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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
IT MIGHT GET LOUD As seen in It Might Get Loud, guitar legends Jimmy Page, the Edge and Jack White must be the only three rock ‘n’ rollers who did not pick up a guitar to get laid. They had to follow their muse. Yeah, and they just read Playboy for the articles. Presented as a summit and joint artistic biography of three generations of masters of the Stratocaster (or various custom models), this reverent documentary is an admirable effort to avoid the usual Behind the Music clichés of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll to focus on the music. But director Davis Guggenheim only occasionally turns the volume up beyond fanboy adulation. Separately, each is interviewed on visits to the places where their bands either first rehearsed or recorded early albums, Page with Led Zeppelin, the Edge with U2, and Jack White in Detroit—first with White Stripes, then in Nashville with the Raconteurs. They are awash in nostalgia and musings about fate familiar to TV magazine profiles or on Oprah. (If the Edge hadn’t seen Larry Mullins’s notice on the Mount Temple School bulletin board….) Their detailed stories of their first guitars are presented as sensually as if they were recalling losing their virginity. (Images of raunchy Times Square roll by as the Edge remembers the siren call of a New York guitar store.) They also come together on a sound stage to jam, share technique, and haltingly get through the Band’s “The Weight” without knowing the chords. There are spontaneous moments that go beyond the fun of “before they were famous” home photos and youthful tapes. (The clips of Page’s pre-Led Zep career in a teen band and as a Muzak session man are the best finds.) The Edge shows how his distinctive chords are pretty empty acoustically until he adds pedals and effects. (It helps to be in the biggest band in the world that employs a tech to prepare a different guitar and unique equipment settings for each song in a concert.) White writes a song on camera, and literally leaves blood on the tracks. Among the best moments is when they sit around at home with their huge record collections and enthusiastically pull out their inspirations on LPs or 45s, like Page’s riff-for-riff love for rocker Link Wray. The clips of their progenitors, from skiffle to punk bands, as well as the guitarists’ past and present performances, are well selected, though undated, to illustrate the points in the interviews. But the guitar gods never get off their thrones. The Edge, never without his trademark wool hat, never acknowledges his birth identity, David Howell Evans. White repeats the myth that he and his White Stripes drummer, Meg White, are siblings, rather than that he took her last name when they wed. And Page’s white mane is carefully coiffed as he allows filming for the first time at his estate outside London. The Edge
lovingly describes building a guitar with his brother, as a custom
guitar is seen being hand made, and Page explains he needed his
double-neck instrument specifically to play the classic “Stairway to
Heaven.” But there is otherwise very little discussion of the actual
instrument or how they select their axes. The opening silent scene
lingers as more imaginative than anything else in the film to inspire
air guitar heroes: White constructs a traditional diddley bow with wood,
nails and wire, adds a bottle slide, and then triumphantly pronounces
“Who says you need to buy a guitar?”
Nora Lee Mandel
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