It’s a time capsule from the halcyon days of hard rock, before the iPhone, “American Idol” and the MP3 audio format changed everything in the music business.
The Best Summer, which premiered Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival, is a documentary film directed by Tamra Davis that captures powerful moments from Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys, Foo Fighters, Pavement, Rancid, Beck, Bikini Kill, Kim Deal’s The Amps and other influential alternative artists of the 1990s.
The 90-minute film was assembled from footage Davis shot DIY-style with a Sony Hi8 video camera while the band’s collection toured Australia at the Lollapalooza-style Summersalt Festival in December 1995 and January 1996. Sonic Youth, Beastie Boys, and Foo Fighters then continued to perform in Southeast Asia, promoted by MTV International to promote its newly launched television channel in the region.
“It was a very tiring tour for me. I remember it well, and it was one of the most fun tours I’ve ever been on,” said Sonic Youth co-founder Kim Gordon. Gordon spoke to Variety alongside Davis and Bikini Kill lead Kathleen Hanna in an interview hours before the film premiered as part of Sundance’s Midnight section.
“When I watch this movie, I definitely feel a lot of emotions about that time, but to be honest, all I remember is that it was fun,” Gordon said. “Thirty years ago we didn’t have high-definition, so I was really happy that everyone could see so well.”
At the time, Davis was a rising star helmer known for Chris Rock’s 1993 dark comedy “CB4” and Adam Sandler’s 1995 hit “Billy Madison.” She had just married Beastie Boys drummer Michael Diamond (aka Mike D) when the tour began. Her initial idea was to create a tour diary to give to musicians as a memento of their Australian summer treks. But dozens of Hi8 tapes ended up sitting in boxes in her house for decades. Davis reviewed the material last year after picking up the box while evacuating her Malibu home during the Palisades firestorm.
Davis’ insider position with the musicians gives the long concert clips on Best Summer a backstage feel. Hannah is a central figure in “The Best Summer,” helping Davis conduct pre- and post-show interviews with musicians, particularly Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Dave Grohl and Pat Smear of the Foo Fighters, Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, Adam Horowitz, and Diamond. The film’s audio and video quality match the raw power of the music of the popular rock band at its peak, or even the early Beck and Foo Fighters.
“The Best of Summer” director Tamra Davis and Bikini Kill leader Kathleen Hanna (1996)
“[The original tapes]were not preserved in any way,” Davis told Variety. While the live performance footage sounded great, some of the conversational interviews needed to be cleaned up using modern audio tools.
“After I finished the first few cuts, I sent it to the sound guy I had just worked with on another film,” she said. “They were able to turn some knobs, but then it was almost too clear. I had to add some of the sound because when we’re talking in a room, we love hearing a party going on next door. If we’re not having fun in this room, we wanted people to feel like there’s a party going on next door. That’s what the tour was like.”
“Best Summer” chronicles a mid-1990s turning point for post-punk and alternative rock musicians. At the time, their songs had spread far and wide thanks to the mighty MTV and college radio, but social media had yet to put them in a 24/7 goldfish bowl.
“There was a sense of self-consciousness that we didn’t need to have because we weren’t on camera all the time,” Hannah told Variety. “It was kind of a novelty for Tamra to have a camera. Not everyone had a camera. So we were like, ‘Look, this is a cool tool we can play with. We should do something with it.'”
Mr. Davis emphasizes that there was no elaborate production system. All video and audio seen and heard on “Best Summer” is from her Hi8 camcorder. It’s extreme DIY, and that’s part of what makes this movie so special 30 years later.
“We were just big girls, dancing into people’s dressing rooms and saying, ‘Hey, I have a question for you,'” Davis says. They crisscrossed Australia, helping to fill the hours of downtime between shows. “If we didn’t do that, it would be like making up some weird game to play in pool,” Hannah said.
Initially, a separate documentary production crew accompanied the Summerthought trek, but they didn’t mesh well with the musicians. Hannah asks questions on camera, prompting candid and compelling answers from fellow artists.
“I thought, ‘I could do a better job than that,’ so we just started going behind the scenes and asking people questions,” Hannah recalls. “It reminded me how important it is to be obnoxious. It’s not about being rude to people or taking up too much space, it’s about being someone like Tamra who makes things happen. She always makes things happen. I can say, ‘I could do more,’ and then nothing happens. But she was like, ‘No, let’s do it.'”
The film also features a glimpse of Sonic Youth’s heir, Coco Gordon Moore. He was already a tour veteran at 18 months old.
Gordon said of her daughter, who is now 31 years old, “I really enjoyed watching the footage of Coco when she was a baby.”
From Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Amps’ Kim Deal’s “The Best Summer”
Touring with a toddler wasn’t as difficult as I thought. As far as Gordon was concerned, she had no choice.
“She went on her first tour at seven months old, which meant I couldn’t leave her,” Gordon said. “The only thing that scared me was when I went to Jakarta, I read that the sewers were open. At that time,[Koko]was obsessed with throwing her pacifier on the ground. So I was obsessed with keeping it clean.”
Another sentimental aspect of “The Best Summer” for Gordon is the sight of old Sonic Youth equipment, including her favorite Fender bass guitar, which was stolen from the band several years after touring.
“It happens with so many bands. It’s like a rite of passage,” Gordon said. “But that’s one of the great things about ‘The Best Summer,'” she said.
The film also reminded Gordon of the stark contrast in how bands and musicians built their careers a generation ago. Sonic Youth went their separate ways in 2011. Gordon will release a new album, “Play Me,” on Matador Records in March.
“Young bands and young musicians today don’t want to get in a van and tour endlessly and stuff like that, and that’s kind of what we used to do,” she said. “That’s a big difference.”
Hannah, who was the focus of the 2013 documentary The Punk Singer, believes the reason many musicians no longer embrace the cross-country touring mentality of the 1980s and 1990s has something to do with America’s overall affordability crisis.
“I feel like a lot of bands can’t afford to tour,” Hannah says. “Rent is too high. Economically it’s a different world, and it’s a different world in terms of people’s sense of being a brand. We didn’t have the word ‘branding.'” There was no social media. I didn’t feel like I needed to protect my personal brand or anything. ”
Hanna believes that fans of Davis’ Bikini Kill and her signature song “Rebel Girl” were instrumental in getting the Washington state-based organization added to the Summer Thought bill. Back in 1995, Bikini Kill was far less well-known than other touring bands.
“We had never played a festival before, and we didn’t have a manager or a booking agent. We were just invited because Tamra liked the band and told[her husband]Mike about our band,” Hannah said. “My life changed because Tamra liked the single we put out.”
Suddenly, “it seemed like we were all part of this really great musical conversation,” Hannah added.
For Hannah, watching “The Best Summer” is especially emotional. Because it depicts the first spark of a romance with Horowitz (aka Ad Rock) of the Beastie Boys.
“It’s like a video of the moment I fell in love with him,” she said. The two became a couple soon after the Summerthought trek. They married in 2006.
“The Best Summer” Beck (left) and Mike D. (right)
Davis and Gordon admitted that they played a behind-the-scenes role in bringing Hanna and Horowitz together.
“We were matchmakers,” Davis said. “We were like, ‘Let’s put these two together,’ because we love both of them. And we knew that Adam was struggling[he was in the midst of troubled marriages to actress Ione Skye]and we were like, ‘This is the best woman for you. It seems like an unlikely combination, but this is the best woman for you.'”
In the performance scene, Beastie Boys stand out as an exciting mix of hip-hop and hard rock. The trio’s closeness is evident both on stage and off. And for those who were close to the band, it’s moving to see Adam Yauch, aka MCA, in his prime. Yauch died of cancer in 2012 at the age of 47.
“When I first saw it cut in its entirety, I couldn’t stop crying at the end because it was like remembering this beautiful time and all the people and how precious it was,” Davis said.
Davis has long been juggling feature films and documentaries (notably 2010’s “Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child”) with television directing work on episodic shows ranging from “Grey’s Anatomy” to “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” To date, she has worked with editor Jessica Hernandez to self-fund the production of “Best Summer.” Music industry veteran Shelby Mead and Davis’ longtime attorney Linda Richter also joined as producer and executive producer, respectively. Late last year, Davis scrambled to get music permission from the film’s artists in time for the film’s premiere at Sundance. It wasn’t a hard sell.
“It took four or five days to get the movie to everyone and get their approval,” Davis said. “Everyone was so great. Everyone saw it right away and approved of it.”
When Davis pitches “The Best Summer” to buyers, he has a strong vision for the optimal distribution plan. The first step is to release it in theaters and allow people to watch it in a communal environment, like a concert experience.
“There’s a lot of things that can cross over. Almost all of these bands are still active in different versions. I feel like there’s a lot of things that can happen with that,” she said. “I want to sell to a company that supports my music. I want a plan. I don’t want to sell just for the money. This is my life. I just believe I can find someone who is passionate about this world and its music and wants to put it out there.”
Davis was offered no shortage of projects to direct or direct. But at 60 years old, it makes sense that she’s making her film debut at Sundance, especially in a film that has as much TLC and DIY-style as she put into The Best of Summer.
“One girl can make an entire movie. We shoot it all with one woman,” Davis said. “I’m so excited to think that I can be 60 years old and have a movie at Sundance. Women, I’m crazy about this crazy age thing. What I want women to know is that your career doesn’t end when you’re 60. You can still do movies at Sundance. We’re still filmmakers. At this age, they’re still making movies. And women should still be there and be represented.”
