movie report: I Am Number Four (2011)

Movie Report: It Might Get Loud

"It Might Get Loud" is a fascinating documentary about legendary rock guitarists Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White. (If you haven't heard of at least one of these guys, you can stop reading now.) These three may be from three different generations of rock, namely the 60s, 80s, and 00s, but each has an obsession about guitars and the music they make.

Jimmy Page is best known as the lead guitarist of Led Zeppelin, a rock group that was on top from day one. They pretty much created heavy metal. Page is a master of the dynamic range possible in both acoustic and electric guitars, from delicate strumming to absolute hurricanes of sound, sometimes within the same song. In the movie, he starts playing some immediately recognizable riffs and you realize: this song that I know by heart? This is the guy who first created and played that song. And that song. And that song. Dozens. Hundreds. Amazing.

Before this movie, I wasn't very familiar with Jack White, best known as the guitar half of the two-person White Stripes. His obsession has to do with paring down music to its absolute essentials. At one point, he plays a record of his favorite song, by a Blues musician named Son House, who seems to have achieved the ultimate in simplicity: with only his voice and hand claps he fills out all the parts of a song, including bass and harmony. White tries to minimize instrumentation on his songs, which has been the goal of other rock musicians like Paul McCartney, Elton John, and Elvis Costello.

The Edge is the lead guitarist of U2. He's on the opposite end of the spectrum from Jack White: better living through technology. At one point, you see him standing in front of racks and racks of colored lights, which you slowly understand are all various special effects for his guitar. As an example, he plays one amazing riff that you can easily imagine building a song around. Then he turns off the effects and plays the same riff. You have to laugh: it's like playing Ode to Joy on a kazoo.

I learned a lot about music from this movie. The Edge demonstrates for Page and White how he plays an E chord, compared to the usual way to play it. Even I could tell the difference, and immediately hear how U2 gets their distinctive sound. I had a weird thought at that moment of a U2 version of Led Zeppelin songs. Producers, take note. It's also interesting how much of a rock group's distinctive sound comes from its lead guitar. Quite a responsibility for guys like these.

I love behind-the-scenes stuff, and there's lots of it in this movie. One story has to do with why the Led Zeppelin song "When the Levee Breaks" has such a distinctive echoing tone. It's because they recorded the song in the vast front hall of a house. And why did they record it there? Because that's where drummer John Bonham's new drums were delivered and no one felt like moving them. At another point, Page is selecting one of his many guitars to play, and the camera zooms back to reveal crates and boxes and shelves and closets. I was watching this with my son, and at this point, we looked at each other as we realized what we were looking at: gear!

The movie gives us mini-biographies of each of the three, and it's apparent that each one went through a crisis that led him on to greater musical achievements. Page was working steadily as a studio session musician, making good money playing guitar on truly wretched pop songs. But he couldn't stand the confining atmosphere of playing only what people told him to play, so he left to join the Yardbirds, a wildly creative 60s group that eventually exploded from its critical mass of super-guitarists. Besides Page, the group included Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck.

U2 was, at one time, a cute boy band. The photos are embarrassing. Then, one day, they heard some punk rock, by groups like The Buzzcocks and The Clash. That threw a switch. "We can do that?" For The Edge, it meant leaving certainty and simplicity and exploring complex regions of the musical unknown.

For Jack White, it happened at an open mike night when his ex-wife Meg sat down to play drums with him. He suddenly realized the possibilities of a minimalist two-member band in making the sound he valued.

So, is all this trivial? Are they "only rock musicians" or something like that? I learned a long time ago that you can make anything look silly. Anything. And it's not hard. But this movie goes the other way. It helps you understand that this discussion of guitars and songs is important.

Take those Led Zeppelin riffs of Jimmy Page: those riffs, or memes, if you will, are now embedded in the brains of untold millions of people, far more widespread and influential than many political slogans, philosophical insights, and religious creeds. Surely, that is significant.

Also, the kind of obsession about musical exploration that these three share is a parallel to the obsessions that all geniuses have, such as Einstein with light or Gandhi with non-violence. It's what drives us to new ideas and new understanding. We advance through obsession. In this movie, you can see and hear the results of obsession. Yeah, it matters.

This movie taught me a lot about music. Here's one example. A few days after we watched this movie, my son and I were driving back to his college for the fall semester. Curious about the White Stripes after hearing Jack White's ideas, he had downloaded some of their songs onto his iPod, which he shared with me. I "got it". I could understand what Jack White was trying to do. I could see the kind of decisions he had made in certain songs, and the kinds of effects he'd been able to achieve. And it was good.