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The Undersung Heroes of Music: Soundbreaking (A DOC NYC Review)

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The Undersung Heroes of Music: Soundbreaking (A DOC NYC Review)

What defines a quality music producer? Well-informed and developed artistic taste? Phenomenal technical prowess in the recording studio? Is it someone who stands off to the side of the musicians, supporting and supplying yet allowing complete artistic freedom? Or is it someone who tugs, digs, bends, and sometimes breaks a top-marks result out of the performers concerned? To each his own, seems to suggest the brand-new eight-part PBS series Soundbreaking: Stories from the Cutting Edge of Recorded Music, the first two episodes of which premiered at this year’s DOC NYC Festival (full episodes are available for viewing here). 

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Derailed, Sooner or Later: Warren Zevon’s Warren Zevon (1976)

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Derailed, Sooner or Later: Warren Zevon’s Warren Zevon (1976)

This is the material world and if one vice doesn’t do you in, another one surely will.  If nothing else, there is the obvious and ongoing erosion of each present self, the sly voice within us that lurks beneath the most laudatory of our triumphs.  Mortality renders the measurability of our accomplishments to be largely at our own discretion.  Sometimes this reaches us during the overwhelming silence of 3AM insomnia, sometimes during the most blissed-out of moments, when we’re trying our hardest to keep this knowledge at bay.

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America's Gerry Beckley, The TVD Interview

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America's Gerry Beckley, The TVD Interview

“Days, where’d you go so fast?” Gerry Beckley asks in “Bell Tree,” his bittersweet beauty-soaked song on America’s Hearts album. The band’s fifth studio recording, which also featured Beckley’s chart-toppers “Sister Golden Hair” and “Daisy Jane,” was produced by George Martin and released in 1975. Beckley’s latest solo record Carousel is due in stores next month (September 9th) via indie label Blue Élan Records. Over the course of the album’s nine original tracks and three cover songs, Beckley offers up more seasoned articulations of his “Bell Tree” question. The irresistibly-catchy “Tokyo,” the Beatles-ish “Lifeline,” and the poetic “Once a Distant Heart,” all deal directly with our mortal inability to transcend the weight and power of time passed, passing, and soon-to-be-passed.

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"We're the Eagles, from Los Angeles."

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"We're the Eagles, from Los Angeles."

It is the evening of March 21st 1977 at the Capitol Centre, a now-extinct concert arena in a suburb of Washington, D.C.  The Eagles are on stage.  “Thank you and Good Evening,” Glenn Frey says to the audience following the group’s rendition of “Hotel California.”  He stands upright, focused, guitar-draped, dressed in Young-American seventies garb - blue jeans, and a University-of-Colorado t-shirt.  He is beautiful, he is a success, his band, having just released its career-topping Hotel California album, is a success.  He knows it.

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“A Man Went Looking for America… and Couldn’t Find it Anywhere”

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Dennis Hopper’s 1969 film Easy Rider is perhaps the most definitive film of the 1960’s American counterculture.  Along with producer Peter Fonda and screenwriter Terry Southern, Hopper had witnessed the rise and pre-fall of the youth movement that had been accelerating over the course of the decade, and wanted to speak to it directly.  The characters’ journey paints a landscape of a deeply divided nation, a nation purporting to be a “land of the free” where anyone with long hair is verbally abused and sometimes murdered.