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Saturday night marked SIFF 2013’s first screening of Twenty Feet from Stardom, the new documentary chronicling the careers of several of the music industry’s greatest backup vocalists. It’s a big, handsome, impeccably crafted, state-of-the-art Cadillac of a doc that puts a loving focus on practitioners of an unheralded (and in these days of Autotuning and studio overdubs, vanishing) art form.
Director Morgan Neville follows several of these singers, tracing the ups and downs of everyone from Darlene Love (a legendary singer on several Phil-Spector girl-group pop symphonies, who was reduced to cleaning houses before a late-career resurgence and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction) to Lisa Fischer (a powerhouse who tasted solo success with the 1991 hit single, “How Can I Ease the Pain,” only to retreat happily to the background as a successful backup singer for Sting).
Neville’s an old pro at music docs, but Twenty Feet might be his best. It’s a welcome female-dominated ensemble piece that presents an array of distinctive, well-rounded characters. And it points up two elements frequently overlooked by music historians and fans alike, up until recently. One, the shades and coloring offered by these vocalists often made indelible marks on scores of classic rock and pop songs (can you possibly imagine the Stones’ apocalyptic classic, “Gimme Shelter,” without Merry Clayton’s stratospheric guest vocals?); and two, but for fate intervening, any of these women coulda been superstars.
Two of the movie’s subjects — Clayton and fellow singer Tata Vega — took to the red carpet at the Egyptian Theatre, along with Neville. The three of them also participated in a post-film Q&A, with a super-special surprise: Both women sang, superstar-karaoke-style for the packed house of filmgoers. Vega brought the house down with a rendition of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” while Clayton, brassy and sassy as all get-out, tore the roof off with a cover of an old Leon Russell chestnut (whose title, alas, escapes me). As Vega sang with gusto, it may indeed be a man’s man’s man’s world, but it ain’t nothin’ without a woman or a girl.
The chestnut is:”A Song for You”