Danny Says, Brendan Toller's 2015 documentary about the career of Danny Fields, is lovingly made, affectionate not only for Fields, who's very easy to love here, but for the eras which he heralded and in no small part helped to build. In the 1960s Fields hung with Andy Warhol and his extended crowd, popping up in the corners of, and often dead center in, countless photographs of that scene at Max's Kansas City and other infamous rooms, worked as an editor at Datebook (where, it's suggested, he was responsible for including John Lennon's loudly infamous Christianity remark on the front cover), as a self-made publicist for the Doors, and then in the same capacity as the middle-man who helped to sign the MC5 and the Stooges to Elektra. He later managed the Ramones through their first three iconic albums, lamenting, as he did of his earlier passions, that he couldn't get them on the radio, where they fully deserved to be. Joey Ramone wrote "Danny Says" for the Ramones' End of the Century album; it's a fitting title and end song for a story about hard work and perseverance in the margins and for the weird, wild, beautiful people who love, toil, suffer, and are unutterably fabulous there.
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Fields, left, with Iggy Pop and David Bowie |
Late in the film, Fields discusses the Ramones, and his comments on their appeal, vexed career, and legacy are sharp and moving, revealing indirectly the lasting mark that the band made on him: "The Ramones were disaffected teenagers for whom, in fact, there was, when they were in high school, no future," he remarks.
But through their work, they gave themselves a very long future. They left a legacy of No Future people: "Maybe we have a future. We thought we had no future. Look at them, they can't play. They're terrible. But look, this is exciting. They're big, they're famous, they can get laid. Let's start a band!" What more can you do? You're pied pipers out there. You can't pay the rent with that, and a lot of these bands are going to go on and be U2 and Pearl Jam and outsell you by the zillion....
A bit later, he waxes philosophical about the ephemeral nature of success and failure in life, and the standards we use to measure them. In a way it's his epitaph:
Oh yeah, stick with me, forty years from now you'll be a star! You'll be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame! That's the worst case, but, you know, life isn't long enough to see everything that happens that we saw beginning or continuing, or we thought was ending. It takes more time than that when it comes to things that will endure.
Indeed. Danny Says is currently airing on YouTube TV.