New Brit-Rock Docs

[BluBonnet]

Critic’s Notebook: A Generation’s Chords of Celebration, Elegy and Reckoning Resound in Two New Brit-Rock Docs
'Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)' and 'Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd' join a vibrant crop of recent documentaries that illuminate the epochal music scenes of the ’60s and ’70s.

Well after their deaths, the pop stars of an earlier era — the mid-20th century, to be precise — are receiving documentary treatment, such greats as Ella Fitzgerald, Dean Martin and Louis Armstrong among them. Artists of the baby boom, on the other hand, a generation of unprecedented size and many other firsts, are participating in the process, as they have been for decades.

The earliest documentary portraits of boomer musicians set the bar high with a fresh, self-reflexive power. D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 Don’t Look Back traced Dylan’s ambivalent dance into and out of the spotlight, and in 1970 the Maysles brothers’ Gimme Shelter found the Rolling Stones facing darker complexities around the same push-pull. Today, films exploring pop artists’ life’s work, or at least certain aspects of it, are being made while they’re still engaged in it.

Two of the most captivating and poignant documentaries to hit screens so far this year focus on the legacy of key creative forces in the rock era who are no longer with us, but whose friends and collaborators, most of them nearing 80 or beyond, are here to bear witness. The films reverberate with elegiac chords that are specific to the biographies of a couple of beloved and challenging men, but they also resound with the joys and heartaches of a generation looking back, taking stock.

The docs form a striking Venn diagram, weaving intimate rock ’n’ roll histories around a core of shared DNA: the members, past and present, of Pink Floyd, and a less well-known figure who played a critical role in the band’s career. He was a visual artist and mad conceptualizer named Storm Thorgerson who, with Aubrey Powell, created a London art design studio called Hipgnosis and many of the most adventurous and indelible album covers of the late ’60s and ’70s. It was a time when album covers mattered.

Thorgerson, who died in 2013 at 69, is at the center of Anton Corbijn’s Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis), which opened in June. And he’s the impassioned offscreen interlocutor and the co-director, with Roddy Bogawa, of Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd, which bows stateside this week.

Barrett was the electric spark who named Pink Floyd and led his bandmates into formula-shattering musical territory. Within a few busy years he wrote the group’s first two hits and then became, by all accounts, an acid casualty. By mutual agreement he didn’t join the band on its chart-climbing road to stardom. Barrett, who died in 2006, at age 60, after decades of mysterious reclusion, never had any interest in explaining himself. Thorgerson, often brash and annoying, didn’t play by the rules either.

Rock ’n’ roll mythologizing is one of the subjects of Squaring the Circle and Have You Got It, but it’s not their method. Rather than reaching for a neat or aggrandizing summing-up, they grapple with the passage of time and the perspective it brings. The films’ subjects and interviewees belong to the first wave of baby boomers, and the filmmakers belong to the younger cohort of that group, aka Generation Jones — the kids who missed hippiedom by a few years but still absorbed the countercultural idealism. The kids who bought the albums.

Friends of Barrett and Thorgerson — among them Powell, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, David Gilmour and Nick Mason, Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page — offer clear-eyed recollections, not self-congratulatory nostalgia. There are difficult memories along with the fond ones, and sometimes a sense of still being slightly amazed. Fifty years after Paul McCartney rang up Hipgnosis about a Wings cover, Powell’s eyes sparkle with delight as he relates the thrill of “working for a Beatle.” It’s the elation of a true fan.

These are stories of finding your people. Before becoming business partners, Powell and Thorgerson bonded like brothers. Before Barrett, Waters, Mason and Richard Wright (who died in 2008) embarked on the uncanny experiment of building a band, Thorgerson and Barrett met as teens. They were both leading lights in a vibrant bohemian scene that began in Cambridge and then moved its explorations of painting, music, film and drugs to London — when it was “lawless,” as Powell recalls, not to mention affordable. These are stories of creative alchemists, a vanguard rejecting conventional notions of career and forging a cultural revolution.