The annual Filmusic Festival kicked off last Thursday at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center with live music by Island band Red Night Delight and a screening of seasonal Vineyarder Stanley Nelson’s high-energy documentary We Want the Funk, followed by a discussion with the director.
Friday began with director Questlove’s new documentary on Earth, Wind and Fire and continued with a double bill featuring drummer and Robby Ameen, first as the bandleader in the short film Robby Ameen Live at the Poster Museum and then live on stage, playing drums and discussing the film with director Nelson Hume in a conversation moderated by composer Jay Chattaway. All three are longtime seasonal Islanders.
On Saturday afternoon, the documentary Billy Preston: That’s the Way God Planned It, spotlighted the talented, troubled keyboardist once known as the “fifth Beatle.” Here, an Island face appeared onscreen: Suzanne de Passe, seasonally of Oak Bluffs, recalling her acquaintance with Mr. Preston.
On Saturday night, the festival screened a sold-out show of the concert movie You Got Gold: A Celebration of John Prine. Due its popularity, two more screenings were added this week, on July 1 and 2 at 7:30 p.m..
Recorded live at Nashville’s cherished Ryman Auditorium in October, 2022, the 90-minute film features more than three dozen folk and country musicians paying tribute to Mr. Prine, the widely beloved and endlessly creative singer-songwriter who died of Covid-19 complications in 2020.
“We could finally gather safely in 2022 to remember him and bring the community together,” said Mr. Prine’s widow, Fiona Prine, as she introduced the Saturday night screening.
Spanning the generations, performers range from longtime comrades like Bonnie Raitt, Bob Weir and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott to contemporary acts including Taylor Childers, Nathaniel Rateliff, The War and Treaty and Brandi Carlile.
“Most of those artists opened for John at the beginning of their careers, and became really wonderful friends,” Ms. Prine said.
Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakam are among the other veterans in the show, while the Prines’ son Tommy takes the lead on a curtain call sing-along of Paradise, the bittersweet ballad often called Muhlenberg County.
On stage and in interviews, the artists recall Mr. Prine’s generosity as a fellow musician, his fun-loving nature and his unmatched gifts as a songwriter.
In concert, the cameras stay close to the musicians as they share deeply-felt renditions of Mr. Prine’s songs — often poignant, frequently funny and always insightful — with a reverent audience on what would have been his 76th birthday.
Occasionally, there’s a number inspired by Mr. Prine instead. Lucinda Williams takes the microphone to sing What Could Go Wrong?, inspired by a real-life attempt by the two songwriters to collaborate over what proved to be too many bottles of wine, and Kacey Musgraves also sings an original tribute.
You Got Gold interweaves the live music and interviews with vintage performances by Mr. Prine and other archival footage and photographs of the ever-smiling artist.
“He cared about people, he loved people, he saw people... so he was able to write songs about them,” Ms. Prine said.
Sunday afternoon brought EPiC (Elvis Presley in Concert), in which director Baz Luhrman presents recently-surfaced footage of the superstar performing and rehearsing in Las Vegas.
Mr. Luhrman’s fascination with Mr. Presley has led to other films; this one is an engrossing portrait of the artist crafting his own legend.
Also Sunday, the French drama Mozart’s Sister explored in fiction the relationship between the composer and his talented real-life sister.
The festival concluded with WBCN and the American Revolution, tracing the early history and political heyday of Boston’s first FM rock radio station from its founding in 1968 to the mid-1970s.
In plentiful interviews with the station’s founder and air staff, paired with archival audio and video, the film recalls the anything-goes spirit and hippie-era values of the late 1960s and the waves of political and cultural change that followed.
Musical highlights include DJ Maxanne Sartori hosting Bruce Springsteen’s first-ever radio appearance, in which he says hello to his mother on the air and then plays Growing Up with his band (complete with tuba) and Patti Smith deliberately flouting the broadcast rules against profanity during a live show from the Jazz Workshop.
The late Islander Peter Simon also appears several times in the film, talking about his experiences as the station’s photographer.
The Filmusic Festival highlighted Vineyard musicians in a pair of short music videos by Paul Lazes of Vineyard Haven, with one screened before each film.
Working at home, Mr. Lazes filmed acoustic performances by Isaac Taylor and Rick O’Gorman and interwove them with scenic drone footage by Denys Wortman, providing an audiovisual palate cleanser between the commercial trailers and the main attraction.
The film center begins its summer schedule this Wednesday, executive director Richard Paradise said.
“We’ll be open seven days a week,” he said.
There’s also more music coming to the theatre’s stage. On July 6, Island bassist Eric Johnson is leading a sold-out concert of jazz by Wayne Shorter, arranged for quintet by Mr. Johnson, and Island singer-songwriter Livingston Taylor is playing the film center on July 5 (sold out) and August 22.
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