Sound City & Real to Reel - the good and the bad…

[Daddyjt 8,606]

I bought the Sound City Blue Ray documentary at the urging of Gene C several years ago, and like many things (unfortunately) it sat unopened on my shelf until a couple weeks ago. First of all, the Blu-ray is spectacular. The history of Sound City, Fleetwood Mac, Rick Springfield, Tom Petty, and Nirvana are a trip any self respecting rock fan needs to take. Oddly, the documentary, at its core, isn’t about any of that though - what it’s really about is the magical Neve 8028 mixing console that was purchased and installed in Sound City, and subsequently “saved” by Grohl and moved to his new studio 606 in southern CA.  While you won’t learn a lot of technical details about the 8028 in the documentary, you will learn about its history, and it’s magical abilities. 
 

The real meat of the documentary is a list of iconic musicians working with Grohl to cut a track for an album spawned by this documentary - more on that in a minute. He works with Rick Springfield, Stevie Nicks, Paul McCartney, Lee Ving, Chris Goss, Jim Keltner Trent Reznor, and Jesse Greene. The last two (Reznor and Greene) absolutely blew me away in their respective sessions with Grohl. I later learned that they cut an album of these tracks, titled Studio City, Real to Reel 606. After watching the Blu-ray, I couldn’t order this disc fast enough. Well, as good as the Blu-ray is, the CD is every bit as bad. No sound stage, no dynamics, no clarity - just blah. And to add insult to injury, the tracks on the CD sound nothing like the tracks they were cutting on the Blu-ray. 
 

So in short, definitely buy (and watch) the Blu-ray documentary, but avoid the CD…

 

the Blu-ray 

 

the Cd - AVOID!