Mandy Stein interview
Extended interview with director of new Bad Brains documentary from HUCK#021 feature.
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Mandy Stein was raised on rock. Not only was her father the founder of seminal record label Sire Records, but her mother was the manager of the Ramones. As young as three, Mandy was attending sound checks in legendary New York underground club CBGB, and when she discovered filmmaking while attending college in LA in 1998, she found a way to tie her passion for music, community and telling stories together.
Intuitively, Mandy seems able to capture moments in time that are fleeting and significant. She was in the final post-production stages of her 2006 Ramones documentary Too Tough To Die: A Tribute To Johnny Ramone when she heard that the home of NY punk, and her cultural birthplace, CBGB, was to close its doors for the last time. The resulting celluloid, Burning Down The House: The Story of CBGB, documented the rise and fall of the Lost Boys-style cavern situated in The Bowery neighbourhood of New York.
Mandy was there at the very end and it was after shooting the final three nights of Bad Brains’ shows with her fiancée, Ben Logan, that her latest, most immersive project yet, was conceived.
We caught up with the filmmaker to find out more about her new documentary Bad Brains: A Band In DC ahead of its summer release.
HUCK: How did you get into filmmaking?
Mandy: It was sort of accidental. I was in college and read an article in Spin Magazine about all these blues musicians in Mississippi and I just thought that would be an amazing documentary. So I researched to see if there had been one done on these musicians and there hadn't. When I graduated, I contacted the record label that represented all the artists and just sort of figured it out. I’d never made a film or even really operated a camera. The film was called You See Me Laughin and most of the musicians have died since I made it so I’m really glad I did.
Is it important for you to capture a moment in time?
Definitely. Particularly the CBGBs film. Obviously, if I hadn't captured it right then and there, I wouldn’t have captured the essence of what that club was. Now it’s a retail store. [...] Time is of the essence when I’m making these films.
How did the CBGB film come about?
I had grown up going to CBGB ever since I was really, really young because my mom used to manage the Ramones. Also, my dad had a record label [Sire Records] and a lot of the musicians that he signed came out of CBGB like Talking Heads, Ramones, The Dead Boys and The Pop Tarts. At the time, I had no idea it was going to close but I knew the landlord situation was in a precarious way. What interested me the most was that local New Yorkers really made it their cause and decided that they didn’t want to lose their New York relic. I had just finished making a Ramones documentary so I was in touch with a lot of people in that scene like the photographers Bob Gruen and Roberta Bailey. They were all still in New York but I was in LA so when I got photos from them, they would tell me ‘you should get here, there's something going on’. And finally I got in touch with the owner Hilly Krystal, who has now passed, and he felt like I was the right person to tell the story because of my strong history with the club. It was a kind of a match made in heaven.
When you travel with a rock band you become part of the family: you annoy each other, you love each other
What do you love about NYC?
There’s just so much. Central Park. I’ve run three NY marathons. I’ve run through all the five boroughs. I live in LA but New York’s my home at heart. My family is there. I love LA because I love my anonymity and being able to have a much quieter life; at home and work, and you can’t beat the weather. I’m really outdoorsy so I hike, I surf and I swim. You can’t really do that as much in New York. But I did learn to surf in Long Island.
So how did the Bad Brains documentary come about?
The last week of shows at CBGB was amazing. It started off with a hardcore matinee with all these amazing bands like Agnostic Front and then it went into three nights of Bad Brains. [...] The footage [we took] was so incredible that my fiancée and I, who I’m actually co-directing this film with, showed the manager and said 'there’s something more here'. It was just really great timing because they had just finished a great album that Adam Yauch, from the Beastie Boys, had produced. They were going on tour for the first time in almost ten years. It was just aligned and everything sort of worked out. All of sudden we were on an aeroplane heading to Woodstock for rehearsals. We got to go on tour with them all over. [...] When you travel with a rock band you become part of the family: you annoy each other, you love each other. It was just really amazing to be embraced by them and their generosity in letting us have the freedom with our cameras. Sometimes you know they’d had enough and were getting annoyed with us, it’s human nature, but they were really letting us in, which is why I do this you know. It’s the biggest gift ever.
What were the main challenges?
Well, a band is like a family and there are a lot of dynamics and there are a lot of characters and finding a way through a family, even it’s your own family, is a challenge. Not crossing boundaries, but also getting what’s important for the story and also knowing when to back off, and when to push, I think is a challenge. You don’t want to alienate your subjects but at the same time you don’t want to lose something that could be crucial to the story you’re telling.
What was the story that you wanted to tell?
First of all, I think they’re an incredibly influential band and they’re really unsung heroes. They’re influenced countless people and luckily we’ve had the opportunity to speak to a lot of those musicians; Ian Mackaye to Henry Rollins, Dave Grohl to Anthony Keidis. There are so many musicians who have been completely influenced by them but at the same time they’re not really as big as a lot of the bands think they should be. I think that's because they were a little ahead of their time, a lot ahead of their time, but it's also down to the dynamic of the people in the band and lost opportunities. I think through the film, hopefully we’ll understand mostly why the music is so amazing and get a piece of what the dynamic is to be in that group. Am I making sense?
Yeah! Bad Brains have courted a lot of controversy. How did you approach that in the film?
Well, luckily they’re very truthful people. I don’t think we approached it as ‘they’re a controversial band’ we approached it as making the most honest film possible. And luckily they wanted that approach too. I don’t think we would have made [the documentary] if there was anything 'off limits'. And there really wasn’t, which is to the credit of the band. They don’t have anything to hide and I think a lot of the controversy will be debunked. So much of that stuff comes from the late 1970s, early 1980s, when they were really young. Now they’re older and wiser, fathers and adults, and they wouldn’t make those same choices. I think it’s really great to see them how they are now.
How is HR’s health?
We just saw him in Arizona a month and a half ago and he seemed well. He seemed to be in good spirits and it all seemed well. Everyone was getting along. It was a one-off show so there wasn’t enough time for him to irritate anybody. Everyone seemed healthy.
Were you into Bad Brains growing up?
Not going to shows, I was a little young for that. But later on, yeah. I mean I was born in 1975 so I missed the CBGB days I guess [...]. I missed HR doing backflips.
You’re making up for it now! What kind of things inspire you creatively?
I read a ton of news and magazines and I see a lot of music and go to a lot of live shows. I try and watch as many documentaries as possible to learn from other filmmakers. I go to museums. Standard stuff. I don’t think I do anything abnormal in terms of finding my creativity. Listening to live music, seeing as many movies as possible, and seeing as much art as possible too. I’m always trying to immerse myself in that. And LA is so amazing for music and art right now. It’s so much bigger than New York, so there’s so many different outlets. There’s always something going on here. Whereas in New York all the clubs have closed and you have to go to Williamsburg or something.
What does the future hold?
Have I got another project? I’m not ready to talk about that yet, but I definitely have two or three things ticking. We’ll see. I’ll keep you posted. One is music-related and one has nothing to do with music at all. [My fiancée and I] will definitely have to find a balance. I’m pregnant. So over the next few months I’m trying to get as much done as possible and then my life is going to drastically change. Working is really important and my mother always worked so I don’t think I’ll ever give it up. I think it’s important to show your kids that it’s important to have a strong work ethic. But I’m really excited to be a mom...
Check the Bad Brains: A Band In DC official MySpace for updates on the documentary's impending release.
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Mandy Stein interview (text) by Shelley Lee Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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