Review

Louder than Love

Rating: Three stars

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If you could make it there, you could make it anywhere. Alice Cooper wasn’t talking about New York. “You couldn’t just be a hard rock band. You had to be a hard rock band with an exclamation point!” the legendary rocker says, referring to the star of Tony D’Annunzio’s homage to the Grande Ballroom, Detroit’s fabled rock and roll concert hall of the late 1960s. This rough-edged flashback will best be appreciated by rock aficianados as familiar with the history of the Detroit music scene’s iconic attractions like house band MC5 and Iggy Pop and the Stooges as with Cream, Jethro Tull, Janis Joplin, Grand Funk Railroad and three bands that once shared a $3-a-ticket triple-bill there —The Who, Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac. There’s some great stuff here, including trippy archival photos and posters; rare footage of Pete Townshend and his Who bandmates previewing their rock opera Tommy; and fascinating flashbacks by denizens from a middle-age groupie who recalls “communng” with a pig while both were on LSD to Russ Gibb, the schoolteacher-turned-rock impresario who launched the Grande after an inspiring visit to The Fillmore, San Francisco’s psychedelic ballroom. Colourful commentary from aging musical icons — Cooper, Roger Daltrey, Ted Nugent, B.B. King and more — add to the fascination factor. It compensates for irritating reduncancy as one subject after another sings its praises — we get it, the place rocked — and a gritty soundtrack more intrusive than helpful in recapturing the psychedelic rock that defined this short-lived Motor City phenomenon.

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