On the Little Steven Documentary, "Disciple"
The question I kept asking myself when thinking about the documentary was, "Why does it matter?"
Yes, I know I am months late to watching the SVZ documentary, but I am one of those people who subscribes to cable services on an as-needed basis. I looked around to see what people had been saying about it, which was not much, and friends I texted about it replied with things like "I gotta watch that" so I know it is not just me that is a little late to this, which is why we are here right now. And I wasn't going to write about it and instead was going to finally write my piece on Men Without Women or about "I Don't Want To Go Home" and I realized all of these things can exist in the world and that too many people I know haven't yet watched this, and should.
You do, in fact, gotta watch this, and it's not going to be for the reasons that you think you do. I'm personally thrilled that there is footage of Stevie's wedding to Maureen, because for years all we knew about it was what we read in Rolling Stone and from the few photos we saw: Bruce as best man, Little Richard as the officiant, Percy Sledge sang "When A Man Loves A Woman," various E Streeters in tuxedos, Jimmy Iovine as an usher.
"It was a classic Steven production." - B. Springsteen
But that ended up being trivial compared to the depth and breadth of the film, which is divided into 4 segments: Salvation, Revolution, Evolution, Revelations. It's not strictly linear, but it is assembled in a way that makes sense, and provides context without spending time over-explaining. If you're reading this newsletter, it's highly likely that you know a lot of it already, or have heard about it, and you'll nod your head through the early history, and the Jukes, and that moment in the studio for Born to Run where he sings the horn lines to the Brecker Brothers, and then his departure from the E Street Band, where SVZ says, repeatedly, that he made a colossal mistake, and at one point decided that he may have ruined his life, which is how he found himself on an airplane headed for South Africa where he was going to be smuggled in to the homelands to meet with the ANC. "I'd blown my life," he says. "15 years in the E Street Band."
I wasn't prepared for that. I was not.
