Dorks And Losers

From 1970 until now, few peo­ple knew that the Amer­i­can hard rock under­ground music scene has a ded­i­cated, almost cult-like, fol­low­ing. The “under­ground” can be mis­lead­ing and inaccurate.

A band can be con­sid­ered under­ground as long as it doesn’t get main­stream suc­cess, major record label deals excluded. While a major record label deal might be the holy grail for most bands and musi­cians, in many cases it could be the kiss of death, no more so than in hard rock.

In Such Hawks, Such Hounds, direc­tor John Sre­balus weaves steadily but dis­pro­por­tion­ately through the high and low points of the hard rock scene. The doc­u­men­tary is focused, but speeds through the ‘70s and ‘80s in favor of an empha­sized con­tem­po­rary look at the ‘90s and ‘00s.

Early pio­neers like Black Flag and the Melvins paved the way for the exper­i­men­ta­tion of hard rock (it was inter­est­ing to hear so many dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tions of the genre) and ground­break­ing gui­tar tech­niques and use. I was sur­prised by the men­tion of Metal­lica because I didn’t think they were even con­sid­ered to be hard rock. Appar­ently the band strad­dled between metal and punk and some­times hard rock.

With any­thing about music, you must make men­tion of the label sys­tem. Nineties band Sleep spent years try­ing to release its 52-minute opus Jerusalem but was sti­fled by the label’s inabil­ity to come up with a mar­ket­ing strat­egy for the sin­gle song album. While I usu­ally don’t defend labels, you do need to look at their point of view when it comes to try­ing to sell a record that doesn’t nat­u­rally scream “radio”.

One inter­est­ing part of the doc­u­men­tary was the slight abhor­rence for the label of ‘90s hard rock as stoner rock. Drug use in the ‘70s gets that era called psy­che­delic while the ‘90s gets stoned. I agree; it’s not fair.

Sre­balus is a first-time film­maker, and it partly shows in Such Hawks, Such Hounds with unpol­ished tran­si­tions and not enough extended music num­bers. What’s a music doc­u­men­tary with­out lots of music?

Look­ing around the audi­ence and you can see peo­ple bob­bing their head to var­i­ous bits of music, but for a hard rock novice who has only heard of bands like the Melvins and Comets on Fire by name (although I have lis­tened to Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man”) it would have been refresh­ing and poignant to include long takes of spe­cific songs that the doc­u­men­tary high­lights, which it does to a degree in its sec­ond half.

The doc­u­men­tary is as much an ode to the bands and fans of Amer­i­can hard rock, but it could have been a lit­tle more had there been a big­ger empha­sis on the music. Inter­views with bands and musi­cians can only go so far, and that’s where the music could and should speak for itself.

After the screen­ing, Sre­balus made him­self avail­able for audi­ence ques­tions. A cou­ple of tidbits:

• Sre­balus wanted to include par­tic­i­pa­tion from the Melvins in the doc­u­men­tary, but it became appar­ent that they didn’t want to be in it.
• Because the film was self-financed, Euro­pean and Asian hard rock were omit­ted. But on a mes­sage board, some­one from Europe cited his inter­est in tack­ling the sub­ject to an enthu­si­as­tic Srebalus.

You can read more about the film at the offi­cial web­site.

Pop­u­lar­ity: 2% [?]