John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Alice Cooper, and a Host of Even Earlier acts are Booked in Vintage Rock Festival doc.

DIRECTED BY RON CHAPMAN/2022

DVD STREET DATE: JULY 2, 2024/GREENWICH ENTERTAINMENT (via Kino Lorber)

A lot went down in the summer of ‘69.  Music festivals erupted onto the scene with Summer of Love fervor, elevating the moment into the stuff of twentieth-century legend.  Among the noteworthy festivals was the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival, a one-day on-and-done offering that was held on September 13, 1969.

The organizers squeezed a lot into that single day.  Not only did the Rock and Roll Revival revive earlier icons Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Gene Vincent, it backed up the latter with some unknown bunch of longhaired weirdos who called their band “Alice Cooper.”  Alice Cooper would also play a wild set of their own, immortalized by the antics of its energized androgynous lead singer. That singer, famously, has since made the “Alice Cooper” moniker all his own, and is a rock n’ roll institution.   At that Alice Cooper show in Toronto occurred the notorious “chicken incident”, a legend in and of itself that helped launch the band into infamy and continues to be told and retold.  (As it is in this documentary).

Most famously and most importantly, however, the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival marked the debut of John Lennon performing apart from The Beatles.  The Plastic Ono Band, fronted by Lennon and Yoko Ono and backed by Eric Clapton, Klaus Voorman, and Alan White, merged American rockabilly with wailing stage art as Ono opted to perform inside a large cloth sack for part of the set.  To each their own…. We see choice clips of this, and other performances courtesy of footage shot by established live rock chronicler D.A. Pennebaker for his own Toronto Revival documentary, Sweet Toronto.  (That film has been released on DVD as the crassly more sellable “John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band: Live in Toronto.”)

One of the major boasts leveled upon this Festival was that it was the opportunity that finally gave John Lennon the confidence and courage to leave The Beatles (which he unofficially did the following week).  …Should that be a brag?  In any case, it’s an important part of The Beatles story, and therefore an important part of the history of the twentieth century.  Though to hear the story told from the point of view of this 2022 film, Revival69: The Concert That Rocked the World, the bigger story is how convincing Lennon and company to play Toronto saved the festival itself.  This is just of many off-kilter aspects of this rushed and kinda deceptive documentary.

Why is Revival69 maybe deceptive?  Perhaps “deceptive” is a tad harsh, considering that it does tell the story of the festival, with much of the story coming straight from numerous original aged horses’ mouths.  What comes off as deceptive is that this music festival documentary skimps severely on the actual music.  Although the DVD cover art flaunts Lennon, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and more, don’t expect too much if any of them actually playing much of anything.  Who wants to watch vintage performances of iconic acts with sound-alike instrumentals laid over them??  I don’t know, but that’s what this is.  Whereas the song credits at the very end ought to be downright epic for a doc such as this, it only has four full song listings, with several others as mere acknowledgments.  The latter songs tend to be featured for less than seven seconds (before fully fading out and starting anew), the commonly believed threshold for unpaid music usage.

Revival69 is another classic example of the filmmakers securing lots of solid interviewees, getting great bits from them about a shared subject of interest along with fantastic vintage footage (the Pennebaker material)- everything that’s needed- and then fumbling the project anyway.  

And I haven’t even mentioned yet that the whole first half of this eighty-minute doc is a blow-by-blow telling of how this festival was in huge trouble, and how getting John Lennon was their only hope.  This segment is told through talking-head interviews with slam-bam graphics (whoooosh-THUD!!  Name and context) and hokey Flash-style animation.  A lot of Flash-style animation.  It’s forty minutes of the story of two hapless promoters desperate to save face and not lose thousands of dollars on what would’ve been an “oldies” festival that wasn’t selling.  Interviewees talk about tense exchanges, anxious phone calls, and longhot wheelings and dealings.  The film’s second half, detailing the show itself, is better but still marred by the lack of most any actual songs being included for any length of time. 

Don’t head into Revival69 expecting a true festival film, or even decent prolonged moments from said festival.  Revival69 is a documentary about the business putting on a rock festival… but posing outwardly as a musical experience.  Ask yourself, how rock n’ roll is that?