New York City's Tribeca Film Festival will premiere new rock documentaries on the Rolling Stones' Ron Wood — Somebody Up There Likes Me; Beach Boy Brian Wilson — Long Promised Road; and the self titled retrospective on the Go-Go's. Rolling Stone reported the Go-Go's will speak and perform after their film's premiere. The 2020 Tribeca Film Festival runs from April 15th through the 26th.
Festival Director Cara Cusumano said in a statement: “This year’s festival embraces the unique power of film to bring people together — whether that’s literally the communal experience of watching a film in a packed theater or the more intangible way a great film can make you empathize with a stranger’s struggle. In an election year where we will go to the polls to make big decisions about our future together, these films are an opportunity for connection and understanding.”
Ron Wood, who first recorded with the Rolling Stones in 1974 and toured with the band the following year, still remembers what it was like to be one of the band's original legion of early British fans: “Yeah, well, I still look at it from a far, y'know? It's a bit like. . . it's very surreal to be in this unit where you used to run home from school to watch on the telly, going (claps hands): 'I'm gonna be in that band!' — Y'know, to actually be in that band.”
We asked Brian Wilson about relocating the Beach Boys in 1967 from Hollywood's top professional studios into his Bel Air home on Bellagio Road — the band's musical headquarters for the next five years: “Well, I wanted to have a home environment trip, where we could record at my house, so we had an engineer build a studio in our den; convert it into a studio. We could function easier, because we were at home at our house. So, the guys knew the house and they knew the studio so they were able to play good.”
Belinda Carlisle is but one of rock's great rags-to-riches stories, going from on the streets of the Sunset Strip to global superstardom: “We formed the Go-Go's in 1978, broke up the band in 1984. We wrote our own material and played it and it was a 'Cinderella' story. We started from nothing and didn't know how to play our instruments and went to the top.”