This could have been a riveting plunge into an era and label boasting a diverse and often explosive roster, but instead it just becomes another TV documentary on the mediocre pile. The film is shot with Jac Holzman as he chronologically goes through Elektra’s releases with a bit of history and some archive clips thrown in. The problem is that it’s an hour long, so band’s that warrant an entire documentary on them alone sometimes only get two or three minutes. This results in a frustrating and lackadaisical documentary.
On Love and their seminal album ‘Forever Changes’ we are given a brief story as to how he found them, Arthur Lee is called a genius, and we see some footage from a reformed Love on Jools Holland in 2003... then onto The Stooges. The film runs like this throughout, i.e. just snapshots. It seems that Holzman’s personal taste differs largely from the perceived image of the label, focusing on artists such as Bread and Queen as epitomes of the label’s artistic peak, rather than The Doors, Nico and The Stooges, as many would believe.
The film also lacks any other real artists’ insight, Jackson Browne being the only real contributor throughout. The result is a patchy, rushed, and largely uneventful documentary. The visual equivalent of a skim read. There are glimpses of intrigue but they pass too quickly. The image of a young Jac Holzman delivering records to shops on the back of his motorbike is a smile-inducing image, capturing the essence of passion, DIY, and youthful hope of 1960s American counterculture. The label has been renamed, merged, sold and resold over the years, so it has somewhat lost its way, but as of 2009 it is back in its closest incarnation since the original. BBC4 have made some wonderful music docs over the past few years, but usually the best ones have come from a natural proclivity to make and discover, whereas ‘The Man Who Recorded America’ feels like it serves too much of a purpose - an obligation rather than an inclination - and as a result we are not really any better off for seeing it.