In the studio with Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White for IT MIGHT GET LOUD

Sony Pictures Classics | 2009 | Rated PG | 97 minutes

There’s something magical about the electric guitar. I still remember my very first one. It was a bottom basement brand, Series 10, that I had worked and saved all summer for. And it was white. Just like the one Jimi played at Woodstock, though albeit, of substantially lower quality. It didn’t matter to me though. I could not wait to get it home, and when I finally did, I vividly remember sitting there in front of the amp and slowly plugging the guitar in, hearing all of the accompanying pops and buzzes from the surge of electricity. I strummed once, not even knowing how to do any chord formations yet, and even though the resulting cacophony was wildly out of tune, I was forever hooked. Still to this day, some twenty years later, I still have the same feeling of anticipation whenever I plug a guitar in. The guitar, as you may recall, is magical. Going then to an early screening of the documentary, IT MIGHT GET LOUD, a film that tells the story of three generations of guitarists, Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin), The Edge (U2) and Jack White (The White Stripes), my expectations were inordinately high, but as filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH) and creator and producer Thomas Tull soon proved, IT MIGHT GET LOUD easily exceeds even the loftiest of expectations.

What is unique about IT MIGHT GET LOUD is the tone that Guggenheim uses throughout the film. There is no idolization of the three respective musicians, who as guitarists, are generally portrayed bigger than life, elevated to the iconic status of “rock god.” What is presented is simply three individuals who completely love what they do. An intimate portrait is thus developed and the audience is allowed to see behind the façade of superstardom and to see just how much music means to the three guitarists. Small moments, almost private in nature, are favored over scenes of the enormity of the crowds each guitarist is used to playing in front of. The Edge goes back to Mount Temple School where he first met Bono, Larry Mullen Jr. and Adam Clayton in the late 1970s, and he excitedly shows the bulletin board where Larry had posted his notice looking for bandmates that would eventually become U2. The Edge shows the raised cement platform outside where they played their first “show” and the small classroom where they used to rehearse after school, but only after they moved all of the desks out of the way first. What is remarkable throughout his visit is the look of passion that is in his eyes as he talks about how much music means to him. As The Edge describes, “As writers we start with the feeling, and everything follows that.”

This same childlike excitement is seen with Jimmy Page, who allowing filming to take place in his own home for the first time ever, takes the film crew into his music room, where his collection of music fills floor-to-ceiling shelves and consists of an unimaginable number of albums. Page happily pulls out records that he used to listen to for inspiration and puts them on, becoming so completely lost in the sheer joy of what is being played that he plays air guitar as his smile beams. The audience can tell not only how exuberant the music makes each artist feel on a deeply personal level, done so stripped of any pretense of fame or celebrity, but more importantly, exactly what playing music means to each of the guitarists. There are some great moments of devaluing the grandiose guise of rock that shine through in the film, such as when The Edge turns off the myriad of effects he’s running his guitar’s signal through during the opening riff of “Elevation” to show how absolutely basic it is, or when Jack White builds an electric guitar on screen with only the most minimal materials. The audience can tell the significance that the true essence of the music has for each musician, and how much playing defines who they are as individuals. Talking about playing live with Led Zeppelin, Page states, “Every night we went on stage it was living, really living.”

This accessibility to the artists, and the ability to see them as fans themselves is what sets IT MIGHT GET LOUD apart from other music documentaries. The audience gets to experience how much something like the Delta blues means to Jack White, who while playing a solo on camera, becomes so lost in the music, he does not realize that his fingers are bleeding. As director Davis Guggenheim explains, “Most rock and roll documentaries focus on car wrecks and overdoses; or they pontificate with sweeping generalities about how this guy was ‘God’ and how ‘music was changed forever.’ Thomas and I didn’t want any of that. We wanted to focus on story-telling and the path of the artist, we wanted to push deeper beneath the surface.”

The individual stories of each of the guitarists that are intercut with one another, from Page in London, to The Edge in Dublin, to White in Tennessee, culminate into the three coming together in an empty soundstage in Hollywood to talk about music, to talk about their influences, and most importantly, to play. There are some brilliant moments in these scenes such as when Page, the consummate studio musician, questions The Edge’s chord choice on “I Will Follow,” a song that The Edge has been playing for over twenty years. The most remarkable moment though comes when the three all play the Led Zeppelin song “In My Time of Dying,” blending their three unique voices into one and taking the song to a place it has never been before.

Guggenheim and Tull have created an incredibly rich documentary showing a personal side of three bigger than life figures. The only real complaint with the film is that there was not more footage included of the three guitarists playing together, for when they did play, it was magic.

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