For years, WPFW DJ Rick “Da Gator” Bolling has brought to his Saturday afternoon listeners the latest in Southern soul and blues.  Not Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings—that’s R&B for rock fans—and not guitar solo-filled blues rock either. We’re talking artists with church-rooted voices and lyrics about lust like Miss Jody and Carl Sims, labels like Ecko, and recent songs like "Junk in the Trunk (I Like that)" and "Slap That Booty.” The Gator has also hosted the annual Gator Days at Lamont’s in Pomonkey, Md., with national and local performers. But since late summer, according to WPFW's Mama K, the Florida-raised Bolling has been absent from the airwaves due to medical problems that now have him in rehabilitation at Manor Care in Upper Marlboro.

In order to help Bolling with his medical expenses, Lamont’s is hosting a benefit Saturday night featuring an extensive roster of soul and blues acts, including Georgia singer Chick Willis (of “Stoop Down Baby” fame);  the James Brown-influenced "Soul Brother No. 2" Lee Fields, and others, including locals like guitarist Bobby Parker and beach-music faves the Hardway Connection.

The show, featuring  Chick Willis, Lee Fields, Hardway Connection, Bobby Parker, the Orioles, Memphis Gold, Jacques Johnson, Clarence "Blues Man" Turner, and others to be announced, starts at 6 p.m. Saturday at Lamont’s, 4400 Livingston Rd. (off of Indian Head Highway), Pomonkey, Md. $20. (301) 283-0225.

Senegalese singer Baaba Maal’s “Tales from the Sahel” show tonight at the Birchmere should prove to be very different from his last local appearance a year and half ago.   That gig offered his 13-piece band Daande Lenol adapting songs from his 2009 album Television, which featured programmed beats and guest vocals from members of New York band Brazilian Girls. But tonight, this longtime vocalist—whose  high-pitched timbre has led him to be dubbed "The Nightingale"—will  be just  joined by percussionist Mermans Mosengo, British multi-instrumentalist Jim Palmer, and longtime British music critic and author Chris Salewicz.

Via email, Maal explained that the tour, which includes acoustic music alternating with question-and-answers segments, “is something I have been doing for many years in Africa and is how musicians have performed for centuries. In the west I was invited to give a lecture at the British Museum about five years ago and I brought my guitar along and it's progressed from there.” The Sahel is a belt-shaped region of grasslands and savannahs that stretches from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia and Eritrea in the East. The college-educated Maal’s father was a nomadic farmer in that region. As a teenager and 20-something Maal toured Senegal and Europe with guitarist and griot Mansour Seck, and they would recount historical tales and perform.

Maal first met Salewicz, who has penned books on Bob Marley and Joe Strummer, 20 years ago when the critic, after seeing Maal perform in Paris, visited him in his home town of Podor. “Every show has been different so Chris has surprised me every night,” he says, adding “that the beauty of this show is that we don't know where the discussions will lead.” Maal says that with this spoken segment he is trying to convey “something of the rich and vibrant culture of Africa and how culture is an important part of the process to educate, and how we should all work together for a better future.” Similarly with the choice of songs Maal states, the setlist “does change every night and I sing some very old songs and a couple of new ones, but I like to keep it as a surprise.”

Maal had intended to have his longtime percussionist Mamadou Sarr with him on the entire tour, but Saar was blocked from getting his visa in a timely manner. “No reason was given, just more time was needed for processing. I have just heard that he might have a visa granted in time for the last three  shows this weekend so we are waiting with fingers crossed.  He was so upset he could not travel; Mamadou toured the U.S. last year and there was no problem. However we have been fortunate that my great friends from the band Playing For Change lent me Mermans Mosengo, their amazing percussionist, for the tour.” Maal says he began working with the other musician on this tour, Jim Palmer, “about five years ago, and Jim was very important during the recordings of my last album Television. I invited him to play with my African band Daande Lenol when we went on the road and he has even come to Senegal a few times to play shows in Dakar. He is so versatile and plays so many instruments including drums sometimes on this tour.”

This tour is not the only item the busy Maal is working on.  “I have been in the studio a lot recently working with Playing For Change,” he says, plus “a young very talented  musician from the U.K. called Jamie Woon, and I have just released an album in Senegal only called Souvenier. I am sure some of these projects will be released shortly here.” In addition, there’s his annual Senegalese music festival. “Its going very well, thank you, we are now on the sixth edition and will be held in Podor, northern Senegal over the first weekend of December. It's called ‘Les Blues du Fleuve [The Blues of the River].’ You are all invited to come!"

Baaba Maal performs at 7:30 p.m. tonight at the Birchmere, 3701 Mt. Vernon Avenue, Alexandria. $35. (703) 549-7500

The sun shone bright Saturday at this year's Virgin FreeFest at Merriweather Post Pavilion, and while the grounds were a bit muddier than last year, at least the Dance Forest wasn't as dusty. It was the first nice afternoon in weeks—as well as the day before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and the start of Ethiopian New Year, as we learned from Patti Smith—so this year's lineup, heavier on the synth and electronica acts than years past, provided an upbeat soundtrack to a beautiful day.

Grace Potter & the Nocturnals

Cut Copy

!!!

Patti Smith

Cee Lo

TV on the Radio

The Black Keys

Deadmau5

Additional photos from Virgin FreeFest sets and people can be found here.

My Friend Peter: A Beaver-esque tale about a disturbed (but amusingly so!) guy who connects to the world via a monkey puppet; his success is about as believable as his piss-poor ability to throw his voice.

The Dual at Blood Creek: Such a silly but entertaining trifle hardly deserves the gorgeous cinematography it boasts; its twist is a cherry.

All of Me: Sex Over Seventy: If you want to hear an 84-year-old woman read her sex poetry with lines such as, “We laughed as you corrugated my nipples,” this short’s for you.

On the Beat: Soat: Essentially an animated music video that seems to star beans, Skittles, and fruit as they take the shape of dancers.

Abduct Me!: A ridiculous, poorly acted skit about a dude who gets jerked off by an alien.

Sold: Twelve minutes of tension as a kidnapped journalist tries to escape her captors.

Wiccan Tease: Another slight, occasionally funny bit about a young witch and a guy crushing on her that features stiff performances and the spot-on line, “You know, this is such a waste of time — and eye makeup.”

Tell-Tale: Carla Gugino raises this salacious short’s profile playing a Carla Gugino type; Clifton Collins Jr. co-stars as an investigator interrogating the femme fatale in this otherwise weak take on The Tell-Tale Heart.

Oh Baby, I Love You!: Forget the whimsical story about a young woman with a sexual tic — this film has the best O-face ever.

Mon., Sept. 12 at 9 p.m. at E Street Cinema
Sat., Sept. 17 at 4 p.m. at Atlas Arts Center

On Saturday, the Virgin Mobile FreeFest dodged rainy forecasts and generally moved forward on the Merriweather Post Pavilion grounds with the efficiency and grace of a Tony Romo drive, at least for the first three quarters. The Ferris wheel was steady; burritos in the press tent were easy to smuggle; no one in the dance forest got too handsy; and none of the homemade paper mache Deadmau5 helmets led to accidental death by asphyxiation. Let's go to the highlights:

RAMON SAYS

Patti Smith still has it, by which I mean seeping paranoia. Smith spent an hour on on the main stage rocking hard, fast, and with feeling. In between, the civil rights rants lacked direction and taste. Smith took surveillance cameras in bathrooms to task, and complained because John Walker Lindh is in prison. Her big picture, "wake up, sheeple" appeal was at least poetic: "We must remember more than two buildings and three planes."

September 11 marks the beginning of the Ethiopian new year. Thanks, Patti Smith.

Lead vocalists felt added pressure to soapbox before the last song. Big Sean was straightforward: "Don't let any of these motherfuckers tell you shit." Will Sheff of Okkervil River was self-effacing in thanking folks, "even if you were dragged here by your boyfriend. Even if you were dragged here by your girlfriend. Even if you're just waiting around for the next band." TV On The Radio's Tunde Adebimpe had this well-meaning bit about turning on the lights in the dark.

Patron patriotism levels were underwhelming. FreeFest boasted minimal waving of the American flag, and only one dude showed up as Uncle Sam. None of the hoopsters thought to at least rock a Dream Team jersey. A missed opportunity.

I was able to see a lot of stuff because the grounds' three stages were walkable, and human traffic was well-organized. Scheduling overlap of talent often means black and white programing decisions, but logistics made the whole event a grab bag of 20-minute sets. In ninety minutes I was able to catch Cut Copy, !!!, Cee Lo's ghastly scavenging of dead ideas from black music, and the aforementioned Smith. Chris, what resonated with you? How awesome was it to see TV on the Radio fill out the Pavilion Stage like it was a sold out, stand-alone performance? Who was straight up terrible?

CHRIS SAYS

Biggest Winner: TV on the Radio, duh. I'm not exactly courting controversy here.  Tunde Adebimpe was the only performer I could see sweating through his shirt from the back of the house, which is my admittedly arbitrary standard for who on stage means it.  Their powerful baker's-dozen-song set, culminating in a "Wolf Like Me" that brought even the lawn contingent to its feet, was hypnotic.

So why were they slotted next-to-last on the Pavilion Stage?  That meant the Black Keys had to follow them.  While the Akron, Ohio, duo sounded admirably greasy—except for when they brought a touch of class by covering The Kinks—for a two-piece, even a very loud two-piece, to follow a shimmery wall of sound like TVotR, they're just outgunned, is all.  Who was opening for who here?

If TVotR played like they owned the place, we'll forgive them on grounds of them owning the place.  But the other acts should've campaigned a bit harder. Okkervil River's set was the first I saw (and the first of any consequence, according to at least one credible observer who arrived in a timelier fashion than I did), and I appreciated Sheff's wry acknowledgment that not every face in the crowd was necessarily there for him. Grace Potter & The Nocturnals probably won some people over with their heavy-footed midday set.  I never noticed how much she sounds like Melissa Etheridge before.

Biggest Loser: Cee Lo's Wardrobe. I wondered where I'd seen his all-sexy-ladykind backup band before.  If Cee Lo turns up to perform in a plain white T-shirt and trousers, does he make a sound?  A: Yes, but after his cover of Pussycat Dolls' "Dontcha" gave way to "Crazy"-=-recalling his appearance with Danger Mouse at this event's ancient ancestor, the Virgin Mobile Festival in 2006—I was already hustling back to the Pavilion to catch TVotR.

Oh: Watching James Murphy spin records is just a lot less interesting than watching him front LCD Soundsystem, the champions of last year's FreeFest.  But that's just genre prejudice on my part, I guess.

Lifetime Achievement Award: Patti Smith. Someone had to do some sloganeering, but Smith's repeated references to John Walker Lindh—"And what does he do in his prison cell that so frightens our goverment?  He prays."—were less coherent in context than her admonition, "Remember who you were on Sept. 10th."  To my ears, her condemnations of the post-9/11 surveillance culture and the Iraq War brought brought cheers and boos in more-or-less equal measure, but the way all those responses turned into howls of approval whenever she spoke the word "freedom" was kind of depressing.

RAMON
Right there with you. James Murphy is a folk hero to any rock writer worth his denim jacket because he writes poetic, enduring dance rock with immaculate references. Watching him spin records started off looking sweet—check all that vinyl!—but the pesky sunlight was a major buzzkill. On the whole, a huge day for electronic and dance music. Teddybears got a nice groundswell when festival organizers fabricated a pre-game interview and broadcast it over the Pavilion Stage's screens just before their dance forest debut. People saw them and realized, "Holy cow, that's a bunch of European men in crisp suits with giant bear contraptions on their head." They sounded pulsing and sludgy, like a less gloomy Rammstein. Ghostland Observatory was pinned against a West Stage-headlining gig from Deadmau5, but their crowd was vibrant, loyal, fluorescent, and they funneled experience as a band that has performed on bigger stages with university marching bands into targeted firepower.

Biggest winner: Without question, electronica was the dominant and most fashionable genre. Neon and war paint for everyone; non-stop dancing even during Calvin Harris' electro house, fist-pump-with-a-turkey-leg rager.

Other winners: People that love the smell of manure. People that love to decorate shirts with Japanese letters while simultaneously contributing to Japan's tsunami relief efforts. People that love discarding plastic water bottles on fields. Virgin Mobile and its cohorts, as this year's edition marked an all-time attendance total more than 50,000.

Biggest losers: The Best Buy emerging artists that played from noon-2p.m.. Most of their fans had been delivered in mom and dad's Nissan XTerra. More power to their sincere enthusiasm, but it felt like when studios don't hold advance screenings of movies because they must minimize negative buzz.

Other losers: Deadmau5 seemed inflated to a stature the Toronto DJ hadn't earned. He doesn't have an album out, and people just wanted to see the million-dollar head gear light up before walking out of the park. Big Sean was the default hip-hop representative and despite his cool Detroit Red Wings T-shirt, lacked the catalog and crowd-control ability to curate. He also ended songs with the sound of broken glass, something that hasn't been cool since the OutKast dropped ATLiens.

CHRIS

Yeah, the festival brand has clearly shifted in a more electronic direction in they years since it became free.  In the Pimilico Era (2006-8), there was always a big boomer act (The Who, The Police, Bob Dylan) and a big Clinton-era act (Nine Inch Nails, Stone Temple Pilots, Foo Fighters) anchoring things.  Even more than in the prior $0.00 installments, this year's turnout skewed under-25 and skewed heavily in favor of kids unafraid to spend a hot day beneath a flourescent clown wig.  The ubiquitous Deadmau5 masks and merch had me kind of curious, but I resisted the urge to check him out on account of my fear I'd be instantly Logan's-ran into powder if I got any closer to the West Stage than the Ferris wheel.  Also, I had homework that night.

Save for TV on the Radio, again, I didn't come away with from any performance smelling singed flesh on my face this year. I have fond memories of fandom-renewing or allegience-solidifying sets in Virgin/FreeFests past from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, Spoon, She & Him, Ludacris—a fairly diverse list.  I'll probably listen to more Grace Potter and Okkervil River this week than I did last week, but I can't say I had anything approaching a conversion experience this time. I also remember the underdogs of festivals past—performers you might think would be cowed by their early timeslots or just the festival format, but weren't. Amy Winehouse and St. Vincent are two from previous festivals whose sets felt like that. I didn't see anyone rise to the challenge that way this year, either.

Sweden's Teddybears are slated to weird out patrons on Saturday

On a scale between "click on a link" and "volunteer for at-risk youth," this year's Virgin Mobile FreeFest lineup is worth, say, assembling toiletry kits at a drop-in center for the homeless. What the cornerstone back-to-school party lacks in area talent and a discernible, reliable musical identity, it compensates for with exhausting marketing.

While the gimmicky stylings of Cee Lo and Deadmau5 are easy to attack, today's festival also offers a seasoned, snarling big three: TV On The Radio (touring on a romantic, quietly stellar 2011 release despite bassist Gerard Smith's heartbreaking passing in April); Okkervil River (same boat but with no reported interdepartmental deaths); and Cut Copy (wildly competent Australian synthpop, see: February's Zonoscope).

James Murphy will DJ in a forest. Patti Smith signed up to chaperon. Kanye weed-carrier turned major-label commodity Big Sean will be charismatic and inoffensive. During the day, catch an overload of electronica (the beats on Ghostland Observatory's 2006 album Paparazzi Lightning are insane). At night, The Black Keys are slated to rock out for every prophetic, shaggy, aromatic smoke enthusiast that wouldn't shut up about Magic Potion in college.

All day today, follow your brave correspondents on Twitter for up-to-the minute stats, breaking news, and profane rants.

After-School Special

Sad sacks and victims dominate DC Shorts' Showcase 1. I’d advise you to bring your tissues, but none of these films are strong enough to warrant tears.

Long Story Short: A little person falls for his tall improv partner; the awkwardness is palpable, their connection is not.

The Man in 813: This three-minute film about 24 hours in an apartment building swiftly shows how fucked up some people are.

After-School Special: Written by Neil LaBute, this is the best of Showcase 1 if only for its shocking conclusion, which might be called Shyamalan-ian if that meant anything anymore.

The Scarecrow Girl: A rural girl whose parents believe that school is only for boys teaches herself to read, which is about as gripping as it sounds.

Spiral Transition: A documentary about a 27-year-old undergoing gender transitioning is more about his mother than him, leaving you wishing it went a little deeper.

Lighthearted Boy: An amusement-park ride is an unlikely source of salvation in this mediocre story about a suicidal grandfather.

She Was the One: Pairing real audio with animation, this is no TV Funhouse but an interview with someone who lost his love on Sept. 11, 2001. It may be one of thousands of stories, but that doesn’t diminish its poignancy.

Frienemies: A mini-melodrama about BFFs and a high-school sexting scandal that deserves rotten tomatoes for occasionally stiff acting and making me write “sexting.”

The Line: This slight comedy about three Mexican men crossing the border in the trunk of a car is less puzzling for its lack of humor than for wrapping things up with “Danke Schoen.”

Thurs., Sept. 8 at 7 p.m. at E Street Cinema
Sun., Sept. 11 at 11 a.m. at Artisphere
Tues., Sept. 13 at 9 p.m. at E Street Cinema

The Museum played before acts like Carolina Chocolate Drops (gospel hoe-downs, approximately), Wanda Jackson, and Amos Lee, and a day after Gillian Welch, Earl Scruggs, and the Decemberists, whose presence explains why Newport sold out this weekend for the first time in its 52-year history. Wax's band, including a smart three-piece horn section and a Mexican son jarocho dancer, displayed its usual panache, and made a strong argument for why the festival should still exist.

Newport has something of a dual personality these days, exemplified in the divide between the "dancing section" (yes, there is actually a dancing section) and the lawn-chair section. Concomitantly, we had the nostalgia acts and the Bob Boilen-approved youngbloods; this is an oversimplification, but not as drastic a one as you might think. Heavyweights such as the Decemberists are called in to round out the crowd, but meanwhile the relevance of the proceedings (if we still worry about these things) is, I think, a healthy question.

Folk music as a rule toes the line between calling out the bullshit pieties and preserving the needful ones. Most traces of purism are gone from Newport. After a heavily distorted "Legionnaire's Lament," Colin Meloy could safely joke: "Pete did not brandish an axe for that one." (Seeger was not only present but within axe-swinging distance; for a gloss of Meloy's reference, see here.) That's a good thing: Mavis Staples kills when she has an electric band behind her, and Wanda Jackson offers a warm and witty rockabilly set—though Newport's Gospel deficit remains troubling. Still, we're talking about a festival that came of age fighting the Man (see: "This machine kills fascists"); it's hard to maintain that attitude when you're suddenly onstage at the pleasure of the Man's Prius-driving brother.

The best answer I think is when a festival—however hoary, however sponsored—makes possible the national debut of otherwise marginal or regional acts. On my ballot, this year's emergent big-timers included several fantastic female harmony groups such as The Secret Sisters and Mountain Man, a trio that combines three-part barbershop with more intricate, canticle-like arrangements to glorious effect. It would be delightful to see both groups return next year. David Wax has proven that success at the festival does not go unrewarded, though residents of Mount Pleasant may well mourn to find that he isn't knocking on their doors as often as he used to.

Photograph of David Wax at Newport by Annie Galvin

Co-producers Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz

It took over 300 hours of video filmed over the course of a year to produce The Interrupters, Steve James' latest documentary study of urban America. While James' celebrated Hoop Dreams captures the rise of inner-city kids to college basketball fame, his latest flick studies the pervasive violence that plagues Chicago. Together with journalist and author Alex Kotlowitz, James looks at violence in a new way–as an infectious disease.

Kotlowitz and James document with fervor the bold approach of one organization to combat the problem: Take ex-cons, former addicts and reformed gangsters into the streets to mediate conflict and stop the cycle of retribution. This team is aptly called “The Interrupters.” I had the opportunity to chat with James and Kotlowitz about how they selected their three characters, the access they had on the streets, and why this story deserves nearly two and a half hours of screen time.

Here's what they had to say:

WCP: How did you find this story. How did it find you?

AK: Both of us have been haunted by violence. Two of the characters in Hoop Dreams have since been murdered. Three of the kids I've been with through my book have since been killed. I kind of threw my hands up trying to figure out a way to wrangle with it. I learned about CeaseFire through a guy I played basketball with... Steve and I for a long time have been looking for something to collaborate on, and I'd been telling him the piece I'd been working on, and it was one of those rare instances for me that I felt that this magazine piece was going to do justice to the men and women around the [Interrupters] table.

SJ: I feel that way about every magazine piece [laughs]

AK: Steve read the piece and felt the same way I did and we felt if we could get the kind of access we did, it could make for a really important film.

WCP: Tell me about your decision behind a 2:24 film.

SJ: Well I have a history of making long films. Hoop Dreams is almost 3 hours. Stevie, another film I did, was about the same length. When we were starting to talk about length, what I first said to you [Kotlowitz] this could be a longer film, you were like, wait a second.... He was rightfully worried, and I was too, that you are immediately setting yourself up for a film that would have a smaller audience and less reach. I feel like a long film works when it’s a somewhat immersive experience; it pushes the audience beyond just having a film experience where you come out saying, “Oh that was good, where do you want to go for dinner.” It makes it a more substantial experience.

WCP: As a filmmaker, you are able to create such intimacy with your characters. And you pick good characters. How do you go about that process?

SJ: I find that if you’re really curious about somebody, your audience is going to be really curious about them too. Like in Alex’s article, there were people that he zeroed in on that were really great characters, some of which we thought would be really great characters for our film. But because they were more camera shy or because we were there on the streets, it would compromise the mediation—which is totally reasonable—they didn’t want to be the focus of the film. And so a lot of times with this film and with any film, it's a serendipitous process. Ameena was somebody that we wanted to focus on. You’d have to be blind to not see what a potentially great character she is... Cobe emerged by just being a guy who... kept calling us to say, “Hey I’ve got a mediation that you can come shoot,” and we would go shoot it and say, "Wow, that was pretty amazing, who is this guy?" And then we got to know him and thought, "What an interesting guy, what an interesting background."

AK: Eddie, there’s something really soulful about his story. His story is rather internal; trying to wrestle and grapple with this act he committed when he was 18. He kind of added something to the film; we didn’t want to replicate what Cobe and Ameena offered. It was also important that we included a Latino in the film. The other thing is you work on a project for two years, you want to find people that you enjoy spending time with... If you enjoy spending time with them, you can have the faith that the audience is going to enjoy spending time with them.

SJ: I also think that the best characters in film are ones that you are very curious about; that there are things about them that you are still trying to figure out. So like Ameena—how does someone whose the daughter of Jeff Fort [an imprisoned gangster] of all people, end up doing this work. You want to understand how she got from there to here. And there’s Eddie. Here’s this mild-mannered sweet very sensitive soul. How did he ever commit murder and what impact did that have on his life? Because people are complicated. And the longer you can spend with anybody, the more interesting they become.

AK: And with each of them, too, I’ll say that they didn’t reveal themselves to us right away. So for us it was a real sense of discovery to begin to peel back the layers.

SJ: A lot of times you think they’re opening up and then you interview them six months later and you’ve really gotten to know them, and you say, “Wait a second, this is the real interview.”

WCP: How involved were the characters in connecting you with the action on the street?

AK: Working on the film was incredibly collaborative because in some ways we were completely dependent. Cobe, Eddie and Ameena were our guides out there and we made it clear to them that, you know, "Here’s what we needed, if something came up, call us," which they did, and we would go out and we had this understanding that if we go out and it felt dangerous or somehow compromising their situation, or people didn’t want to be filmed, that we would, in the end, walk away. And we did on occasion. That happened. But there’s no question, you can see the kind of access we had in some of those scenes and that access is really because of Cobe and Ameena; they would go out there and set the tone. Cobe would go out there—he’s this really affable guy—he would go out there and tell people, “This is my film crew,” and keep on going about his business.

WCP: What is the takeaway or your conclusions, if you have any, about violence and the epidemic of violence?

AK: What’s cool about Cease Fire is that they take away the moral judgement. People aren’t bad people... They empathize and partly because of their own experience. You see that with Cobe on the bench with one of the brothers saying, "I know what it’s like to not have a father around." Ceasefire is onto something there. They’re also onto something looking at violence as infectious disease. I think that there’s also a lot of factors and we see that in the film. I think if anything, for me, there's a sense of hope and I will say going into this film and going into this article, I didn't feel that.

SJ: There's so many big problems to be solved in this country. And as it relates to people's lives in this city, these are problems that have been there for decades and decades. And it can be completely impossible to think, especially in the economy and the world we are living in now, when are those things going to really get fixed if ever. It's great to know what a difference an individual can make. They're not going to fix all those problems and they need to fix all those problems but it's amazing to look at Cobe and Eddie and see what individuals can do.

Bob & The Monster Director Keirda Bahruth

It doesn’t matter if you don’t know who Bob Forrest is, or recognize his alt-rock band Thelonious Monster. His is the story of '80s and '90s rock in America. Silverdocs selection Bob & The Monster is a throwback to that time, including both the sublime and the ugly, and it’s all due to a huge body of well-curated footage. Rock stars just love to document themselves. But this film is only “rock doc” in part, and purposely so, says director Keirda Bahruth. It’s also a redemptive story about the road to sobriety and an advocacy piece about drug and alcohol recovery. I had the opportunity to chat with Bahruth after the screening about how she came upon this treasure trove of footage, her day job producing reality television, and her decisions to stray beyond the behind-the-music format.

Washington City Paper: How did you find this topic or how did it find you?

Keirda Bahruth: I found Bob at the record store. I loved Thelonious Monster as a kid. Bob put out a record with a new band called The Bicycle Thief, which was a very beautiful, personal autobiographical record. I hadn’t heard Theolonious Monster in a long time so once I heard that record I was like, “oh yeah that’s Bob Forrest from Thelonious Monster! That guy was so great.” This record unfolded through the speakers about his path and what he had done and that he was washing dishes and he was helping people recover from drug and alcohol addiction and it was really a beautiful record and so it just stuck with me. And after—I’d say it was probably a month—I went to my partner at the time [husband and producer Rick Ballard] and I said I think there’s a film there. There’s a lot of really interesting people attached to the story and Bob is so charismatic, let’s approach him. And so we did. That was in 2004. I told him it would take about two years. And it took six-and-a-half.

WCP: Why did it take so long? And tell us about your timeline for the film.

KB: It took so long because of money. We were never able to secure the funds that were needed. Rick and I were the camera operators, we were the editors in the beginning. We did everything. We kept our day jobs and kept shooting and showing up whenever we could. A few years went by and I produced a film by Ondi Timoner called We Live in Public. And the film ended up winning Sundance in 2009. My network of people really opened up as a result of the success of that film. So I think people trusted me a little bit more and I was able to get a little bit of money. I met my editor while we were doing We Live in Public—Josh Altman—and we really just connected and he loved Bob’s story. So from that it really accelerated. From 2009 to our finish was just pushing and pushing and pushing and so we were editing for a year-and-a-half and continuing to shoot Bob opening up Hollywood Recovery Services until we completed it. And we got a call from SXSW that we would have our premiere there.

WCP: I see two documentaries in this one film. There’s the “rock doc”, an entire genre in itself, and then there’s the addiction advocacy doc. What was the intention going in? Did you have the concept to fuse these or were you leaning for one more than the other?

KB: I wanted to be able to transcend the behind-the-music format. A lot of people were saying “this is a very behind-the0music story” but obviously no one has ever heard of Bob Forrest so it couldn’t be behind the music because you don’t really know who he is or care...I wanted to tell a bigger story.  The “rock doc” part of his story is really his life so I couldn’t break away from that part of if I wanted to because that really is his story. That’s what happened. And it went from that chaos to ending up in front of 200,000 and falling apart on stage to shooting drugs with AIDS-infected needles to washing dishes at a restaurant. By nature of his story, that is what happened. His life got a lot quieter. And I think that happens for a lot of people. So I wanted to just be true to what the story was rather than make it this racing fast-paced rock doc and to be true to what Bob’s life is.

WCP: I find it interesting with rockers and musicians in general, is that they have this obsession with documenting themselves. And you had some fantastic footage dating back to the '80s and '90s. Tell me about the process of gathering that.

KB: We got a lot of the archival at different stages in the filmmaking. The opening sequence that we animated over black and white footage, that is a music video that was shot by Jane Simpson and Tina Silvey who were these two filmmakers in the '80s who were doing a lot of the cool stuff with like Concrete Blonde and creating a lot of that frenetic MTV style...[They] came to us and said you can have this footage gratis. They literally pulled it out of a storage unit and handed over the reels because they were just really happy to have someone that was telling Bob’s story. That’s the gist of really most of the footage...The best footage we got came from Pete Weiss, who was the drummer of the band that was in the film. He donated some tapes of them that he had shot while he was on the road. [K.K] Barrett shot a lot of the early stuff of Bob with his son...He is now an art director for Spike Jonze. He did Where the Wild Things Are. All these people really are talented people on the scene who were either making videos themselves, or were becoming cameramen, becoming wardrobe stylists...Another great jewel that we happened upon was Jon Huck who was a founding member of Thelonious Monster. He pulled out a VHS tape of them recording their first demo with Flea [of Red Hot Chili Peppers]. And that was shot by Bill Pope who went on to shoot The Matrix. He’s a huge cinematographer. Months and months and months would go by and we’d just get this great footage and not alter where the story was going, but we’d have to find a place for it...If I had footage that equaled the story that I was telling then I could show that. If I didn’t, then [I used] stop-motion animation and line-drawing animation.

WCP: Tell me about your background. You mentioned you had a day job while making this film.

KB: Television. I’ve been television and film out of high school. Whether I was in music videos or film. I worked at Saturday Night Live for a long time, which was really a breeding ground for my interest in documentary because I used to shoot behind-the-scenes for SNL...So I worked there for years and then I moved to California and got involved in reality television and so I’ve produced and directed shows from dating shoes to survive-this shows to whatever kind of reality trend is happening at the time. And that’s what’s really paid my bills for a long time.

The film screens at Silverdocs Film Festival on Saturday, June 25 at 6:15 p.m. in AFI Silver 3.