The Songmakers Collection (2001)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Produced by A&E Home Video

Features:

• Text bios of featured artists
  

Anamorphic: N/A

My Advice: Borrow it, but only if you dig on early rock & roll.

Fans of A&E's long-running Biography series can attest for that show's power to render even the most obscure and banal members of the glitterati into fascinating individuals with complex and often intriguing stories. Less melodramatic than Behind the Music and less sensationalist than E! True Hollywood Story, the producers of Biography approach their subjects much like any serious documentarian.

With The Songmakers Collection, those same individuals responsible for Biography attempt to get to the heart of the cultural and musical revolution that was early rock & roll. This 2-disc set contains five documentary pieces covering some of the larger names of the era. What first struck me, however, was what a seemingly odd and random collection of names had been assembled. Burt Bacharach, Dionne Warwick, Bobby Darin? I grant you that these people had an impact, but why not go with gusto, and examine some of the more marquee names? Sure, Elvis has been done to death (no pun intended), but there are plenty of other innovators. Chuck Berry comes to mind, as does Little Richard. So before I even began watching, I was a bit disappointed in the editorial choices being made.

The opening documentary, twice as long as any of the "featured artist" pieces, discusses the revolution of song-writing at "Tin Pan Alley," centered with New York City's Brill Building. The Brill Building was responsible for a staggering percentage of the hits of the late 50's to mid 60's, and managed this success by doing what none of the other music production houses would - they hired kids. Some of the best-known songs of that era were written by teenagers, many of whom went on to become big names in their own right. Carole King, Hal David, Lieber and Stoller, all of these got their start in the Brill Building.

The descriptions given paint a picture of a music "factory," where hits were churned out like the consumer product that they had become (and remain today). The film is made up of a good mix of stock footage from the period and interviews with the songwriters and performers themselves. What is sorely lacking is more performance snippets. Any time we're treated to footage of one of these hits being belted out, it's cut off after thirty seconds, and we're back to interviews and stock footage. I think it might've been more interesting to let the music take center stage.

The episodes revolving around individual artists are, with a single exception, profoundly uninteresting. I'm not sure if this is a matter of how they are produced or a matter of how poorly the biography subjects were selected, but they are terribly forgettable. And almost all the same, following the typical "kid gets famous, kid has trouble with fame, kid gets life together and moves on" formula that has made VH1's Behind the Music so predictable.

The exception to this rule is the episode dealing with Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller. In case you're not familiar with their names, let me give you a little sample of the titles for which they were responsible: "Hound Dog," "Yakety Yak," "On Broadway," "Stand By Me," "There Goes My Baby," and "Jailhouse Rock." Not an exhaustive list, mind you. The pair cranked out the majority of the songs ever recorded by The Coasters, a significant number of songs for The Drifters, and a dozen or so hits for Elvis Presley, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Their story is a fascinating one, beginning in the early 50's, through a period of writing cabaret music for Peggy Lee, and continuing to their semi-retirement in the 70's.

What makes this episode better than the others are the interviews with Lieber and Stoller themselves. The two are still friends, and their rapport is fascinating, the kind of thing that can only happen between two people that have been friends for half a century. Add to that the fact that their music represents a more significant (and more listenable) contribution to both music and popular culture than all the other featured artists put together, and it's not hard to understand why this episode stands out from the rest. I'd love to have seen a two-disc set about just these two, and it wouldn't be problematic to stretch their story out to six hours or so. I would have especially liked to see more about the recent Broadway tribute show, Smokey Joe's Cafe, which is mentioned only in passing.

The discs give precious little in the way of additional material, featuring only some text biographies of the featured artists, as well as some other artists not depicted in the shows (which I found vaguely confusing). Why they couldn't show a little love and give us a DVD jukebox of these hits is beyond me. Having a collection of Lieber and Stoller hits on the disc would have made them worth buying all by itself. So unless you're a die-hard early rock scholar, there's nothing to make this set a necessity for your collection. Though if you can rent or borrow a copy, I highly recommend the Lieber & Stoller story.