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LOUIE BLUIE (1986)

Terry (Crumb, Ghost World) Zwigoff made his first movie when he got a load of Howard "Louie Bluie" Armstrong, a veteran singer/musician -- he played guitar, fiddle, and mandolin -- and raconteur, then in his mid-seventies, and decided that such a one should have his passage among us mere mortals properly recorded. A natty, courtly hedonist, Armstrong seems to embody the spirit of self-invention and robust folk art at its least genteel and polite whether he's playing comic blues, razzing his buddies, or proudly showing Zwigoff his homemade "encyclopedia of pornography." He may be everything that Zwigoff's later leading man, Robert Crumb, ever really wanted to be; he is definitely from that otherwordly place that the vintage record collector played by Steve Buscemi in Ghost World invokes when Enid asks him if he has any other records like the Skip James version of "Devil Got My Woman" he sold her, and he can only shrug, "There are no other records like that." Armstrong died in 2003 at the age of 93, eight years after releasing his first solo album.

ROCK THE BELLS (2006)



Denis Hennell and Casey Suchan's documentary records the first annual Rock the Bells hip hop festival, held in 2004 in San Bernadino, California. The performance segments include on-stage glimpses of such rappers as Redman and Dilated Peoples, as well as the final reunion of the full membership of the Wu-Tang Clan, but the real star and hero is the concert organizer and promoter, Chang Weisberg, a starry-eyed hustler who refinanced his house to make the event a go, pressed his wife and mother into service at a site where most guys would be trying to arrange for emergency air support to get any loved ones they had choppered out of the area, and, most crucially, bet his future on his ability to bring together a bunch of unpredictable people on the same stage because, first and foremost, he wanted to see it happen himself. Most of the Wu-Tang were so dazzled by the young fellow's sheer gall that they could scarcely wait to get on-stage, but Ol' Dirty Bastard, a more dependable source of drama than three-quarters of the screenwriters in Hollywood, made it as far as his hotel and just stopped, refusing to get up from his bed and come to the auditorium. The suspense is terrific as RZA commandeers a cell phone and tries to cajole his old teammate to show up, telling him that he's never in all his days seen "so much love for the Wu-Tang." Meanwhile, Redman and MC Supernatural are doing an extended freestyle number to appease a crowd with its phasers set on "riot." In the nick of time, ODB reports for duty, and though he isn't up to much besides sitting in a chair onstage while the other rappers make a joyful noise around him, nobody seems to mind. Despite the movie's sad coda -- ODB would die four months later -- it stands as a tribute to the best let's-put-on-a-show entrepreneurial spirit of hip hop. It may leave you half-convinced that, if these guys had been put in charge of the invasion of Iraq, people in Baghdad would have been tooling happily down Chuck D. Boulevard by the end of 2003.

SAY AMEN, SOMEBODY (1982)



People who assume that black gospel music as we know it is an indigenous folk creation going back centuries may feel a little woozy if they see George T. Nierenberg's documentary and stare into the face of Thomas A. Dorsey, a pianist-composer known as "the father of gospel music," and for good damn reason: he pretty much invented the genre and wrote the core body of classic gospel hymns, including "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" and "Peace in the Valley", and is even credited with coining the term. Dorsey had been a raunchy bluesman performing under the name "Georgia Tom" until his wife died in childbirth and he turned to religion to assuage his pain. Dorsey, who was born in 1899 and lived to be 93, was already a prolific blues composer when he devoted his life to "sacred" compositions, and when he began to apply his considerable professional mastery of his craft to songs of praise, and added his own brand of showmanship from his new perch as music director of Chicago's Pilgrim Baptist Church, the results moved people in a spasmodic way that at least passed for a religious experience. Filthy hedonists such as those who read and write for this site can argue about the nature of that experience, but the performance segments of this film, featuring some of the singers who came to form a holy honor guard around Dorsey, make a strong case that if there is a God, he never came up with a better ad campaign for Himself.

THE T.A.M.I. SHOW (1964)



There have been a lot of attempts over the course of the rock era to pull together a single performance event that would crystalize the moment in pop by summing up everything worth experiencing at its best. Some of these, from Monterey Pop to Lollapalooza, have earned their own legends, but none got closer to the top of the mountain than this humble TV production, directed by Steve Binder (who later spearheaded Elvis Presley's 1968 comeback special) with Jack Nitzsche on board as musical director, which was briefly released to theaters by A.I.P. (The title is an acronym for, depending on which press release you read, "Teenage Awards Music International" or "Teen Age Music International".) The lineup included Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Lesley Gore, the lovably scruffy where-are-they-now garage band the Barbarians (best known for their hook-handed drummer, Moulty), and the closing act, the Rolling Stones. With rare uniformity, though, everyone seems to agree that the high point was provided by James Brown and the Famous Flames. The footage is an invaluable record of James at his most hardest-workingest; while his backup men stand behind him, diligently hitting their marks as if the boss had eyes in the back of his head and a scope rifle aimed at their hearts, he shouts, "Are you ready for the 'Night Train'!?" at the fresh-scrubbed white kids in the audience, who do their noisy best to assure him that, yes, they'd like nothing better than to make its acquaintance. The dance moves he then unleashes so impressed the crowd that they responded with a thunderous ovation, and so impressed Mick Jagger that Binder almost had to force him out onstage at gunpoint. Keith Richards later said that agreeing to follow Brown was the worst thing the Stones had ever agreed to do, and he said this after Altamont.

TOM DOWD & THE LANGUAGE OF MUSIC (2003)



Mark Moormann's consistently entertaining documentary makes the case for Dowd -- a recording engineer and record producer who died in 2002, while the film was being completed, at the age of 77 -- as the Zelig of jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, and Southern rock. Drafted into the military during World War II, Dowd spent part of his youth working on the Manhattan Project. After the war, he planned to get his college degree studying physics, only to learn that this would entail his having to pretend to know less about physics than he already knew, because certain advances in the field to which he'd been privy as part of his work for the government were still classified as state secrets. So instead, he went to work for Atlantic Records, where he helped popularize eight-track recording and stereo sound, and became legendary for his ingenuity in helping the label's roster of artists, ranging from Ray Charles and the Coasters to Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, and Thelonious Monk, capture the sounds in their heads. His influence was quick to spread down South through Atlantic's ties to the Stax soul machine. In his interviews here, Dowd comes across as the Gandalf of soundboard tech geeks, wise and affable with a pair of heaven-blessed ears, and to judge from the conga line of witnesses (including Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, Ahmet Ertegun, and Jerry Wexler) lining up to sing his praises, he doubled as the Johnny Appleseed of good vibes. His story has the same effect as the music he helped to capture: hearing it makes you feel good.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six & Seven

Contributor: Phil Nugent