Melody Maker was
generally more significant for Barrie Wentzell’s striking B&W photos of sixties
and seventies pop and rock stars than the depth of its reportage. So Leslie Ann
Coles’s documentary Melody Makers:
Should’ve Been There is a fitting tribute to the long-running UK music
paper. The storytelling is as flimsy as a puff piece on Yes, but boy, those
Wentzell photos that fill the screen throughout this film’s 88 minutes are
impressive. Peter Gabriel resplendent in his daisy headpiece. Brian Jones
cradling his sitar. Tina Turner commanding the stage as a Screaming Mimi in a
mini.
Just as readers bought Melody
Maker for the musicians it celebrated rather than the paper’s staff,
viewers will likely check out Melody
Makers for the rockers too. However, insights are meager at best (a few
tantalizingly slim tales involving the Stones’ reactions to Jones’s death, Syd
Barrett’s mental troubles, and Peter Grant’s bad attitude) and non-existent for
the most part. Too many discussions involve uneventful encounters with pre-fame
rock stars for the sake of a “The security guard didn’t even know who Bob Dylan
was!” punchline. Discussions of the magazine’s inner workings are similarly skimpy
as we learn a little about its delegation of work, its failure in the U.S., and
Wentzell’s work methods, but not much else.
Yet, there are instances in which Cole makes it clear that
she is looking for ways to zap the material to life. There’s a neat sequence in
which several talking heads discussing Keith Moon’s monkey shines are cut
together in a hodgepodge montage that could be the editing equivalent of Moon’s
“hit random shit and see what happens” drumming. While Melody Makers is almost frustratingly neutral (the paper had its
detractors, but none speak up in this film), sly commentary also comes out in
the editing from time to time, as a discussion of how MM ignored celebrities’ hedonism is punctuated with a photo of (alleged)
celebrity rapist Kim Fowley.
Since photography is so central to the story and storytelling
of Melody Makers, it feels like a
movie that would have been better served as a coffee table book, and I did
occasionally find myself hitting the pause button to pore over some of
Wentzell’s striking shots. So the three-minute image gallery included on MVD’s
new DVD edition of Melody Makers:
Should’ve Been There is a nice bonus, especially since it is set to the
only non-generic music on the disc: The Strawbs’ “Oh How She Changed”. I’m
still holding out for that coffee table book.
