REVIEW: It Might Get Loud

By Philip Martin

Photo by AP

Jack White of the White Stripes, the Edge from U2 and former Led Zeppelin member Jimmy Page jam in Davis Guggenheim’s exuberant celebration of the electric guitar, It Might Get Loud.

ADVERSTISMENT

LITTLE ROCK — It Might Get Loud88Cast: Documentary with Jimmy Page, Jack White and The Edge Director: Davis Guggenheim Rating: PG for thematic elements, language and smoking Running time: 97 minutes

An electric guitar is more than an acoustic instrument amplified; it makes a different kind of loud, not just the loud that allows a musician to produce single-note lines and solo like a saxophonist, but a vaguer and more thrilling kind of mystery. You turn it up; you bring all sorts of other factors into play, not just the pick and your fingers and the vibrations that they make but your hands and your body and likely your soul too. You get the entire instrument humming, lively in your hands, casting out fields of overtones and interference patterns, rings of shock and awe.

What you get with the best electric guitar players is often a barely contained chaos of tones, which might be canceled out by subordinate tones or sustained indefinitely.The joke in Spinal Tap was that Nigel Tufnel’s Gibson might sustain a note throughout infinity; the reality is we don’t always know where they end or where they go. In Eastern metaphysics the idea that nature is vibration has always been prominent - crash out a power chord and in some small way you begin to understand the religious ecstasy inherent in a Jimi Hendrix riff.

Davis Guggenheim, the director of the Al Gore infomercial An Inconvenient Truth, is obviously a congregant in what rock critic Robert Palmer called “the church of the sonic guitar.” We can take his new movie, the excellent if necessarily superficial It Might Get Loud, as an act of religious devotion.

Movie

It Might Get Loud

Rating: PG

Length: 1 hour, 37 minutes

More information

Guggenheim arranged for a summit of three electric guitar virtuosos of different generations and approaches to the instrument: Jimmy Page, best known as the blues-ginning motor of the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin; U2’s atmospheric accretionist the Edge; and Jack White, the chief creative force behind The White Stripes.

After starting in a pasture, where White demonstrates how a guitar can be made of almost anything (in this case, a Coke bottle, a piece of wood, nails and some twine), Guggenheim proceeds to examine the love affairs between these artists and their chosen instrument, and the very different approaches they take to their craft.

He follows them as they visit old haunts and look through old photographs, rummage through vinyl records and memories, as they try to explain feelings and instincts that cannot be reduced to words. While these guys have interesting things to say, they’re all more articulate when they play.

This isn’t an unauthorized backstage look at the rock stars, but an appreciation of their artistic rigor and an examination of their work. You get a sense that there’s something beyond physics and math involved in their music, that the various ratios and harmonics are subservient to the larger question of emotional resonance. These guys really are more high priests than technicians.

If the film actually goes a little slack in its putative climax - when the three begin to jam (it’s endearing that White seems a little intimidated in the presence of the others) - it’s still a sweet little ride, a little glimpse into the spooky stuff inside.

MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 10/09/2009

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chrysolyte5 says...

There is definately something going on beyond math and physics...I hear it too.
*I better laugh out loud before anyone begins to think it's just the voices in MY head. LOL

October 9, 2009 at 2:55 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

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