It Might Get Loud, Revisited

When It Might Get Loud came out in 2009, I was just getting into Jack White’s music and at the peak of a rediscovered Led Zeppelin fanaticism. I loved the hell out of the idea of the film. Thesis: take three guitarists and examine the role of rock guitar in music, and what drives the players to learn and excel at it – starring Jimmy Page, Jack White and The Edge.



The premiere was in LA and when I phoned up for tickets, they said there were two premieres. I asked what the difference was, and she didn’t tell me the truth, which is how come I went to the second premiere that didn’t have Jimmy Page and Jack White in attendance. But never mind! I saw it another two or three times in the cinema, and then bought the DVD. I gushed about it several times on my blog, and other bloggers – cooler heads, one might say – did try to tell me it wasn’t very good, but I wasn’t having any of it.

I re-watched it just now. There’s things I still love about it. Jack’s laconic gunslinger outsider shtick, Jimmy’s palpable excitement at listening to Link Wray’s Rumble and his enthusiasm with the other players; Edge’s self-deprecation and brief Wanderer-of-the-Wasteland episode ending when the looming tangle of trees suddenly resolves into perfect rows with clear paths between them; the cows listening to Jack’s Diddly Bow; the slide guitar jam near the end; the White Stripes performing for a room full of puzzled Chelsea Pensioners. And although the three men seem to be mostly there because they were the three who answered the phone, rather than anyone’s idea of a broad selection, they settle into their roles as Jack (heart), Edge (head) and Jimmy (groin).

The cooler heads were right, however. The exercise was flawed in numerous ways. Neither producer Thomas Tull nor director Davis Guggenheim demonstrate an understanding of the guitar nor are they able to pull together a cohesive account of the electric guitar or its place in rock. The narrative used is a three-act drama, which means that at the top of the second act, someone had to have a crisis, reach rock bottom and be forced to develop new strengths to overcome adversity and ultimately triumph. This is a really strange thing to have in the middle of a factual film that is not a biography. It’s shoehorned in by bending poor old self-effacing Edge’s story, having him go into exile to learn songwriting skills. Which he does, but the sought-for emotional catharsis is blunted by its artificiality. As a more concrete example of a flaw, Jimmy’s first electric guitar is labeled onscreen a ‘Stratocaster’ even though it’s a Grazioso, and Jimmy was one of the least likely rock musicians to be seen with a Strat at any point in his career.

More obviously (and loudly) two of the three guitarists refuse to stick with the script. Jack’s first love is the drums, and he’s portrayed as switching to guitar mostly because his upholsterer boss Brian Muldoon already played drums and he wanted to jam. Apart from a fair amount of drumming, the bulk of Jack’s music in the film is thumped out on piano, so Guggenheim must have been overjoyed to get hold of the footage of him bleeding for his art all over a guitar pickguard. Jimmy loves guitars – literally – but spends a lot of time talking about producing music (mostly drum sounds) and plays a lovely mandolin bit. At least he can tell his spooky story about the guitar “intervention” when his first guitar turned up mysteriously in his house just as he became interested in music. Edge sticks to guitar, but his style – very simple riffs compounded into lacy ruffles by echo, delay and other effects – means that the film spends most of its time marveling at his equipment and following his guitar tech around.

The ’summit’, where all three guitarists meet for the first time, with their equipment set up around them, is evidently supposed to be a climax. In the event, all three seem a little shy, and you watch The Edge, ever eager to please, trying to keep the conversation going by asking Jimmy questions but aware that he needs to avoid the minefield of disallowed inquiries that have tripped up many a professional journalist and gotten them yelled at by an irate Page. (He steps in it with the Kinks question, but manages to get out with both feet intact.) They demonstrate one of their famous riffs each, teach it to the others, and then join in on the ultimate song of the movie. It’s… The Weight, that old chestnut, played on acoustic guitars, and there’s nothing about it that you wouldn’t see at any house party where three or more of your friends brought or found an acoustic instrument and downed sufficient beers to have a loose jam.

It’s worth watching, because we care about the people and what they have accomplished, but as a movie, alas, it’s strictly third-tier.

It Might Get Loud 2008 (DVD)

I got the It Might Get Loud DVD last week and have been watching it obsessively. Hey, I only saw it twice at the cinema. Another ten views to go!




Look, this is Jack White's nine year old self. He brings him over to learn to play guitar. Someone asked Davis Guggenheim where he got the kid from.

WCP: Speaking of Jack, who was that little kid in the movie who helped tell his story?
That's Jack White as a 9-year-old boy. Did it throw you off?
WCP: A little bit.
Yeah. Jack said to me, “I want to teach myself how to play guitar.” And I was like, cool. And the next day he shows up in a hat and a bowtie and a suit, and in the back, seriously, was a 9-year-old kid dressed exactly like him. And he said, “Davis, this is Jack. Jack, this is Davis.”
WCP: Any idea how he found the kid?
Not a clue. I let them tell their own stories, and how he told his was quintessential Jack.
WCP: The kid was good.

The kid was good. [Pause.] How do you know it's not him as a 9-year-old?

You know, I wouldn't put it past Jack White to be able to do that.


At one point, we see Jimmy Page in a room full of old junk. But it's Jimmy Page's old junk! It's probably worth millions to collectors. He's kept everything.



Look, there's the pair of Rickenbacker Transonic cabs we last saw in June 1969. We know he stopped using the heads after the first American tour, and we know he used the cabs (and possibly heads) on Led Zeppelin II. Most of the cabs were abandoned in the US after the second tour, but it appears he kept two – for forty years! The head is a Vox UL 7120, though, not the 4120 he used on that tour.

Jimmy hasn't changed much over the forty years, either.




The DVD also contains "deleted scenes" which is a weird phrase to use about a documentary, where you're building up a visual sculpture from piles of local material, rather than a feature film, where you're producing your own material and perhaps deleting some scenes that you love later on. 90% of his footage, at least, was a deleted scene. Presumably these were the sort of short-listed scenes.

They are are split evenly between the three guitarists and are equally as fascinating as the main movie. Is Jack White wearing lipstick in the build-a-diddley-bow scene? How very Whitean. Jimmy Page playing his theremin. White teaching the others to play Seven Nation Army, Jimmy teaching the others DADGAD tuning. (If he's just teaching them it, how come their guitars are already tuned in it?) Jimmy explaining how in the sixties, before really light strings were available, they'd move the strings down one and use a banjo string as the top E. And in another moment where it could only be Jack White saying this, Jack explaining how he used to choose strings because they were elements – Copper, Aluminum, Nickel. Lots of other things, all of which seem a little bit more personal than the main movie, but maybe that's because I wasn't familiar with them before I saw them on the little screen.

The DVD also contains a long press conference Q&A and the trailer. It's not an extensive package, but it's pretty cheap. As cheap as a new CD, in fact. (And the record companies wonder why no one's buying CDs.)

It Might Get Loud (movie, 2009)

Ah, now I can sleep. I've seen the movie, and it is good.

Warning: spoilers. I know it's not a fictional movie and I can't spoil a plot point, but it occurs to me it would be just as well to see some of these moments for the first time on screen rather than reading about them beforehand. So my advice is just go see it when it comes out but click away from this spoiler-filled review right now.


Also I turn into a hippy at the end of the review and it's not a pretty sight.

It Might Get Loud is that marvelous thing, a documentary that doesn't look like a documentary. It's founded in fact but looks like a fantasy. Guggenheim takes an unpromising premise – musicians talking about music, which was once called the equivalent of dancing about architecture - and he paints events, pictures, movies and music around it, making an impressionistic collage.

There is a structure, of sorts. The two older musicians are initially portrayed as innocents and Jack White as the villain. He's in stage villain costume, derby hat, bow tie, cigarillo in hand, driving to the showdown and talking about a possible fistfight. The meeting between them, on a soundstage in LA, is intercut with their reminiscences of how they got here. Jimmy Page gave up gigging in 1963 to become a session musician – retired, as he puts it, before jacking that in to form Led Zeppelin. The Edge grew up in a bleak, economically devastated Dublin surrounded by sectarian violence. It's hard to say how Jack White grew up because it's difficult to believe a word he says. Until, that is, he plays Son House's Grinnin' in Your Face, and it's clear that the record taught him a respect for others that is fully as passionate and genuine as The Edge's memory of personal growth inside a milieu of car bombs and drive-by shootings.

At their meeting, working without any script, or as far as I can tell question prompts, the musicians play records and chat with the usual awkwardness of total strangers. But whereas most of us at a cocktail party will meet, talk with and then leave the others without any method of connection besides small-talk, these three are musicians. They show and tell their guitars and play a little of their own material. And then they play together, and their understanding of each other goes off the scale that mere mortals use. A stand out of the movie is watching the total awe on the faces of White and The Edge as Jimmy Page, who appears on the surface to be a white-haired pensioner, plays the riff of Whole Lotta Love with the same attack and fury he did in 1969. One jaw-dropping moment for me was watching The Edge teach Jimmy Page a riff. Skeptical of his spoken explanation of the chords, Jimmy at first doesn't follow him. After a moment he begins to play along. But he doesn't watch The Edge's hands. More than half of the time he's looking intently at his face, and only occasionally glances at his fingers. That said a lot to me. (Mostly that I'd like Jimmy Page to look that deep into my eyes, but that's another story.) Watching them feel each other out is exhilarating. You can't be sure it will work, possibly because it wouldn't work in a cocktail party setting. Perhaps musicians watching this know the ending already – that it is all going to work out fine.

Jack likes broken guitars, bent necks and difficulty. He wants to struggle with his instruments. He believes it makes better music. He makes an instrument on camera from a piece of wood, a coil-wound magnet, metal string and nails. It looks like scrap and sounds like Jack White. Jimmy loves his guitar, saying it is like a woman, running his fingers over the wood and gushing over the workmanship. The Edge doesn't really notice his guitar. He fixated on the first one he found and has since concentrated on the effects units that enhance it as a tool in hewing U2's sound. Jimmy Page shows us Headley Grange and takes us around the now well-furnished interior to explain microphone positions and the science of his production work. (It's only the historical footage of him onstage with Led Zeppelin that show how much of his music comes straight from his hips – that and his reference to the crescendo in Stairway to Heaven as 'the orgasm'.) There's archival footage if him with Robert Plant, playing with a couple of dogs, having fun on the lawn at Stargroves, a magical moment that doesn't seem quite historical, more mythical, as though it were shot in Rivendell.

All of them remember primal musical moments. For Jack White it is the Son House record. He's been trying to get that feel ever since, he explains. As he plays the vinyl and sits there listening, there's a shocking shattering of the thick glass he's placed between himself and us. It's as if he'd thrown the hammer he uses so dexterously elsewhere when making his primitive guitar; the barrier's down. For The Edge it's the explosion of punk in Britain in 1976. For Jimmy Page it's the badass attitude of rock and roll. He plays Link Wray's rumble and smiles with the feeling it produces in him still, fifty years later. And when Link Wray lays on the vibrato about a foot thick, Jimmy bursts into delighted laughter and so did the entire audience at this screening. It's a wonderful moment.

A little bit of film-schooliness creeps in as Guggenheim feels obliged to give each musician a little bit of the Dark Night of the Soul. Will I make it? Am I any good? We fail to bite our nails, of course, because we know they did. The Edge breaks through his block and explains that his epiphany took place in a managed broad-leafed forest. In the film the story is accompanied by beautiful shots of the trees in their regular rows, a million identical, leaf-scarred, silver trunks. Seen at one angle it's an impenetrable thicket; seen at another, it's a series of wide lanes carpeted by tiny flowers. The way forward is suddenly as plain as the Yellow Brick Road. As a metaphor for the release from despondency and as a visual for suddenly being able to see the wood in the trees, it's quite stunning.

Near the end, although not quite near enough the end to be a perfect counterpoint to the beginning, villain Jack White is redeemed. "You have to join the family of storytellers," he explains. And so he does. He joins it as the Howling Wolf of the group, filled with mystery, darkness, violent struggle, voodoo and metaphor. Jimmy has a Tolkien story, that of the king of the final days of glory of men, before the coming of the Dark Lord. And The Edge, guileless and almost impossibly open, is a William Gibson cyberpunk, working the transistorized tools of Akihabara under the glittering city lights to bring back the passion that was once found in the wood.

Hmm, I've turned into a hippy.