Smells Like Team Spirit

Sound City

*** out of **** 

Directed by: Dave Grohl

Running time: 108 minutes

When Dave Grohl took the Grammy stage in 2012, he slammed the artificiality of the record industry in his acceptance speech.

“Rather than go to the best studio in the world down the street in Hollywood… we made [Wasting Light] in my garage with some microphones and a tape machine,” Grohl said, beaming. “This award means a lot because it shows the human element of making music is what’s most important. It’s not about being perfect. It’s not about sounding absolutely correct. It’s not about what goes on in a computer.”

Fast forward one year, and Grohl appears at the Grammys to plug Sound City, a loving ode to the run-down recording studio in Van Nuys that birthed many of rock and roll’s most enduring acts, without the need for manufacturing mayhem via AutoTune or ProTools.

This is Grohl’s first turn as a director, and this documentary is a mostly smooth transition. Although he appears in the film with a flurry of Hall of Famers who recorded at the famed studio – including members from Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, as well as Neil Young and Rick Springfield – the film’s main star is Sound City’s soundboard.

The crisp-sounding, handmade Neve Console, exalted by nearly all the rock and roll legends interviewed, was an analog mixer. It made no alterations from what was recorded in the studio, despite its numerous buttons and controls (so many that Neil Young calls it “the Enterprise on steroids").

Sound City Studios does not look like a place where rock and roll history was made. Located in a dumpy lot in Van Nuys, California, the studio looks like an old basement, with shag carpet on the walls and whiskey stains on the floors. However, the frames of Platinum records marking the walls give a different impression.

Grohl’s film spends its first two thirds compiling some fascinating tidbits from the studio’s early days, when owners Tom Skeeter and Joe Gottfried avoided early debt by opening the space to rock acts. One of the studio's early successes was an LP by Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. When Mick Fleetwood listened in on this studio session, the music captivated him. Fleetwood decided to join forces with the duo and the rest is music history.

As a high-fidelity heaven for recording artists, who heap bastions of praise on it, Sound City delivered a key component that these musicans thrived for: sound of the purest kind. The undercurrents of sweet rock and roll swept through the decaying studio, a church for those praying to become rock Gods.

The acoustics of the studios also made it a fantastic place to record drums, Grohl exalts. Tom Petty holds the Van Nuys studio in a similar regard. Since there was no manipulation of sound allowed on the Neve, which many studios had started offering during the shift to digital recording in the 1980s, there was no place for recording artists to hide their mistakes at Sound City Studios.

For a place so deeply fused with the fierce growls and fury of rock and roll, Grohl rambles on about the human feel that the studio brought out, which he says speaks to a deeper truth hidden within the music. Grohl recorded Nevermind as a member of Nirvana there, helping to revitalize the then-struggling studio.

For its first two thirds, Sound City is an insightful and entertaining ode to the analog era of making music. The last third, which takes place at Grohl’s personal studio after the rocker-turned-director acquired Sound City’s Neve console, has the immediacy of a DVD bonus feature and is mainly featured to promote the film’s soundtrack.

A few diehard music fans will enjoy the interplay between Grohl and other artists who come to jam, such as Paul McCartney and Trent Reznor, but it adds nothing to the subject of the film. These scenes feel like the second-disc of outtakes in a reissued classic album: cool for the most hardcore music aficionados, senseless filler for everyone else. Talk about selling out immediately after a major success.