I have only been to Memphis once. Primarily, it was to make the sacred pilgrimage to Graceland. While there, we also went to the Stax Museum and Sun Studios, which are also amazing. Then I started wondering if was possible to see Ardent Studios, where many amazing albums were recorded.
The Replacements recorded Pleased to Meet Me there. R.E.M. recorded Green there. ZZ Top recorded, um, everything there?
Whomever I spoke with on the Ardent staff was stunned anybody would want to see the facility. They informed me it wasn’t a museum like Stax. But they agreed to give me a tour and, at the appointed hour, we were shown around by producer John Fry and Big Star drummer Jody Stevens.
I was in seventh heaven. One thing they asked me to do was try not to disturb a camera crew who were filming in the central courtyard for a documentary about Big Star.
Years later, that documentary finally got a release and much, much later I finally got around to watching it. I don’t think I was consciously putting off seeing it but, whatever I was thinking, I’m glad I have now seen one of the best documentaries about a single rock band.
Simply put, the filmmakers interview the right people and get interesting insights about one the world’s top “should have been big” groups. It also goes into Alex Chilton’s and Chris Bell’s time before and after Big Star, as well as the unfortunate history of Ardent, they label they were on.
I thought I already knew everything there was to know about this band, but were many surprises for me here. Probably the biggest was an interview with John Lightman, who was briefly the live bassist. An odd tangential thing that amused me was learning TGI Fridays was at one time a genuinely disreputable place and not one of America’s least desirable restaurant chains.
I highly recommend acquiring the blu-ray of this documentary as you get some deleted scenes, as well as a couple of mini-docs going deeper into the lives of Chilton and Bell.
Dir: Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori
Documentary
Watched on blu-ray