MUSIC DOCUMENTARIES

These 10 cool music documentaries range from forgotten to lost forever

The best thing the pandemic has done for us is the chance to enrich ourselves. Books to read. Music to listen to. Movies to watch. Music documentaries hit all three of those fields quite nicely. There’s nothing like a documentary about a genre, an era or an artist to pique your curiosity. But for each fascinating project where film and music intersect, there’s one that never found an audience. Even worse are the projects whose unedited reels are slowly disintegrating in a warehouse somewhere.

This video is about some music documentaries that for whatever reason, belong to history. Perhaps the directors miscalculated how “important” their subjects actually were. Maybe the artists involved didn’t like the way they were portrayed. There’s a myriad of reasons why some music documentaries go out into the world and flourish. But sometimes the sordid history of a project is far more interesting than the project itself.

Read more: Watch Brian Baker stir the pot while making “Seeing Red” sauce

Our list features some true rock paragons. There’s a highly influential band that never got their due, but watched as everybody cribbed from their playbook. Another features a “legendary” punk band that we never ever hear people talk about. (But it’s got some weird stuff in it.) We namecheck a classic proto-punk band whose music documentary almost made it to the shops. That is, until the producers realized they didn’t get the music clearances they needed. Another one of these music documentaries didn’t get song clearances, and they still made the damn thing. And yet another one reportedly suffers from having too much footage.

Remember those days when a band would release an album and then six weeks later, they’d re-release it with a special DVD added? They had one friend they took with them on Warped one year who had a camcorder and had him document their pirate ship that summer. Admittedly, most of those DVDs were pretty damn tedious. But most of the ones on our list are even worse. Why? Because we may never see them in the first place. Raise your goblet of rock to the moments that will forever elude us all.