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Standing in the Shadows of Motown
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There are secret histories of creative collaboration in every
field of culture. Popular music, with its often sparse credits on record and CD
sleeves, surely hides the highest number of unsung artists.
Standing in the Shadows
of Motown is about a special group of session musicians, the Funk Brothers,
who provided the musical backbone for dozens of Motown hits throughout the
‘60s.
The well-known stars in this story, from Stevie Wonder and Diana
Ross to Marvin Gaye, are given a back seat. Director Paul Justman conjures up
for us, through lively interview sessions, the hothouse atmosphere of studio
recording, where talented musicians including Joe Hunter, James Jamerson and
Benny Benjamin would build a song's essential structure in a few
pressure-packed hours.
The success of Wim Wenders' Buena Vista Social Club (1999) looms over many recent music
documentaries. This one also hinges on a reunion concert, where the surviving
Funk Brothers play alongside younger colleagues, backing such performers as
Chaka Khan and Ben Harper.
Frustratingly,
Justman sometimes whisks these numbers away mid-stream, as if afraid to attract
the dreaded label of ‘concert film’. Many music fans will be awaiting hopeful extensions
of this concert footage on the DVD release.
There are other problems in the overall form of the documentary,
especially when Justman indulges in superfluous, TV-style dramatic recreations
of events that are not always especially dramatic.
But the heart and soul of this film is in the people it presents,
and in the glimpses it provides of their musical processes. Justman, working
from Allan Slutsky's book of the same name, allows himself the usual
predictable reflections on the swiftly changing political landscape of the
American ‘60s: civil rights,
Vietnam,
the counterculture (cue Gaye's “What's Going On” on the soundtrack).
But one touching point rises above the
litany of clichés. In its peaceful combination of white and black musicians, the
Funk Brothers quietly embodied a utopian dream of racial reconciliation via
popular art.
© Adrian Martin January 2003 |
