NATHAN WEINBENDER:
The Beatles are the most exhaustively catalogued and recorded band ever, and so we’ll probably never stop getting documentaries trying to find new angles on their legacy. Beatles ’64 is a 50th-anniversary celebration of the band’s first American concert tour, including their now-mythic appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and at Carnegie Hall.
Of course, this particular chapter in their history has been examined to death, and Beatles ’64 isn’t likely to tell you anything you didn’t already know. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a pleasure to watch.
It begins with the cultural context of Beatlemania: It was a few months after the Kennedy assassination and America was desperate for the fog to lift, and kids who had screamed for Elvis were primed to go even crazier for the next big thing.
This film, now streaming on Disney+, was produced by Martin Scorsese and directed by David Tedeschi, who previously edited Scorsese’s documentaries about George Harrison, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. It’s a hodgepodge of archival footage, musical performances, cultural commentary and interviews with writers and musicians who recall being swept up in Beatlemania at the time.
What makes Beatles ’64 worth watching is its extraordinary footage, shot by legendary documentarians David and Albert Maysles as they followed the Fab Four on their tour. They capture some remarkable moments: the Beatles reading and reacting to their own press, teenage girls sneaking into the Plaza Hotel, and on-the-street interviews that illustrate the blurring of racial divides in rock ‘n’ roll at the time.
Another new music film, now streaming on Max, is Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, which chronicles the history of that distinctly smooth, soft, slightly jazzy style of pop that exploded in the late ’70s and early ’80s. The film is basically Yacht Rock 101, featuring contemporary interviews with some of the subgenre’s luminaries — Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Christopher Cross and the guys from Toto.
The music wasn’t always called “yacht rock.” That term originated in an early 2000s web series, and not only did it stick, but it helped bring those musicians to another generation. That the term itself is simultaneously disparaging and affectionate is fitting for music that’s so nakedly earnest, and it still hasn’t been embraced by some of the artists it describes, most notably Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen.
Steely Dan is considered the big bang of yacht rock, and anyone studying album credits at the time would have noticed that the session musicians on their records were also appearing on many others. It created something of a musical family tree: These were a bunch of friends who loved spending hours in the studio and playing on each other’s songs, and it led to Grammy success and No. 1 radio hits like “What a Fool Believes,” “Africa” and “Sailing.”
Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary — spelled “d-o-c-k” — is at its best when it’s reflecting on that rich period of collaboration. It argues that yacht rock crashed into a proverbial pier with the advent of MTV and the rise of synth pop and new wave (although, ironically, the guys from Toto played on Michael Jackson’s Thriller), and it not only examines the genre’s debt to Black music but shows how hip-hop embraced yacht rock well before the rest of the world.
This isn’t a remarkable documentary in any way, but it’s as sunny and breezy as the music it’s about. Plus, all those songs will be stuck in your head.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is one of the film critics heard on Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM on KPBX and Saturday afternoons at 1:30 PM on KSFC.