Review: 'Bang! The Bert Burns Story: Official Soundtrack'

Producer/composer Bert Bern’s role in the Rock & Roll conversation tends to be limited to discussions of Van Morrison and Neil Diamond’s early career, but there’s a lot more to his legacy than “Brown Eyed Girl” and “Cherry, Cherry”. Berns wrote or co-wrote such timeless tunes as Solomon Burke’s “Cry to Me” and “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love”, Them’s “Here Comes the Night”, Freddie Scott’s “Am I Grooving You”, and Erma Franklin/ Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart”. He also produced such major records as The Jarmels’ “A Little Bit of Soap”, The Isley Brothers’ The Exciters’ “Tell Him”, “Twist and Shout”, The Strangeloves’ “I Want Candy”, and The McCoy’s “Hang on Sloopy”. That there is one impressive track record, my friends.

A new documentary called Bang! The Bert Burns Story apparently sets the record straight by telling Burns’s story, while its soundtrack is a stunning sustained blast of why that story is worth telling. There is not one bum track on this 20-track double LP. There isn’t even one track that deserves anything less than a sincere “Wow!” Relative obscurities such as two tracks by The Pussycats (making their long-playing debut), Morrison’s funky “Chick-A-Boom”, Lorraine Ellison’s gospel-like “Heart Be Still”, Bobby Harris’s “Mr. Success”, and Kenny Hamber’s “Show Me Your Monkey” join most of the classics mentioned above. The absence of any of Diamond’s early sides for Berns’s Bang Records seems a somewhat glaring oversight, but that does nothing to change the fact that Bang! The Bert Burns Story: Official Soundtrack is a knock out pop and soul compilation.

Review: 'The Complete Monterey Pop Festival' Blu-ray

Capturing Rock & Roll at a more experimental phase than The T.A.M.I. Show did, but not as self-indulgent and drab as Woodstock, or as depressing as Gimme Shelter, D.A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop is the greatest multi-artist concert film. With a wide selection of some of the era’s most thrilling artists to include in his feature, Pennebaker created a nice sampler of all that made 1967 Rock’s most dazzling year. There’s a whole lot of soul (Otis), raga (17 minutes of Ravi Shankar flooring the crowd), jazz (Hugh Masekela), blues (Janis, Canned Heat), pacific pop (Simon & Garfunkel, The Mamas & The Papas) proto-punk (The Who), and of course, psychedelic Rock (The Animals, Country Joe, the Airplane, Hendrix and his Experience). The performances are as electric as they are eclectic, and Pennbaker’s shadowy cinematography creates nearly as much mood as the vibrant music.

In 2002, The Criterion Collection put together a triple-disc package called The Complete Monterey Pop Festival that built an already monumental film to skyscraper proportions. The set included the original film, as well as complete performances from Otis Redding and The Jimi Hendrix Experience and the feature-length Outtakes Performances. This is just as essential as Pennebaker’s 1968 film, recovering additional performances from The Who, Simon & Garfunkel, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother & The Holding Company, The Mamas & The Papas, and Country Joe & The Fish, as well as footage of some major artists who didn’t make the cut of the original picture, such as The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Laura Nyro (whose spellbinding rendition of “Poverty Train” dispels rumors that she fumbled the gig), The Association (who provide a charmingly mainstream moment amidst all the heavy underground activity), and others. In addition to the three major supplements were a plethora of commentaries, interviews, trailers, and booklet essays.

In 2009, Criterion upgraded the 2002 DVD for Blu-ray without offering anything beyond the 2002 supplements. For the festival’s 50^th Anniversary, Criterion has given the video a 4K buffing and added several extra features, such as new onscreen interviews with Pennebaker (who discusses the filming and the acts) and festival producer Lou Adler (who discusses a 50^th Anniversary festival staged on the site of the 1967 one, the original film’s lack of explicit politics, and other matters) and a general new essay about the film by Michael Chaiken (however, text by Pennebaker and Jann Wenner from the 2002 edition have been lost in translation). Much more historically significant are some extra outtake performances from The Steve Miller Band, Moby Grape, and The Grateful Dead. 

Criterion’s new 4K restoration of Monterey Pop delivers splendid colors and appropriately crunchy grain. Some shots are a bit soft, but that is likely a consequence of the lo-fi conditions under which Pennebaker and his crew made the movie (we often see them working the focus in the middle of a shot). Jimi Plays Monterey, Shake! Otis at Monterey, and The Outtakes Performances are presented in the same 1080p transfers used for the 2009 Blu-ray release, but the Hendrix and Otis mini-movies have been newly restored according to the back-cover copy. 

Review: 'Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, & Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock'

As the psychedelic era reached its frenzied pitch in late 1967, as even the earthen-blues Stones were dressing up like wizards and peddling lysergic premonitions, Bob Dylan was looking back and bucking trends by issuing the stripped John Wesley Harding from his tree-lined retreat in Woodstock, New York. That record, as well as another by Dylan’s neighbors and collaborators The Band, completely shifted Rock & Roll from the cosmos to the farm in 1968, and pretty soon hippies across the nation were rambling about “getting it together in the country.”

It’s ironic that Dylan was such a leader in this movement since he both hated being thought of as a leader and he hated hippies. In fact, he’d essentially abandoned the leftist politics that won his original following to become pretty conservative— perhaps not incidentally, the prevailing political stance of pre-hippie-influx Woodstock—following the lead of manager Albert Grossman into an odd-bedfellow balance of rustic living and materialism, and even privately voicing support for segregationist George Wallace. Nevertheless, the hippies flooded Woodstock, tried their best to get to Dylan, and staged the most famous outdoor festival in rock history.

In his new book Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, & Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock, Barney Hoskyns fortunately devotes a mere chapter to those three days of peace, love, and music, because the Woodstock Festival has been examined and examined and examined in plenty of other places. Yet, it is also the climactic event in a story that begins with Grossman’s move to that New York community in 1963, builds through Dylan’s retreat and The Band’s emergence as artists in their own rights, and downslides with sad tales of over-commercialization and over-hype. We lose The Band’s Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, and Levon Helm before the tale is over. Long before then, Helm and Robbie Robertson split bitterly. Ditto Dylan and Grossman. Doomed souls such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin end up in Woodstock on their way out of this mortal coil. For too many, “getting it together in the country” meant hard drugs and early death. Others, such as Dylan and Van Morrison, managed to extricate themselves from a place they initially deemed enchanting but ultimately regarded as a toxic zone.

Hoskyns keeps his authorial distance for the most part, though he cannot hide his own enchantment with the storied burg, rendering its striking sights, sounds, and smells in three vivid dimensions, and the way he occasionally jumps into the present to detail its thriving music and art scene rescues his story from the tragedy bin. There may have been some serious downsides to the old, old Woodstock scene, but this story is fleet-footed, full of creativity, and peopled with a dazzling array of artists, from those previously mentioned to George Harrison, Patti Smith, The Isley Brothers, and the Rolling Stones. And the focus on Todd Rundgren’s wacky glam/prog exploits throughout the seventies that ends the book rescues the story from being a prolonged hippie-fest. Plus, a story that results in the creation of The Basement Tapes, Music from Big Pink, Pearl, Moondance, Something/Anything? and possibly even All Things Must Pass can’t really be called an unhappy one.