To order the DVD click here: http://amzn.to/96trgY Trailer for the exciting country music documentary "The Nashville Sound" featuring some of country music's hottest acts from the 1960' and 70's.
Music City Mondays: The Nashville Sound
When: 7 p.m. Monday, July 13
Where: The Belcourt The same year he shot Hi, Mom!, a still-shocking counterculture comedy directed by the young Brian De Palma (and starring a younger Robert De Niro), filmmaker/cinematographer Robert Elfstrom and his partner David Hoffman came to Nashville to record the deejay convention that eventually split into Fan Fair and the Country Radio Seminar. They emerged with this remarkable document of Music City circa 1970 — when the Opry was still at the Ryman, when Music Row didn’t look like a mausoleum, and when record mogul Shelby Singleton had longer sideburns than Burt Reynolds in White Lightning.
The filmmakers (including Putney Swope cinematographer Gerald Cotts) follow stars like Sonny James and Jeannie Seely as they work the convention’s thousands of deejays, while capturing terrific performances by Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn and many, many more. The city’s hip tip is represented by a startlingly funky Doug Kershaw-Charlie Daniels session with producer Bob Johnston, as well as electric footage of a seemingly teenage Tracy Nelson ripping through “You Win Again” with her group Mother Earth.
But the filmmakers’ masterstroke was to follow a hopeful one-man-band named Herbie Howell. Robert Altman couldn’t have dreamed up this guy’s story, which culminates in an introduction to Ralph Emery, a performance at Singleton’s mansion, and a management deal, which he greets as if he’s just been handed the keys to heaven. The last shot — of Herbie’s face frozen in a ready-for-his-close-up rictus — is both triumphant and chilling. The more things change, as this time capsule demonstrates, the more they remain the same.
Following last weekend's outdoor screening of Coal Miner’s Daughter, this officially launches Music City Mondays, The Belcourt’s weekly Monday-night series of movies shot in Nashville in the 1960s and ’70s, featuring selections ranging from Elfstrom’s fine 1969 doc Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music (July 20) to Gus Trikonis’ Tarantino-approved 1976 exploitation artifact Nashville Girl (Aug. 3) — and wait, is that the Ormond Family we hear on the horizon … ?
