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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Meet L.A. DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, who helped launch the careers of Blondie, the Ramones, Van Halen, the Go-Go's and countless others.
Apr 13, 2004 | Because rock 'n' roll is a relatively new art form, we're only just now seeing what happens to people who have, from a very young age, devoted their lives to spreading its gospel.
The subject of George Hickenlooper's "Mayor of the Sunset Strip" is Rodney Bingenheimer, a shy, soft-spoken elf of a man who came of age in Hollywood during the '60s (the young Sonny and Cher were like surrogate parents to him) and went on to become one of the most beloved, respected and instinctive DJs of the '70s and '80s.
Bingenheimer broke countless bands, including Blondie, the Ramones, Van Halen and the Go-Go's, and his show, "Rodney on the Roq," on KROQ in Los Angeles, became a lifeline for anyone hungry for new music. Bingenheimer used his remarkable radar to search out great songs, done by people you hadn't heard of (yet), and sent them out on the airwaves before other radio stations would even touch them. You could argue that he played as big a role in shaping the rock 'n' roll culture of the era as the artists themselves did.
But few people outside Los Angeles even know who Bingenheimer is. And his show, once a must for anyone within listening range who wanted to stay on top of new music, is now relegated to one minuscule nighttime slot. As one of his younger KROQ colleagues says, not unsympathetically, in the film, Bingenheimer is now considered by the station to be the "king of the obscure ... the gateway to things people care about" -- and here, he adds a pause that speaks volumes -- "less." Now that radio is all about programmed playlists, it's no longer valuable, or even advisable, for a DJ to have killer instincts. Or even just ears.
"Mayor of the Sunset Strip"
Directed by George Hickenlooper
Hickenlooper is a smart young filmmaker who co-directed the 1991 "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse," which documented the making of Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now." More recently, he gave us the flawed but inescapably elegant "The Man From Elysian Fields." Here, Hickenlooper doesn't set out just to tell the story of an unsung hero (although that's surely part of his goal). He's deftly filling in a much bigger picture, a sprawling, abstract canvas, rendered in some pretty melancholy colors, about the ways our love of music can affect our lives: Sure, music enriches us. But the rough truth is, it can also beat the crap out of us. I've heard more than one musician reflect ruefully, "Music ruined my life" -- in other words, the love of it spoiled them for anything else.
Yet even if Bingenheimer's celebrity and influence have declined in recent years, Hickenlooper doesn't make him an object of pity. That may be because Bingenheimer doesn't see himself as an object of pity, even though it often seems that he's thrown much of his energy into building the careers of others while not being particularly devoted to bulking up his own. Bingenheimer is charming, understated and waiflike. His hairstyle has undergone some minor changes over the past 40 years, having settled into something that's half Ron Wood rooster cut, half Dutch-boy bob, but also weirdly timeless. His eyes are serious, inky and honest. When Hickenlooper, off-camera, asks him a question, he answers with so much unrehearsed forthrightness that you realize it would never occur to him to lie or embellish. In fact, his longtime friend, the nefarious producer and heel-about-town Kim Fowley, builds up Bingenheimer's legend more than Bingenheimer does, informing us that, in the '60s, Robert Plant noted that "Rodney gets more girls than I do."
It's easy to see how girls in '60s Southern California would have gone wild for the teenage Bingenheimer, who looked like the innocent little boy every girl wanted to mother (and more). But Bingenheimer didn't have a particularly glamorous upbringing. He grew up in the small California town of Mountain View. His parents divorced when he was 3. His father went on to remarry and, as he practically admits in his on-camera interviews here, had little to do with Rodney's upbringing. Rodney was closer to his mother, who died several years ago, but even that relationship is a bit shadowy: Bingenheimer was left on his own at a young age, roaming Sunset Strip and somehow (it's never made clear exactly how) meeting and befriending the most sensational musicians of the day, from Mick Jagger to Elvis Presley to David Bowie.
Hickenlooper mixes contemporary and vintage footage, crisscrossing the past and the present to sift out every possible fleck of glitter from Bingenheimer's sometimes glamorous, sometimes pedestrian, career. Zelig-like, Bingenheimer shows up in photograph after photograph, as well as in live-performance footage, sidled up to the big stars of the day. He was never a stone's throw away from a photo op with the likes of the Doors, the Mamas and the Papas, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and Frank Zappa.
Apparently both persistent and likable, Bingenheimer became a fixture on the Hollywood scene of the mid- to late '60s. His glamour quotient increased further when he tried out for the Monkees. (He didn't make the cut, but he resembled Davy Jones closely enough that he did serve as a Monkee stand-in now and then.) Somehow, everybody who was anybody knew Rodney. In the early '70s he opened a club known as Rodney's English Disco, which featured a tiny roped-off VIP area that was barely separate from the space where the club's garden-variety beautiful people shimmied and shook.
