Some documentaries — Soul Power is an excellent recent example — immerse the viewer in the sensory spectacle of a live performance. Others, like Anvil: The Story of Anvil, acquaint us with the lives and personalities of performers. It Might Get Loud, a film directed by Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth), is more unusual. It’s a group portrait of three musicians and also, more intriguingly, a free-form historical and philosophical essay on the instrument that unites them.
The mystique of the electric guitar is as durable as anything in rock ’n’ roll. Whenever the power chord or the screaming solo seems destined for oblivion, it’s rescued and revived, either by a new generation of players or, as has been the case more recently, by a video game. There has been no shortage of innovators, from Chuck Berry to Jimi Hendrix to Bob Mould, and It Might Get Loud, rather than surveying the whole field, assembles a representative power trio made up of Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, the Edge of U2 and Jack White, most famously of the White Stripes.
Interview and archival clips are interspersed with a summit meeting, half jam session, half graduate seminar in guitar metaphysics, on a soundstage loaded with all kinds of cool equipment. The guitarists trade riffs and thoughts and at the end make their way through an acoustic rendition of The Weight. It is both stirring and amusing to see three superstars strumming along to this song, originally recorded by the Band, which has long since become a staple for desultory buskers and late-night dorm-room singalongs. It’s a serviceable ballad, hard to butcher and tough to make your own, and thus a safe meeting ground for these three thorny individualists.
Page and the Edge, in their principal jobs, occupy the traditional guitarist’s role of sidekick, wingman and sonic bulwark for a flamboyant lead vocalist. Perhaps as a result, and perhaps also because of temperamental reticence, they prefer to talk with their fingers and strings.
White, whose singing style is as distinctive as his guitar playing, is a bit more voluble. As the junior member of this august delegation, he may also have the most to prove. He proves himself to be, along with everything else, a serious intellectual with a deep sense of the traditions, influences and latent possibilities of the modern musical vernacular.
Guggenheim spends some time following his subjects back to their roots, a fascinating journey into the musical past during which some notable commonalities emerge. Page, the Edge and White all honed their art in reaction to what they perceived as the dominant styles of the time.
Page came up playing skiffle, a peppy, folk-inflected genre that ruled British pop in the 1950s. After a successful stint as a studio session prodigy, he made his way to the Yardbirds and then to Led Zeppelin, where his interest in the blues, Eastern music and in the nuances of amplification reached full, thundering fruition.
The Edge, growing up in the downtrodden Dublin of the 1970s, discovered punk as an antidote to the bloated arena rock and fatuously shiny pop that saturated the airwaves. And White, in 1980s Detroit, wondered if hip-hop would permanently eclipse the instrumental sounds he cherished.
Each man has a different relationship to the musical past, and also to technology. White, a traditionalist wary of digital effects and innovations, is nonetheless as much given to tinkering as the Edge, who finds lyricism in complicated sonic treatments and modifications, or Page, famous for playing a double-necked guitar and recording John Bonham’s drum parts in the echoey atrium of a big, old house in the country.
For rock geeks of any age or taste, the lore in this documentary will be catnip. But It Might Get Loud is more than a narrowly focused fan artifact. It gives those of us with tin ears and clumsy fingers a chance to linger in the presence of serious artists with formidable chops and big, if not always clearly expressed, ideas about what they do. And it will put you in the mood to listen.
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