‘It Might Get Loud’: Guitar greats go for it
Published 9:42 pm Thursday, August 27, 2009
Ah, it sounds like a great idea: Hold a guitar-god summit with virtuosos from three generations of rock and put them in a room with an amp.
That’s the notion behind “It Might Get Loud,” but the face-to-face meeting between the maestros is awkward. Maybe when music is your first language, conversation is a distant second — or maybe you have to be a little cracked, a little warped, to be this good at the mystery of making music.
The three are Jimmy Page, the legendary lead guitarist of Led Zeppelin; The Edge, of U2; and Jack White, of the White Stripes.
Thankfully, the documentary includes more than just the three of them facing each other in a room.
Director Davis Guggenheim, who won a rather generous Oscar for the illustrated global-warming lecture “An Inconvenient Truth,” delves into the backstories of each musician. The common thread is that each began by wanting to create something new — something different from the prevailing rock sound of his time.
Page comes across as a still-childlike absentminded professor — but you have to love the guy for his continued devotion to an old 45 record of Link Wray’s “Rumble,” which he plays as an example of a guitar sound he reached for in youth.
The movie doesn’t do Page any favors by including a film clip from “This is Spinal Tap,” a parody that drew quite a bit from Led Zep-style excess. He does sound like he might wander over and tune his amp to 11, but the guy can still make “Whole Lotta Love” sound like a wall of noise.
The Edge comes across as the most human of the three, a real person who thinks deeply about social concerns. He also talks about his use of technological gimmickry to create giant sonic canvases, demonstrating what a tiny U2 riff sounds like without gonzo amplification.
Jack White is full of youthful, back-to-basics brio; in the beginning of the film we see him thumbtack together a guitar out of plywood. His oddball persona is one reason the three-way summit seems stilted, but he sure does fascinating things with music.
Even if that conversation doesn’t come off (maybe it needs a skilled moderator — the Jack Black character from “School of Rock”?), “It Might Get Loud” has undeniable appeal for guitar freaks. And arriving just a few days after the death of electric guitar fountainhead Les Paul, it stands as a tribute to the signature sound of the plugged-in era in music.
