All Access To ALL ACCESS

All Access To ALL ACCESS
MODE’s Exclusive Interview with Shapiro and DeCurtis

by Benjy Eisen

I remember the first time I went to see live music. It was at Hersheypark Stadium on July 23, 1987. My heartbeat doubled, my palms clammed up; I was nearly sweating from excitement. My mom read a book in the seat next to me while I danced and howled and laughed myself silly at the sounds that were scintillating from the speakers, commanded by the guys on stage. How can this be happening? How can it be doing this? The music was not only magical; it was mystical. It was filled with possibility and freedom. Afterwards, I made my mom wait in the bleachers while I naively asked the security guards if they would let me get backstage. The music, the lights, the electricity, the thousands of lighters, the energy between band and audience — all combined, it floored me. I was 12 years old at the time. I still get floored at shows, when the elements align just right.
Music had brought me to life, and in doing so it became larger than life. Nowhere has that immortality and that hugeness been so animated, so undeniable, as it is in All Access, a new IMAX film that premiered at the Whitaker Center on April 6. I was at that premiere. My heartbeat doubled, my palms clammed up — I was floored. Watching some of my favorite musicians appear on a screen that is six stories high, 80 feet wide, it was like I was somehow holodecked to nine different concerts in one hour.

During a phone conversation I had with Anthony DeCurtis a couple days later, he reflected on the experience: “It’s a physical version of what I feel like when I go to a show and I’m listening to music that I’m really into, where I just feel transported and surrounded.”

Anthony DeCurtis is plenty familiar with that feeling. He, too, is a music fan. He also is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine. “I think there’s a lot of ways in which people encounter music these days that is kind of distanced and removed. Stuff that’s out there right now is packaged and marketed and presented in a way that seems kind of one-dimensional to me. We wanted, in the movie, to get as close as you could possibly get to that rush that you get when you’re at a show.”

For All Access, DeCurtis conducted interviews with all of the artists, the fruits of which are interspersed between the performances. We see Kid Rock talk about developing his skill as an artist, Macy Gray talk about growing up with music, Moby look back at some of the concerts he’s been to. These are people that not only give the rush, they get it, too.

The film was conceived and produced by brothers Jon and Pete Shapiro. Pete also served as the musical director for the film. “A lot of shows today are very choreographed and are the same night after night,” he says, “The idea of the movie was to demonstrate the power and the magic of live music, and to do it with the best format available.”

IMAX is indeed the best format available. The IMAX negative is 10 times the size of standard motion picture film. Imagine seeing George Clinton’s fangled funkified head stretched six stories high and 80 feet wide! Dreadlocks the size of limousines! A face the size of Godzilla! Think of it!
Most IMAX films have utilized this magnificent screen size to take the audience to geographic wonderlands. “Films on beavers and dolphins and the sea and space and mountains are great,” admits Pete, “but they don’t fully take advantage of the sound system.” IMAX’s six-channel 16,000 watt wrap-around system makes dinosaurs out of DDS, THX, and just about anything else theatrically.
All Access does sound incredible. There are nine sparkling performances by 15 artists and bands; each one passionate, each one inspired. A giant town-house sized Sting performs “Desert Rose” as a duet with international rai star Cheb Mami. Funk pioneers George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic bring modern day hip-hop queen Mary J. Blige onstage for a medley of P-Funk classics. Superstar Dave Matthews teams up with soul legend Al Green for “Take Me To The River.” On a sound stage by herself, Sheryl Crow sits with an acoustic guitar and strums, “If It Makes You Happy.” Kid Rock, Macy Gray, and Moby take turns with the torch, too. Carlos Santana passes it on to Matchbox 20 lead singer Rob Thomas as the two pair up on their Grammy award winning ultra-smash “Smooth.”

So, All Access is a film about live music (“I hope people will feel more like they went to see a show than a movie,” Pete told me). But it is not just a collection of outstanding performances. It follows the performers in the moments before and after in hopes of tapping into the mystery.

For one hour we are able to don invisibility cloaks and go places usually off-limits. Pete explains, “People love to go backstage even when nothing’s really exciting, you just see someone back there drinking a beer or something … so we tried to give that feeling as well as the feeling of being on stage, as well as the feeling of being in the front row, and the back row. IMAX can take you where you can’t go in real life. It can take you to the top of Everest, it can take you under the water off the Australian Coast, and the idea for this was to go to a concert that you could not see in real life.”

The centerpiece of the film is a first-time collaboration between B.B. King, Trey Anastasio (from Phish) and hip-hoppers The Roots. They had all just met moments before the shoot. The performance was 100 percent magic. It was the moment Pete Shapiro was most proud of. It was an idea he had come up with, and one that had its share of doubters.

“I argued against it,” laughs Anthony DeCurtis, after singling it out as the musical highlight, “The lesson is about taking risks, which is also part of what performing live is about. Somebody tries something and suddenly you’re in a place nobody knew you were going to go. In many ways, I feel like that performance got at the essence of what the movie itself, and the project itself, was trying to do.”
The lights in the Whitaker Center’s IMAX Theater flick on. The movie ends. The fantastic sound is gone. Once again, I sit floored. And, this time, I didn’t even need to make my mom wait in the bleachers.

CLICK HERE, for a candid Q&A with Pete Shapiro and Anthony DeCurtis.