“20 Best Music Movies Ever”
NME.com picks the 20 best music movies ever. They are:
Pretty in Pink
Glastonbury
Garden State
Meeting People is Easy
The Rolling Stone: Gimme Shelter
Bob Dylan: No Direction Home
Pulp Fiction
Dazed and Confused
Stop Making Sense
Dig!
High Fidelity
This is Spinal Tap
Bob Dylan: Don’t Look Back
The Who: Quadrophenia
Trainspotting
Some Kind of Monster
Almost Famous
Control
Anvil
24 Hour Party People
That’s a great list of movies. Great to see Dylan on their twice. But how could you possibly omit this movie:
The Last Waltz, directed by Martin Scorcese, featuring one of the greatest bands ever The Band. Also A Hard Day’s Night, Saturday Night Fever, and Mad Dogs & Englishmen:
What other great music movies come to mind?
UPDATE: We can add this to this list:
When I was a kid, my friends and I tried to out-lore each other with massive pronouncements about rock ’n’ roll matters we knew little about. I was a “T.A.M.I. Show” guy — meaning, I had managed to see a VHS tape bootleg relic of the 1964 all-star extravaganza concert film that hardly anyone had seen since the days of “Beatles for Sale” and “Another Side of Bob Dylan.” Which is to say, when the Beatles were still in black and white and Dylan had yet to plug in. I avowed that there was no finer rock concert film — never mind that the Beach Boys had made sure that their segment was excised — and I stumped for it as though I had a hand in future royalty payments. “Woodstock,” “Monterey Pop,” “The Last Waltz” — mere aperitifs compared to the full-on whisky kegger that was “The T.A.M.I. Show’s” artistic bounty. I didn’t care that its full name — Teenage Awards Music International — sounded both awful and totally made up.
One tends to be a bit of a moron at 13 or so when you’re going on about your own personal canon, but “The T.A.M.I. Show” is now out on DVD, the Beach Boys are back in place, and I think I probably undersold the whole thing, actually. The film was directed by Steve Binder, who was later responsible for that 1978 Star Wars holiday cartoon special, the delight of many a YouTube-trawling stoner. “The T.A.M.I. Show” is a mess in its way, too, but in the manner of a rugby scrum or a goal line battle — the energy is intoxicating. And it looks like it was shot inside out — that is, the front of the stage might as well be backstage for all the attendant chaos, with bands setting up as other bands perform, and people racing in all directions for their marks.
James Brown. Rolling Stones. Chuck Berry. Sounds like great stuff.