20/20 Filmsight - Film Criticism by David O'Connell

Have a conversation with someone in the recording industry and you’re bound to come away wanting to cut your wrists. CD sales are down. The internet’s a bitch. Music piracy will be the death of us all.

But what is the real state of modern music? And how do rock bands perceive the shifting sands of the industry? It’s a question that tickled the fancy of Scott Sloan and Steve LaBate, two life-long friends who decided to pool their love of music and hit the road for 40 straight nights of gigs all across the United States.

Scott would film every epic show, dingy dive bar and meltdown moment for 40 Nights of Rock & Roll, a feature length documentary looking at the current state of rock & roll in America, while Steve – a former editor for Paste Magazine – would pen copious amounts of notes for the accompanying 40 Nights of Rock & Roll book. It would be documentary at its dirtiest, rock writing at its most verisimilar.

When I speak to Scott, I can’t see him, but I imagine him in a terrycloth dressing gown, scratching at a week’s worth of stubble: he’s ten days off the road but the trials and tribulations of being cooped up in Jeep Cherokee for over a month with only a close friend and ear-bleeding rock music for company have perhaps taken their toll. “I got a bit of wanderlust today,” he mutters. “But the first week I was back I refused to drive, so to go to the Rockies game downtown I’d walk like seven miles, because I just don’t want to drive anymore. Black Betty [the Cherokee] smells really bad. It smells like wet meat in there.”

Scott has an undeniably amiable way of communicating. He’s candid and conspiratorial, like an old friend, and explains his and Steve’s inspiration for 40 Nights of Rock & Roll as if you’re sharing one last pitcher before closing time. “Steve and I were both at a point in our life where he’d just gotten laid off from his job and I’d just gotten let go from my job a couple of months earlier, and I had this whole plan that I came up with last summer where I would somehow end up on unemployment, sell the house I was living in and use the profit to purchase some equipment and do a film – something creative, something fun. Take a chance – I hadn’t done that before. I’d been working in a cubicle for 13 years and it was like, ‘Do it now or never.’ I don’t have a wife or kids. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do but I broke out of the cell, I guess. Or something.”

Filmmaker and writer met when they were teenagers, Scott coming home from college to find his little brother in the basement, blind drunk with Steve after stealing a stack of beers from the local gas station. Steve actually vomited they first day they met – very rock and roll. “I had to teach them how to drink properly,” Scott laughs.

“The interpersonal thing between me and Steve: I thought we’d get along a lot better than we did, but any time you’re driving around 400 miles a day with someone’s face so close to you that you could lick them… You see them before you go to bed, you see them in the morning, and we weren’t having sex so there’s no redeeming factor there. It’s just, ‘Fuck, you again?! Shit man. Fuck!’ So that part all turned out a little differently.”

So what did the guys think they were making when they started the shoot? “Well, originally I was thinking about almost doing it avant-garde and being very disciplined with the structure of it: 40 bands, three minutes per band, a 120 minute film, and that’s it, just work within those rules.

“I wasn’t even going to show Steve and myself, but then I realised there’s no point in doing something in 40 consecutive nights where you’re going to be in pain a lot of the time – that lends it urgency, so you’ve gotta see that side of it. We didn’t shoot a lot of ourselves, but we got a bunch of flip footage and some other stuff, and I realise our story of being on the road is really the connective tissue. I think from the documentation part of interviewing the bands and doing the songs, it pretty much came out as I expected it.”

The bands chosen by Steve and Scott read as if they raided their local record store and wandered the aisles blindfolded. There are high profile groups such as Third Eye Blind and Shout Out Louds sitting comfortably next to virtual unknowns, like Texarkana’s Four Wheel Drive. Such a spread was by design, Steve and Scott looking to get an opinion from every level of the industry. “That was very important to us,” explains Scott. “Because you get to a certain level and you’re getting ushered in and then the person comes to meet you and then they leave, and it’s not as personal as going to some concrete slab that holds 200 people, slamming cans of beers with the band in a crappy little green room. That’s cool.

“Of course, you want to go see something at the House of Blues where they have an awesome PA and great lights and an acoustically well-designed room, but for us, for rock & roll, to see what the state is you’ve got to look at garage bands and all those things.”

Perhaps the biggest boon for the filmmakers was the appearance of Paul Westerberg, former frontman of The Replacements. In a magical piece of organisation, Scott and Steve met the notoriously reclusive Westerberg at Target Field in Minneapolis, the singer-songwriter performing for the documentary on top of the Twins’ dugout.

“We were thinking about how to get Westerberg and then Steve remembered, ‘Oh, he’s a massive Twins fan,’” Scott explains animatedly. He’s blown away the cobwebs now, as if recounting the (mis)adventures is reigniting his passion for the project. “’Let’s set this up so we’re in town in Minneapolis while the Twins are on the road and have Paul Westerberg play his guitar acoustically in an empty stadium.’

“Steve pitched that idea to Westerberg’s agent and it went back and forth for like a month, just trying to get an answer, yes or no. Finally, the day before we’re due to get it down, Westerberg’s agent calls and is like, ‘You know, Paul never does anything, but every once in a while something that’s just the right kind of weird comes up.’ And I love the guy forever after that – if something weird comes up he’ll do it – that’s my kind of person. And he was totally gracious and a very cool and funny man.”

So what have Steve and Scott learned about the current state of rock & roll? Is popular music to be destroyed, the only new tunes created being those we whistle when washing the dishes? Or is the internet once again showing its tendency towards hyper-democracy, allowing bands to more readily connect with their fans? “It’s way better than I thought it was, and I was quite optimistic heading into it, for some reason,” Scott chuckles. “The biggest thing is that it’s changed. It’s changed the game and now, with GarageBand and MySpace – you can put all your music onto iTunes and it’s just up to you to promote it. None of the bands have a problem with it; they think it’s a good thing. The only real negative that they see – and this came up from a few of them – is that it kinda dilutes the talent pool. Whereas before if you had a CD pressed or a vinyl pressed, you had to be pretty fucking amazing, but now you can record anything.

“It’s good but it’s just different. I think with the internet now, you have to deliver the goods live because that’s where you’re going to make the bulk of your money. You’re just using the internet and the electronic distribution as the means to get your brand to the people that will come to your show.”

In any case, it’s a question Scott can mull over some more as he prepares to edit the hours of footage he’s collected. “We’re working on a book part right now. I haven’t actually touched the footage yet,” he says. “I’ll probably start logging it in the next few days, but I haven’t decided what platform I’m going to edit it on yet and I need to find a good sound person.

“But for me to just jump right into it I think I’d be too biased and I really believe that with something as personal as this you need time to distance yourself from the material. And not by any problem on my part – I just feel like I can approach it more objectively and as a potential viewer rather than as a participant before I get into it.”

Like writing drunk, editing sober? “Exactly,” Scott laughs. “That’s excellent advice.”