Rockumentary 101Page 3 of 3 -- The beauty of "Gimme Shelter," however, is that it takes simultaneous readings from two different orders of existence. On the ground, the Stones are a silly, strutting rock band caught in a bad situation; on the mythic plane, they are exposed as insufficient shamans, capable of summoning darkness but not of controlling it. They play "Sympathy for the Devil," but then -- sensing the atmosphere -- back off into a noodling, hapless version of "Under My Thumb," during which the killing occurs. People scatter. The Stones abort their set, and with darkness roiling behind them these meek millionaires tread palely towards their helicopter and are whirled aloft to safety.
In the 1980s, as America's musical genius went underground into punk-rock Hades, the camera followed it. Here things were inverted: In rockumentary road movies like "Another State of Mind" and "Reality 86'ed" it was ordinary life, not the band, that looked bizarre and in need of correction. "Another State of Mind" follows a 1983 cross-country tour by Social Distortion and Youth of Today. Town after town sees the young musicians, hair-dyed idealists, stagger dazedly out of their van and blink and yawn and peer in horror at the stolidness of normality. They sit down in a diner and the police are called. By 1986, when Dave Markey filmed the final Black Flag tour for his "Reality 86'ed," the mood had hardened: "The more I see of this country, the more I think the world should be destroyed," comments one roadie. . . . Metallica have always been about 10 percent punk rock, but the truest forebear of "Some Kind of Monster" is "Let It Be," in which the Beatles come together in a converted film studio to rehearse what turned out to be their final album. The Fab Four, incomparably, were always Themselves, and it takes only a few inches of celluloid for director Michael Lindsay-Hogg to receive a strong psychic imprint from each of them: John Lennon is gaunt, withdrawn, somber, Yoko-centric (she haunts the sessions without a word, as if making a private art-statement); McCartney saunters in with a full beard and a child at his feet, a sleek and cheerful family man; Harrison is watchful, poised; and as usual, Ringo Starr awaits his orders, either clowning or looking martyred by ennui. It's immediately obvious that Lennon's had enough, and that everyone knows it. McCartney, on the other hand, is full of beans. His permanent good mood is his gift to the world -- no one has written more songs about being happy than Paul McCartney -- but in the unheated Twickenham studio his buoyancy seems off-key. He does an impromptu, eruptively high-spirited bossa nova version of "Long and Winding Road," and one senses what Ringo called his "Beatleaholism," the coercive bounciness that so annoyed his bandmates. Having upset Harrison by calling his guitar work "complicated," McCartney attempts to soothe him: "Look, I'm trying to help you, but you always end up getting so annoyed. . .. You're doing it again! I'm not trying to get you. I'm just trying to say, look, lad -- the band -- you know?" "I don't mind," Harrison dourly rejoins, going ultra-Liverpudlian. "I'll play whatever you want. I won't play anything at all if you don't want me to." Both "Let It Be" and "Some Kind of Monster" find their final resolving chord in live performance. Here, after all, is where the troublesome laws of life -- change, perishability, the complications of experience -- are briefly repealed, and rock'n'roll has its moment. Here is where rockumentary stops. (Pure concert movies -- of which Martin Scorsese's 1978 "The Last Waltz," about The Band's final show, is the exemplar -- are always acts of worship.) Onto the roof of the Apple building at No. 3 Savile Row, the Beatles -- resplendent in furs, beards, long hair, the full flower of late Beatlehood -- emerge with wary grins to give their last show, up where the pigeons are. It's low-key, extraordinary. Ringo, battling roof-gusts, tries to light himself a cigarette. Lennon looks cheerful for the first time. And as midday office workers peer up from the street below, "Get Back" redounds through the smutty chasms of London's West End. "Some Kind of Monster," true to the scale of heavy metal, ends seconds before the first show of Metallica's current world tour -- the band are group-hugging it backstage, healed, saved, excited, while the gorgeous strains of Ennio Morricone's "Ecstasy of Gold" (their prerecorded intro) travel across a stadium full of seethingly expectant, ready-to-go metalheads. Metallica are back. The ringing, invisible superstructure towers above them, thronged with the hopes of their fans and accountants. They are reentering the dream of their music.
James Parker, the author of "Turned On: A Biography of Henry Rollins," is a writer living in Brookline. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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