PENNEBAKER HEGEDUS FILMS

When the fearsome foursome of rock music, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, decided to show up in Toronto for a rock and roll festival, I knew we had to go there to try to get them all on film. This could be the musical event of the millennium, which in 1969 still had a ways to go.  Even as we were figuring out how to raise money to do it, John Lennon was thinking the same way, and, little did we know, was planning to show up himself, along with Yoko Ono, Eric Clapton and the newly created: Plastic Ono Band.

The Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival was fantastic and we filmed everybody that moved and recorded a lot of great music, but it was really the four rockers we were after.  And The Plastic Ono Band was just something that flew in out of the blue.  Their performance was one of the most dramatic endings I’d ever seen at any concert, and I knew it ended something but I wasn’t sure what.

When the film was rough cut, John Lennon called and asked could he see it. So I flew to London, got a projector and drove to Ascot for our first audience: The Lennons. We all ended up in their bedroom because that was the only room with a white wall to project on. Sitting there on the floor watching that music come to life, I could feel John getting more and more into it. He was excitedly telling Yoko all about the performances of his heroes like you would with your high school yearbook.  Suddenly I was inspired to rent Carnegie Hall and screen it there as a Christmas show, which I did with. . . stereo interlock sound. The hall was filled twice, with a standup crowd. It was a filmmaker’s dream. We called it “Sweet Toronto” until one day Janis Joplin came by to see it and right in the middle of Chuck Berry she yelled out, “Keep on rockin!” So we used that for the title for another version of the film but without Lennon and Yoko.

D A Pennebaker