of Led Zeppelin. I am strait-laced by disposition, so I was rendered slack jawed by the toxic excesses of rock stardom described in these books, or at least the parts I could grasp well enough to conjure a mental picture. Some things — things you should never Google about Led Zeppelin and mud sharks — remain blissfully outside my ken.
I'm strait-laced but not a prude. Over time, I came to understand that sex and drugs and sharks are among the ancillary consequences of taking the world's most gifted, vain and emotionally marginal people, placing them in stressful situations and giving them bottomless expense accounts. Nature simply takes its course. People used to seem endlessly entertained by hearing appalling stories about the results. The feral behavior of even middling musicians was the draw for VH1 programs like 'Behind the Music,' which was light on music but quite detailed about behinds, or '100 Most Shocking Music Moments.' (No. 97 featured Chuck Negron, of Three Dog Night, explaining how a certain part of his body 'exploded' following an exceedingly ambitious surfeit of human contact.) I will admit that I, too, came to relish these tales. I like Mötley Crüe just fine, but I loved Neil Strauss's medium-ironic group history, 'The Dirt,' from 2001 — again, light on music and heavy on dirt, including things you should never Google about Mötley Crüe and burritos.
Music documentaries and biopics now feel like a larger part of the entertainment ecosystem than ever, but they've traveled a long distance from that tabloid bonanza. Today's rock historians echo groundbreaking filmmakers like D.A. Pennebaker and the Maysles Brothers, treating rock 'n' roll as serious intellectual business. Early this year, 'A Complete Unknown,' James Mangold's biopic of Bob Dylan, did respectably at the box office, bringing figures like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie into a modern frame. Soon after, in Bernard MacMahon's documentary 'Becoming Led Zeppelin,' you could watch that band coalesce, transforming from an also-ran version of the Yardbirds into a juggernaut whose unique combination of brute force and strange, feminine vulnerability has rendered them an insoluble legend.
Yet in both, something seems to be missing. If you, like me, have mentally cataloged the countless forms of bad behavior that marked the Dylan and Zeppelin years these films cover, you find yourself practically jonesing for a scene of rampant chemical intake or at least a television being hurled through a hotel window. Aside from Robert Plant's glancing mention of the ambient feeling of drugs and girls arriving on the scene as Zeppelin's fame grew, a blissful innocent could watch MacMahon's film and believe the individuals on the screen endured the Caligula-like high-water mark of their fame with the quiet dignity of devoted family men.
These masses of songs are now blue-chip properties with reputations of their own.
It's not that I want to see the nasty stuff for fun; a lot of it is depressing, idiotic, cruel or seriously criminal. The question is what is actually true and how much we care about it. There was a time when we were prepared to hear all sorts of shocking tales, but today's filmmakers seem to be moving expediently in the opposite direction — toward cleaned-up, on-message image-making, the sorts of revised mythologies fans are eager to engage.
Consider, for instance, the Disney+ documentary 'The Beach Boys.' The band started off writing songs about surfing and cars, to match contemporary trends, and were photographed in matching striped shirts that, in some crucial way, they were never allowed to take off; they would become emblems of a carefree baby-boomer adolescence, the innocent 'before' in the before-and-after picture of the 1960s. But perhaps more than any other band of the era — an enormously high bar — the Beach Boys' story only got stranger, with problems ranging from the typical (drugs, alcohol, fights, lawsuits) to the infamous (Brian Wilson's yearslong breakdown) to the bizarre (Dennis Wilson's brief acquaintance with Charles Manson, whose song 'Cease to Exist' the band recorded a version of). In 1983, the secretary of the interior, James Watt, banned the group from performing a Fourth of July concert on the Washington Mall, on the basis of their degeneracy. Very little of this is covered in the documentary. By its very nature, it needs to see the Beach Boys the way their fellow Californian Ronald Reagan must have when he moved to restore their annual Washington gig — as a sunny redoubt of wholesome Americana, a totem of nostalgia too sturdy for those details to topple.
One simple explanation for today's hagiographies is that everyone involved is eager to cement a musical legacy, not sort through unflattering gossip. The three surviving members of Led Zeppelin are in their 70s and 80s now, fathers and grandfathers; they have, in various ways, assumed an austere dignity. As for filmmakers, looking at some of the band's past behavior through today's eyes must be just as unappetizing. Their films would be expected to devote half their run time to weighty moral investigations; almost inevitably, the music would be subsumed by the outrage.
But there is also, increasingly, the question of brand value, the preservation of intellectual property for maximum future profit. 'A Complete Unknown,' for instance, skirts the speedy, druggy side of Dylan's early work; it even massages the particulars of Dylan's personal life such that within the film's love triangle, there is no mention at all of his pregnant soon-to-be-wife, Sara Lownds. My 79-year-old mother, who has excellent taste, loved the film and walked out eager to engage with Dylan's music, despite being more of a show-tunes lady. She might not have been so smitten with a less tidy version of his life.
It's not just the artist's reputation that is at stake. In 2020, Dylan sold his catalog of more than 600 songs to Universal Music Group for a reported $300 million. Many other big-ticket acts have cashed in their catalogs in recent years, including Bruce Springsteen (sold to Sony for an estimated $550 million) and Queen (also to Sony, for what is said to be more than $1 billion). These masses of songs are now blue-chip properties with reputations of their own; why tarnish their value with off-brand looks at their creators? There's a quote often attributed to the Illinois senator Everett Dirksen: 'A billion here, and a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money.'
Profit motive, fan service, squeamishness — all are present. On the other hand, I recently worked on a liner-notes project for a beloved band that was notorious for its excesses, to the point where the musicians' sheer will to debasement will always feature in the first two paragraphs of their Wikipedia overview. The more time I spent with their story, though, the less I found their self-destructiveness as interesting as their constructiveness — the factors that made four reprobates hold things together long enough to make a handful of generationally defining albums. Once you've heard about enough toxic behavior, a certain tedium sets in. The familiar pileups of sex and drugs and narcissism start to feel less like a thrill ride and more like a dull narrative cul-de-sac. People don't remember the saxophonist Dexter Gordon for his heroin addiction; they remember him for 'I Can't Get Started.' For even the most debauched of our great musicians, time is on their side.
Elizabeth Nelson has written for The New Yorker, The Ringer, Pitchfork and others and is a singer-songwriter for the Paranoid Style, a band based in Washington. She last wrote for the magazine about Tiger Woods and Vanessa Trump.
Source photographs for illustration above: Macall Polay/Searchlight Pictures; Michael; Larry Hulst/Michael.