One might think that sitting in a movie theatre for an hour and half listening to three people talk about the awesomeness of playing the guitar might wear quickly. I suppose that’s depending on your frame of mind. Anyone not interested in the intricacies of rock’s essential instrument will be easily bored, but why you’d walk in with no desire to see Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, U2’s The Edge and Jack White hang out and talk guitars is beyond me. It’s not exactly the Athenian exchange of ideas I was expecting, but that’s by no means an indicator that It Might Get Loud was a dullard of a rock doc. Far from it actually.
Gathered from three generations of rock, Page, White and The Edge make an interesting, though not necessarily obvious triad to explore the ongoing love affair between rock music and the guitar. Page and The Edge are the steadfast back-up to their band’s frontmen, while White wears the mantle of the tortured musician ever struggling to avoid a bourgeois fate of fading away. The three men have very different styles, but they all share the wonder and excitement of picking up an axe for the first time and taking its strings for a proverbial test drive. More than that though, Loud focuses on the wonders of the electric guitar, and how they allow for the manipulation of sound and how it helped take the guitar from being just an instrument and made it an art form.
That’s not to say it wasn’t an art before that. Anyone’s that ever picked up a guitar knows that it’s easy to be competent playing just a few chords, but to be really good, to be legendary, takes time and effort and skill. There is a bit of a secret council in getting the three of these men in one room, a kind of secret language spoken between them. The surprising thing though is that it’s easy translatable to the novice. Yes, the meet up does include the occasional jam session, or perhaps it can be more accurately described as share time. At one point there’s this great look on The Edges face as he’s watching Page launch into a solo; it’s like seeing a kid unwrap the present he wanted most on Christmas morning, it’s priceless. And to the credit of filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth), that excitement translates through every scene.
Disappointingly, there wasn’t a whole lot of footage of the three interacting in the immaculately indie looking parent’s basement stage. But instead what you get is a lot of really interesting guitar talk: the history of the instrument, it’s enduring appeal, the difficulties each man had in honing their craft. There are also a lot of great bits in it that you can enjoy on their own or as part of the whole; like I forgot how great a soloist The Edge is and how he’s a great singer and song-writer in his own right, or the priceless, You Tube-ready discovery of a TV clip featuring a young James Page talking about his future as a microbiologist.
Mostly though, this film is an ode to the music, and there are a lot of great examples of it across every inch of this movie. From the featured players own bands to the music that inspired them to the music that almost was (The Edges demo tapes, for example, are a wonderful finding). Best of all was that there was a communion with the audience, the music shared and the music remembered. There were moments where you were tapping your foot and you could feel in the floor boards that you were not alone in this motion. To me, that’s what this movie is about: sharing. And it’s open to anyone and everyone that just so happens to be in a sharing mood. To those how are about to, or continue to rock, I salute you. Keep up the good work.
