The
teenage revolution was in full force on the fall 1964 night that Kit Lambert
and Chris Stamp stumbled into the Railway Tavern, a London pub where a band
called the High Numbers was playing and mods were gyrating. It was London's
Swinging '60s, with its subculture explosion and stylish youths.
Such is
the scene, glimpsed in footage shot that night, at the beginning of the
riotously entertaining new documentary “Lambert & Stamp.” Lambert and Stamp
were assistant film directors, frustrated by not ascending to the director's
chair, but full of wild ideas. They wanted to find a band to make a film about,
but their plans had wider cultural aspirations: “a mad (expletive) concoction
of stuff,” says Stamp in the film.
The
frenetic energy and loud rhythm and blues riffs of the High Numbers hit like a
thunderclap, even if they lacked in looks. (Later, some would worry that they
were too ugly to make it big.) When Lambert and Stamp became their managers,
they urged them to take an earlier, abandoned name: The Who.
The
infatuation was mutual. Lambert and Stamp had zero knowledge of the music
business, but they were a captivating duo. Lambert, the son of a famous
conductor and an Oxford grad, was posh, erudite and gay at a time when
homosexuality was illegal in Britain. Stamp, the brother of the actor Terence
Stamp, was a dashing East End Cockney, the son of a tug boat captain. Neither
cared a lick for convention.
“I loved
them immediately,” says Pete Townshend, the guitarist and songwriter of The
Who, in the film. “They changed my life forever.”
Lambert
and Stamp would mold The Who (among other things they encouraged the
songwriting of Townshend) into one of the great rock 'n' roll bands. And it all
started with an idea that, as Townshend says in the documentary, was intended
to “blow itself up” in a year or two.
“Lambert
& Stamp,” the directorial debut of James D. Cooper, a veteran
cinematographer, is an intimate rock documentary that eludes most of the
standard beats of the genre. By focusing on the managers — the band's so-called
fifth and sixth members, “the shell of the egg” as singer Roger Daltrey says —
the movie takes a wider view, capturing the composite nature of creative
invention and cultural change.
It's
almost all depicted in the film in black and white: gritty in period footage,
classy in contemporary interviews. Stamp died in 2012, but was interviewed
extensively before passing away. Lambert, though, died in 1981. His presence
(the more magnetic and fascinating of the two) hovers over the film from older
footage.
“Lambert
& Stamp” hums frantically in the first half with the spirit of teen
rebellion that propelled both The Who and its unconventional orchestrators.
(Daltrey, Townshend says in a way that could only be cutting, was the only
“conventional” figure of the bunch.) But the film, perhaps inevitably, subsides
in the second half, as the familiar fallout of fame — drugs, death, disputes
over a film of the rock opera “Tommy” — wrecks the relationships.
“Anyway,
anyhow, anywhere I choose,” was the anthem The Who sang, and their managers
(who signed Jimi Hendrix to a record deal before actually having a record
label) were perfect representatives of the song.
Their
genius was in realizing the sea change that was happening. “You don't market TO
them. You market THEM,” Townshend says of the new audience relationship.
Speaking to a skeptical news program, in French no less, Lambert predicts that
the '60s Mod scene was no mere fad, but a youth movement that would regenerate
with every generation. Indeed, the Who got older; the kids stayed the same age.
“Lambert
& Stamp,” a Sony Pictures Classics release, is rated R by the Motion
Picture Association of America for “language, some drug content and brief
nudity.” Running time: 117 minutes. Three stars out of four.
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