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PARK CITY, Utah — It’s a time capsule from the hard-rocking halcyon days before iPhones, “American Idol” and the MP3 audio format changed everything about the music business.
“The Best Summer,” which premiered Jan. 24 at the Sundance Film Festival, is a documentary film from director Tamra Davis that captures a potent moment in time for Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys, Foo Fighters, Pavement, Rancid, Beck, Bikini Kill, Kim Deal’s the Amps and other influential 1990s alternative artists.
The 90-minute movie was assembled from footage that Davis shot DIY-style on Sony Hi8 camcorders in December 1995 and January 1996 as that collection of bands toured Australia on the Lollapalooza-esque Summersault festival. Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys and Foo Fighters then went on to play dates in Southeast Asia that were promoted by MTV International to tout its newly launched TV channels in the region.
“It was an exhausting tour for me. I remember that a lot, but it was one of the most fun tours ever,” said Kim Gordon, co-founder of Sonic Youth. Gordon spoke with Variety along with Davis and Bikini Kill leader Kathleen Hanna in an interview conducted a few hours before the film premiered as part of Sundance’s Midnight section.
“Looking at the film, I feel, certainly, a lot of emotion about that time. But I honestly, I just remember it being a good time,” Gordon said. “It was just so great to see everyone looking so good – from the lack of high-definition 30 years ago.”
Davis was a rising star helmer at the time, known for Chris Rock’s 1993 dark comedy “CB4” and Adam Sandler’s 1995 hit “Billy Madison” She had just married Beastie Boys drummer Michael Diamond (aka Mike D) as the tour began. She initially set out to make a tour diary to give to the musicians as a memento of the trek that took place during Australia’s summertime. But dozens of Hi8 tapes wound up being stored in boxes in her home for decades. Davis revisited the material last year after she grabbed the box while evacuating her Malibu home during the Palisades firestorm.
Davis’ insider status with the musicians makes for a you-are-there-backstage feeling in the lengthy concert clips presented in “Best Summer.” Hanna is front and center in “The Best Summer” as she helps Davis conduct pre- and post-show interviews of the musicians, notably Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Dave Grohl and Pat Smear of Foo Fighters and Adam Yauch, Adam Horovitz and Diamond of Beastie Boys. The audio and video quality of the film matches the raw power of the music from beloved rock bands who were in their prime, or in the case of Beck and Foo Fighters, in their infancy.
“I didn’t have [the original tapes] preserved in any way,” Davis told Variety. The live performance footage sounded terrific but some of the conversational interviews needed cleanup with modern audio tools.
“After I did the first few cuts, I sent it to the sound guy that I just worked with on another film,” she said. “They were able to turn a few knobs, and then it was almost too clear. I had to add back in some of the sound because I love it when we’re in a room talking and you can hear a party going on next door. I wanted people to feel like, if you weren’t having fun in this room, next door there’s a party. That’s how the tour was.”
“Best Summer” documents the mid-1990s inflection point for post-punk and alternative rock musicians, when a strong MTV and college radio helped spread their tunes far and wide, but social media had yet to put them in a 24/7 fishbowl.
“There’s a self-consciousness that we didn’t have to have, because we weren’t constantly on camera,” Hanna told Variety. “Tamra having a camera was, like, a novel thing. It wasn’t like everybody had one. And so it was like, ‘Oh, look, it’s a cool tool that we can play with. Like, we got to do something with it.”
Davis emphasizes that there were no elaborate production set ups. All of the video and audio seen and heard in “Best Summer” came from her Hi8 camcorder. It was DIY in the extreme, and that’s part of what makes the movie so special 30 years later.
“We were just these bossy girls and just like, ‘Hey we have questions for you’ and we’d just waltz into people’s dressing rooms,” Davis says. It helped them pass the many hours of downtime between shows as they crisscrossed Australia. “If we didn’t do that, we would have been like making up a weird game to play in the pool,” Hanna said.
At first there was another documentary crew that came along for the Summersault trek, but they didn’t mesh well with the musicians. Hanna’s on-camera questioning brings out candid and telling responses from her fellow artists.
“I was like, ‘We could do a better job.’ And so, like, we just started going into people’s backstages and asking them questions,” Hanna recalls. “It reminded me how important it is to be obnoxious – not to be rude to people or take up too much space — but to be like somebody like Tamra, who makes something happen. She’s always making things happen. I could say ‘We could do better,’ and then nothing would happen. But she was like, ‘No, let’s go do it.’ ”
The film also includes glimpses of Sonic Youth scion Coco Gordon Moore, who was already a tour veteran at the age of 18 months.
“It was just fun to see those clips of Coco when she was also a baby,” Gordon said of her daughter who is now 31.
Touring with a toddler wasn’t as hard as it might seem. As far as Gordon was concerned, she didn’t have a choice.
“She went on her first tour at 7 months. I mean, I couldn’t leave her,” Gordon said. “The only thing I was afraid about is when we went to Jakarta, I’d read that they had open sewers there. At that time, [Coco] was really into throwing her pacifier on the ground. So I kind of obsessed over keeping it clean.”
Another sentimental aspect of “Best Summer” for Gordon is the sight of some old Sonic Youth gear, including one of her favorite Fender bass guitars, that was stolen from the band years after the tour.
“It happens in so many bands — almost like it’s a rite of passage,” Gordon observed. “But that’s one of the great things” about “Best Summer,” she said.
Watching the film also reminded Gordon of the sharp contrasts in how bands and musician built their careers a generation ago. Sonic Youth went their separate ways in 2011. Gordon has a new album, “Play Me,” set for release in March via Matador Records.
“Young bands now, or young musicians — nobody wants to get in a van and tour endlessly or whatever. And that’s kind of what we used to do,” she said. “That’s a big difference.”
Hanna, who was the focus of the 2013 documentary “The Punk Singer,” sees a connection to America’s overall affordability crisis in why many musicians no longer embrace the grind-your-way-through-the-country touring ethos of the 1980s and ‘90s.
“I feel like a lot of bands can’t afford to tour,” Hanna said. “Rent’s too high. It’s a different world economically, and it’s a different world in terms of how self-conscious people are about being a brand. We didn’t have that phrase about ‘branding.’ You didn’t have social media. I didn’t feel like I had to uphold a personal brand or something.”
Hanna credits Davis’ fandom for Bikini Kill and her signature tune “Rebel Girl” for helping the Washington state-based outfit get added to the Summersault bill. Bikini Kill had a much lower profile in 1995 than the even the mid-range acts on the tour.
“We had never played a festival before. We’d also never had a manager or booking agent. We were just asked because Tamra liked the band and told [her husband] Mike about our band,” Hanna said. “The whole reason my whole life changed was because Tamra liked the single that we put out.”
All of a sudden, it seemed, “we were all a part of this really cool musical conversation,” Hanna added.
Watching “Best Summer” is particularly emotional for Hanna because it captures the first spark of her romance with Beastie Boys’ Horovitz (aka Ad-Rock).
“It’s like footage of me falling in love with him,” she said. The pair became a couple soon after the Summersault trek ended. They married in 2006.
Davis and Gordon admitted to having played a role behind the scenes to bring Hanna and Horovitz together.
“We were the matchmakers,” Davis said. “We were like, ‘Let’s get them together,’ because we loved them both, and we knew Adam was struggling [he was in the midst of a troubled marriage to actress Ione Skye], and we were just like, ‘This is the best girl for you, even though it’s like the most unlikely pair.”
In the performance scenes, the Beastie Boys stand out for being an electrifying mix of hip-hop and hard rock. On stage and off, the closeness of the trio is palpable. And it’s touching for those who were close to the band to see Adam Yauch, aka MCA, in the prime of his life. Yauch died of cancer in 2012 at the age of 47.
“The first time I saw the whole thing cut together, I couldn’t stop crying at the end, because it just was like a memory of this beautiful time and all these people and how precious it was,” Davis said.
Davis has long juggled feature films and documentaries (notably 2010’s “Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child”) with episodic TV directing work on shows ranging from “Grey’s Anatomy” to “Crazy Ex Girlfriend.” To date she has self-financed the production of “Best Summer,” working with editor Jessica Hernandez. Music biz veteran Shelby Meade and Davis’ longtime lawyer Linda Lichter have also come on board as producer and executive producer, respectively. Late last year, Davis scrambled to get music clearances from the artists featured in the film in time for the film to premiere at Sundance. It wasn’t a hard sell.
“I had four or five days to get the film to everybody and to get those approvals happening,” Davis said. “Everybody was so awesome. Everybody watched it immediately and approved it.”
As she shops “Best Summer” to buyers, Davis has a strong vision for the optimal distribution plan, starting with a theatrical release so that it can be watched in a communal setting a la a concert experience.
“There’s so much crossover stuff you could do. Almost all of these bands are still out there in different iterations. I just feel like there’s so much that can happen with it,” she said. “I want to sell it to a company that supports music. I want a plan. I don’t want to sell it just for money. This is my life, and I believe I’ll find somebody that just is passionate about this world and that music and wants to put it out.”
Davis has never had any shortage of projects that to shepherd and directing offers coming her way. But at the age of 60, it’s meaningful to have a film debut at Sundance, especially one assembled in DIY style with as much TLC as she has poured into “Best Summer.”
“One girl can make a whole movie – shot all by one woman,” Davis observed. “I’m psyched that at 60, I get a movie at Sundance. Women – they’re obsessed with this crazy age thing. I want women to know that your career isn’t over at 60. You can still get a movie at Sundance. We’re still filmmakers. The dudes are still making movies at this age. And women should still be able to be there and represent.”
(Pictured top: Kathleen Hanna, Tamra Davis and Kim Gordon at “The Best Summer” premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 24, 2006.)
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