While Dave Letterman signed off from his show with a Foo Fighters’ song, frontman Dave Grohl is using their own music to keep his own series going, Sonic Highways. Sonic Highways was named for an eight-part documentary miniseries that aired on HBO in 2014, in which Grohl and company visited cities across America and interviewed …
It was 2004 and I was fifteen years old when I read Charles R. Cross’ Heavier than Heaven. I remember finishing the last chapters, sprawled on the floor of my family’s cottage as I cried so hard I started to dry heave. At the time I was unaware of the controversy that surrounded the adaptation, both in how Cross took liberties in certain facts (some information was later disproved, or at least not substantiated) and the decision he made to create what was ultimately a fictional take on Kurt’s final days up until the point he killed himself. Like many teenager before and since, Kurt Cobain represented a romantic and ultimately tragic figure to look up to – for better or for worse.
If Rock and Roll and guitar rock is a dying breed, then the rock-doc is certainly becoming a quaint relic. How many documentaries can you make in which an aging rock star waxes poetic about a type of music from 40 years earlier? How much nostalgia, history and navel gazing can you pack into the genre before even the documentaries move on to being nostalgic about boy bands, Taylor Swift and EDM?