It Might Get Loud

The concept was to get iconic guitar players from different eras, have them meet and talk shop. Jimmy Page put it best: "We're going there to have a chat," Page says at the beginning. "But it just so happens that the instruments are there as well, so who knows?" The other players? The Edge from U2, and Jack White from the White Stripes. This documentary is not a “history of the electric guitar.” It traces the lives of these three men, their origins, their inspirations, the tools of their trade. If you’re a guitar geek and music junkie like me, this is a very enjoyable film.

Jimmy Page
Before watching this movie, Jimmy Page was the one guitarist out of the three I knew the most about. If you grew up in the 1970s, you knew lots of Led Zeppelin stories. But only the four of them knew them all.

First fact I didn’t know before I watched this movie: Jimmy Page played on “Goldfinger.” That’s right, that “Goldfinger.” He talked about Shirley Bassey doing the vocal in one take and collapsing at the end of it. The Edge asked JP about his session work in the 60s – what did you play on? “Sometimes you could hear what I did, sometimes you couldn’t hear what I did” - then comes out the “Goldfinger” story. The epiphany that he was playing other people’s music happened at a session where he was playing Muzak. That’s when he wanted to start creating his own music.

Jimmy Page’s musical roots – skiffle, blues. “Pop music was rubbish, so we weren’t gonna be playing that. Playing blues music, music of the Chess catalog, not going with the flow.” He played gigs all over Britain, sleeping with the equipment in the back of touring vans, getting sick all the time. He thought music might not be his calling so he went to art college for awhile to learn painting. But he couldn’t stay away. Since he had given up his lucrative session gigs, Jimmy Page was a free agent, so he was talked into joining The Yardbirds in 1966, first as a bassist, then as a second guitarist with Jeff Beck. After The Yardbirds imploded in 1968, Jimmy Page was left holding the proverbial musical bag, so he put together a group of New Yardbirds that was still under contract to fulfill some live dates in Scandanavia. These New Yardbirds later changed their name to Led Zeppelin. The rest is history…

Second fact I didn’t know before I watched this movie: Even Jimmy Page plays air guitar. While talking about his influences in his living room, he treats the viewers to a glimpse of a record collection that I would kill for. He puts on a 45 of one of his favorite songs, Link Wray’s “Rumble.” While “Rumble” is playing, JP talks about all the nuances of the song, playing air guitar while doing so. Who knew…

First guitar: Fender Stratocaster. Sunburst finish. Once he started to get proficient on the guitar, it became an obsession. He took it to school – practiced during the recess breaks. The school confiscated it, thought it was subversive.

Where does the songwriting come from? “Whether I took it on or it took me on I don’t know. The jury’s out on that. But I don’t care. I just really, really enjoyed it. That’s it.”

The Edge
What inspired The Edge to become a musician? The Edge came of age during Northern Ireland’s “Troubles.” The Irish Republican Army was in full flight, people were being shot, things were blowing up. It wasn’t a pleasant environment. On top of the Troubles, there was the economy, of which The Edge says:

“Dublin in the mid-70s was really economically very challenged. The economy was in the toilet. We just didn’t believe that anything could change.” While looking across the loading docks in the port in Dublin he laments “there has to be more than this…This is not the only thing that is on offer here…”

First guitar he bought: Gibson Explorer, bought in New York.
“The biggest thrill is creating something that has the power to really connect with people. That’s why I took up the guitar in the first place.”

The Edge reveals himself to be a slave to technology. He’s enamored with technology. His guitar tech wheeled his arsenal of effects onto the soundstage where some of this movie was filmed. He shows the viewer how each U2 song has a its own guitar and unique sounds that go with them. Quite the gearhead, he demonstrates how the riff from “Elevation” sounds with and without effects. The differences between the two are startling.

Jack White
The movie starts with Jack White, he of The White Stripes, The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather. He demonstrates how to build a Diddley Bow, using one board, a piece of wire, a Coke bottle, a few nails and one pickup. After taking about five minutes to put it together, he demonstrates that it works and asks the cameraman “who says you need to buy a guitar?”

Where he grew up in southwest Detroit, it was uncool to play an instrument. People wanted to hear rap, hip-hop. Nobody liked rock ‘n’ roll or blues music. He apprenticed in an upholstery shop as a teenager. A guy he worked with was a drummer, so Jack White thought “ok, I’ll play guitar.”

His drummer friend exposed him to punk music, the Velvet Underground, and Cramps, surf and rockabilly, Dick Dale, trying to absorb everything, but the hook was a two-piece band from North Carolina called the Flat Duo-Jets. Just guitars, drums and vocals – just like the White Stripes. Seeing them live blew him away. There was nothing on-stage, just a 10-watt amp and a Silvertone guitar like you could get at Sears.

By the time he was eighteen, someone played him stuff from Son House. “That was it for me.” His favorite song to this day is Son House’s Grinnin’ in Your Face. He was blown away by this guy just singing and clapping, no instruments. All that mattered was the attitude of the song.

First guitar: a beat-to-shit Kay which he still plays. He got it from a St Vincent De Paul store as payment for helping to move a refrigerator.

What should I sound like?
As each of these guys talked about how they came up with their trademark sound, it became clear that they began defining themselves by what they didn’t want to sound like.

Jimmy Page was the London first-call session guy. He got discovered playing in a band at the Marquee Club in London and was asked if he would like to play on records. He’d do film music or jingles. He’d play for other recording artists like The Kinks or Donovan. He played Muzak. And that’s why he created Led Zeppelin. He wanted a band that could use both light and dark shades. He wanted to be able to speed up and/or get louder in the middle of a song. He wanted to stretch out on tracks for a long time. “Dynamics, light and shade, whisper to the thunder, sort of invite you in, sort of intoxicating. Well, the thing that fascinates me about it, and always has about the six strings, no one has ever approached, they all play in a different way and, you know, their personality comes through.”

The Edge: “15-minute guitar solos – 15-minute organ solos, or the drum solos. Professional rock musicians who looked down upon their fans. There was a huge element of self-indulgence. Those old colors were dead. We wanted none of that…” He confessed that when U2 started out, they didn’t know what they wanted to sound like, but they knew what they didn’t want to sound like. They didn’t want to sound like those bands that The Edge described as self-indulgent. This is a very punk-like aesthetic. Ironically, some of the bands the punks didn’t like included the likes of Pink Floyd, Yes, and…Led Zeppelin. He saw the movie Spinal Tap and confesses he didn’t laugh at the movie – he cried because for him it was so close to the truth.

“If we believed fully in what we were about, that actually was far more important than how well you could play. Our limitations as musicians were ultimately not gonna be a problem.” Again, a very punk-like aesthetic, where attitude was more important than ability.

Jack White: If The Edge was the antithesis to bands like Led Zeppelin, then Jack White is the antithesis to U2. To him, what’s old is new again. His attitude toward playing – unlike The Edge, Jack White is not enamored with technology. He prefers his guitars cheap, beat-up, even out-of-tune. He says he wants his music to be a struggle between him and his instrument. He wants to suffer for his art.

Jack White’s influences - “You want to figure out how you want to play guitar, what your niche will be. You just start digging deeper. When you’re digging deeper into rock ‘n’ roll, well you’re on a freight train headed straight for the blues…”

Get Back To Where You Once Belonged
For each guitarist, the journey had to start somewhere. For The Edge, he and the camera crew go back to the very elementary school where U2 started. The Edge pointed out the very spot on the bulletin board where Larry Mullen, Jr. posted a “musicians wanted” notice. They walked to the classroom where one of the teachers would allow the nascent U2 to rehearse. They got around to the back of the school to what turned out to be U2’s first stage for a public performance. The Edge hadn’t seen the place in over 30 years, so he was definitely taking in the moment to stroll back through time. He points out “Larry was in the back, I was on this side. I’ve been on this side ever since…”

Jack White took a drive through the part of Detroit he grew up in, what he dubbed “Mexicantown.” He lamented that people in his neighborhood were more into rap and hip-hop, how it was uncool to actually “play” an instrument. But instead of exploring the old neighborhood, Jack White and his camera crew went to a farm outside Nashville. Jack White uses the device of having a young kid play the “younger Jack White” so the “older” Jack White could show him how to play. Very strange, a bit contrived, but still interesting.

Jimmy Page goes back to an old Victorian era house – Headley Grange. Zep fanatics like me know about Headley Grange, but for those who don’t, here’s a taste – Stairway to Heaven was written there. Some of Led Zeppelin IV and most of Physical Graffiti were recorded there. Jimmy Page tells the story of how he captured the booming drum sound on When the Levee Breaks in a stairwell at Headley Grange. Jimmy picks up a mandolin and starts playing The Battle of Evermore. Good stuff indeed.

 “The Summit”
After all the biographical sketches of the three men, they met on a Hollywood soundstage. Davis Guggenheim, the man who made this documentary, concedes that “for the first two hours, the conversation was actually boring. I’m thinking to myself, ‘This is going to suck.’ ” Then, he says, “Jimmy picked up his Les Paul and played ‘Whole Lotta Love,’ and it was like a throwdown. Basically saying: ‘Here’s what I do. Let’s stop talking, boys, and get on with it.’ After that, I knew we had a movie.” That was fun to watch because you’ve got this elder statesman of guitar suddenly get up, strap on his Les Paul on starting banging out the riff to Whole Lotta Love. All The Edge and Jack White can do is sit and watch in awe. Then the “I showed you mine, now show me yours” back-and-forth started. The Edge showed how he came up with the chords for “I Will Follow.” Jimmy Page was kind of bemused because The Edge doesn’t use the usual chord shapes, so it kind of threw him.
For me, by far the highlight of "the summit" was when Jimmy Page picked up a Gibson 320 and started playing In My Time of Dying from Physical Graffiti. Thus inspired, The Edge and Jack White picked up their guitars and joined in. It didn’t take long for me to notice that this was when these guys started to click together. I remember reading Tom Dowd’s description of Eric Clapton’s Layla sessions with Duane Allman. He described Eric and Duane’s first meeting as two long lost brothers having found one another, and then there was a four-way conversation – the heads were talking to one another, and the guitars were talking to one another. In My Time of Dying was just such a moment in It Might Get Loud.

The summit, and the movie ended with all three guitarists playing The Band’s The Weight. The two younger guys tried to get Jimmy Page to sing, but he told then “guys, I can’t sing” [or words to that effect anyway]. The movie ended there, and the credits rolled.
Bottom line: I enjoyed this documentary. It isn’t for everybody, but it is for music junkies like me, and I got my fix.