Christ. Bruce Really DOES Hafta Do Everything Himself

I've long bitched and moaned about books and docs about albums that end up actually saying nothing about the recordings themselves; entire books have been written about, say, Exile On Main Street that page after page tell us "Keith was wasted!! Mick was aloof!" over and over. The Replacements book pissed me off in the same way:

So now we have a book, and 95% of it is 1) fans gushing and going about how much they meant to them and 2) story after story of “we went to the show, they were wasted, it was awesome!!!” We get it. Seems to me like the author could’ve boiled all that down to a small chapter; for once in a fucking rock n roll band book can we hear something about the songs themselves? How they were written and, as importantly, how they were recorded, please? I’d guess off the top of my head that each album has MAYBE a page worth of info/anecdotes, then it’s straight back to “Paul was a contrarian!! They were drunk!!” Lotta Hullaballoo about Tim being their major label debut, and then a single quote about the gotdam thing. Westerberg spends a sentence bitching about Tommy Ramone’s mix of the album. Really? Well, can you do a LITTLE bit of work and find out more about that? I would think that would be a big deal: band leader hates the mix of their big go-for-it album. Why did he? What’d he try to do about it?

And now it looks like the upcoming Bruce doc on the making of Darkness on the Edge of Town will actually, finally, deliver what I've been bitching for:

"Lots of rock & roll movies are about something [besides artistry] -- substance abuse, ego problems or the glamour of being a rock star," Powers explains. "What's missing from those films is an emphasis on what makes us interested in this artist, their creative process. The strength of this movie is that is just concentrates on the making of just one album. There's not even much concert footage."