The documentary DANNY SAYS did the festival circuit for much of 2016, was finally released theatrically (as well as via streaming) in the fall, and is now hitting home video this week. Written and directed by Brendan Toller (who made the great 2008 doc I NEED THAT RECORD!, concerning the life expectancy of the indie record store), and it throws a spotlight on Danny Fields, the legendary music manager, publicist, and journalist who has had in hand in the success of such bands as The Doors and Cream to Lou Reed, The Stooges, and The Ramones, as well as Nico and Judy Collins, if you want to get eclectic.
A Harvard Law dropout, Fields hung out with Andy Warhol (the two become close friends) at the Factory and even went legit in the music industry for a time as Director of Publicity for Elektra Records. He had so much faith in the punk rock movement that some thought he had lost his mind, but he turned out to be a visionary. DANNY SAYS is a wonderful chronicle of Fields’s life and time, with colorful commentary by Fields and many of the musicians he worked with closely.
I had a chance to chat with director Toller via phone about the film and working with Fields on putting together his life story, as well as gathering testimonials and footage of the musicians that Danny loved so much. Please enjoy my talk with Brendan Toller…
Capone: Hi, Brendan. How are you?
Capone: Brendan Toller: Hey, Steve. Good, how are you?
Capone: Excellent. How did you first meet Danny Fields, and what was it about him in that initial meeting that made you think this guy deserves his own film?
BT: So I was coming off of my first feature film that I just got out of Hampshire College with, called I NEED THAT RECORD! (THE DEATH OR POSSIBLE SURVIVAL OF THE INDEPENDENT RECORD STORE), and that film really chronicles what seemed like the demise of the record store at the time. It basically chronicles what made the physical brick-and-mortar spaces come to a lull in the mid- to early 2000s. And a girl I was dating at the time, Ariel Rosenbloom, who’s an incredible photographer—her grandmother insisted that I meet Danny Fields and interview him for the movie. As it turned out, I went over to Danny’s apartment, and we did the interview and we didn’t even touch on record stores.
I had no idea that he had started in 1966 working for Datebook Magazine, wherein his first issue he published John Lennon's “We’re more popular than Jesus” quote, which caused much fervor and fury in the United States, especially the Bible Belt area. Reading different rock-and-roll books, whether it’s “Please Kill Me” or “No One Gets Out Alive,” or, not necessarily a rock-and-roll book, but the Edie Sedgwick book [“Edie: American Girl”] by Jean Stein and George Plimpton, this guy Danny Fields kept coming up, and you’re like “This can’t be the same guy who was shoplifting at Harvard Law and then the publicist to Jim Morrison from The Doors.
I’m certainly not the first to want to do a biography of documentary on Danny Fields. Warhol mentioned it in his diaries two months before he passed: “Hey, I want to tape Danny Fields’ life story. This guy is great.” So I just asked, and we went to Brooklyn, and he said, “Let’s get started.” And I was like, “Okay.” I was not planning to do another film right away. I had just gotten out of college, and like many millennials, it’s hard to find a job, hard to make rent in Brooklyn, but I made it happen as soon as he said yes.
Capone: So you had heard of him, but not necessarily in the context of his influence and his part in both the New York pop culture scene and then later in the music scene. You hadn’t put it all together until you first met him.
BT: Well, I don’t think anyone had really put it all together, unless you were a really close friend of his, because his stories are littered all across these books and some documentaries, and his Wikipedia page is very sparse, and interviews were scarce on the internet. I felt like when I was interviewing him, it took me at least the first two years to put it all together. He’s not somebody who’s easily defined. He’s not somebody who you can say had one role. He wasn’t just a manager. He wasn’t just a publicist. He wasn’t just a photographer. As he likes to say, the cliche of all cliches, “Jack of all trades, master of none.”
Capone: But he certainly has a reputation for being a great storyteller of the things that have happened in his life. It sounds like he was open to this. Were you really the first person—other than Warhol—to say let’s sit down, let’s do this, let’s take several years, let’s do it right? Did you have to do much convincing to get him to sit down and lay it all out?
BT: We basically laid it out like “We’re going to come over here every Sunday and we’ll spend at least two hours with a camera and a microphone talking to you. So the first thing that we did to get our toes in the water was, he did voiceover on his bar mitzvah film, which is in the beginning of the movie. So he started laughing. Danny is somebody who’s not shy if you ask him “What was Iggy like? What was Jim Morrison like? What was it like to be saved from a bad acid trip by Judy Collins?” He’s very generous with his intellect and his past. I did all the interviews with the writer named Justin Skrakowski, and for Danny we were a young, captive audience that was really interested in this stuff, and it was exciting for him to tell a lot of the stories with all the folklore and description and detail.
He’s really brilliant. He’s a wordsmith. It was just a pleasure. Getting him to do things again, though, that’s another story. It’s like, if I needed something ever again it’s “What? I already told it to you.” So sometimes I felt like I maybe had to explain the medium that I was working in sometimes to him. Because sometimes he goes, “Just have somebody read ‘Please Kill Me.’” It’s like, “Danny. That’s not what we’re doing here.” So it’s not that it didn’t come with some difficulty, and usually he was right. If he didn’t want to tell a story, it had been told somewhere else originally played better on an audio tape. You can really hear it in the movie. We use a pastiche of many different archival interviews, so it’s not resting all on my shoulders. We cherry picked from all the best.
Capone: Speaking of audio tapes, it’s weird that every once in a while, we get a recorded phone conversation. One of the best pieces is the voicemail of Lou Reed’s reaction to hearing the Ramones for the first time. Who’s recording that? Why do those tapes even exist? Did Danny start to record things in his life?
BT: Starting in about ’68, Danny made hundreds of cassettes of phone conversations with his friends. I think it was something the Warhol gang did, and I think it started with Brigid Berlin. She was somebody that was very into instant documentation, whether it be Polaroids or these phone tapes. They’re the original tapes from ’68. I digitized pretty much all of them and they’re now at the Yale Beinecke Library being cataloged and inventoried [laughs]. Yeah, it was just a treasure trove. It certainly takes you back, because I could never picture Danny saying “far out” or “groovy,” but there he is saying it. It was just an amazing resource to have.
So usually what we would do is, I would scan photo negatives and have the tapes digitizing while I was doing that. It was just amazing what he had. And its great too, because it takes the audience back and puts them in the scene. It reveals Danny’s relationships with these people, whether it’s Danny asking about why Iggy keeps getting addicted to heroin, or trying to help Nico out with getting more gigs. “Oh, Danny. I need to work.” Or if it’s Lou Reed really being super positive and essentially spelling out what would be the trajectory of The Ramones. It was really incredible to have those. Danny recorded all those, but he was like “Well, I assumed people were recording me, so I didn’t think it was a big deal.”
Capone: It almost begs the question, is there such a thing as too much material to pick from? You clearly could have made this an epic-length, multi-part series. Did you consider other formats besides just a regular documentary to put this out as?
BT: Oh, please. I think originally I had a meeting with producers who wanted to put some initial funds in, and I sat down and I said “I want to do a three-part series,” and they just laughed me out of the room. They said, “How does this make sense for festivals like SXSW or different forms?” I said, “Look guys, everything on Netflix is these new serial or episodic formats. I think this would really lend itself.” People were not too receptive, so I’m glad that it is the hour and 40 minute documentary and primer that gets people into Danny’s stories. It shows them how influential he was in various roles across many scenes to shift the trajectory of pop music. If people want to do it, there’s certainly more for a sequel. [laughs] Let’s see how this one does first.
Capone: It’s one thing to have people line up to say nice things about Danny, but I have to imagine it was a huge challenge to describe Danny’s impact on culture and music. Was that your primary challenge, to capture what his gift was as a tastemaker and talent scout and nurturer of artists?
BT: Oh, and getting it across to people who knew him. Everyone, as you said, was ready to line up to speak about him, but when you actually ask the question “What was his role?” or “what has he done?” people had to sit and think.
Capone: It seems like he did something different for everybody.
BT: Well, he’s not so product based in a world that is very product based, whether it’s the music industry or pop culture at large. He’s somebody who is about process, and a lot of that process is just encouraging who the mainstream would have considered as freak or fringe people. And saying “No this is fabulous. This is the next new thing. This is what everyone should turn their ears and eyes towards.” And with making these stars elevate, if you will, he was also very encouraging. It’s nice when a publicist can say “You’re doing a great job” in a New York column, or he can hook you up with a record deal. Some people were like, “He had the key to the candy shop.” He was the coolest guy.
So yeah, a lot of the film was me trying to figure out, what did he do? There wasn’t really a book I could refer to. I really had to shape it myself, not that Danny didn't give me the soundbites or tools or descriptions to do it, but if you ask him, he’s like, “I don’t know what I did. I wasn’t a photographer, I was a lousy manager, I wrote some funny captions and took some good pictures.” [laughs] That’s all he’ll own up to. I think this documentary hopefully attempts to define somebody that really is this mysterious Puck in the Shakespeare play “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” It’s like this little fairy that is there and not here at the same time, stirring up trouble. He is the ultimate gad fly with no resume to show for it.
Capone: You say he wasn’t really product based, but he did have jobs in his life—at the 16 Magazine or the Electra job— that were definitely product based. But he took those jobs and turned them into something different than had been done before. He redefined those magazines and the publicist’s job in a way.
BT: Yeah, and Danny always says “We don’t have jobs, we have roles.” Jobs for him were just a means for him to have money and live. As contradictory as it would seem, there’s a co-editor of 16 Magazine, while at the same time the weekly column writer for the SoHo Weekly News, which is a weekly free reader, but he was the first to write about Talking Heads, Television, Patti Smith, The Ramones, and Blondie and really defined what was going on post-New York Dolls in that scene. In a way, it’s the same job, it’s just a different slice of pop culture. And then of course, once he started managing the Ramones he gave SoHo Weekly up, but I think he stayed at 16 for a little bit too.
Capone: Is there one person who is no longer with us who you really wish you could have interviewed with this film. I’m sure there are many, but pick one.
BT: Obviously, it would have been Andy Warhol, because similar to Danny, his influence is so effusive and elusive. It’s hard to put your finger on. Andy was a catalyst for many, but also, what I really got through going through different archival interviews and talking to Danny, he encouraged a lot of people, and I think that’s something that Danny took from him. One of my friends, who was friends with Andy probably around the 1980s, said to me, “I remember riding in the car with Andy and I said, ‘You know, Andy, I really want to write.’ And Andy said, ‘Just do it. Be the worst writer, then.’” Similar to what Andy was telling Lou at The Factory. He was like, “How many songs did you write today, Lou?” And Lou would say, “I don’t know, one.” And Andy’s like, “No, it’s all about work. You’ve got to do it. You’ve got to get it out there. Just do it.” And I think Danny did that for a lot of people.
Lenny Kaye is a great example of somebody who didn’t really have any wild aspirations, and then he fell into a rock writing gig thanks to Danny, and he was probably introduced to Jack Holzman where he cleaned up Jack’s record collection and made Nuggets, which is the first psychedelic rock collection and is the basis for so many commercials and songs and movies and television and just super influential on bands. I think Danny took that lead from Andy, and it’s important to inspire and encourage. Because as Danny says in the beginning of the film, young people are all so fragile, and they need reassurance that they’re doing a great thing.
Capone: The Linda McCartney photos are I think essential to this movie. How did you get those? And how did you arrange to have those in the movie?
BT: [laughs] They’re hanging on Danny’s wall. They’re prints that she gave him. Or they’re photos that he snapped. So yes, we’re going to go ahead and claim Fair Use on that. I think Danny’s relationship with Linda in the early days was super important. These were both upper-middle-class people who were getting into rock and roll, and this was happening for the first time. That connection of sneaking into Stones press conferences and gossiping about the next hot rock star and featuring them prominently in the press and photographing them, that was a shared joy for the two of them. I think that they were swept up by it all together because they would frequently work as a reporter-photographer duo. This isn’t in the movie, but Danny was the one—one of many I suppose—that told Linda “Go to Paul McCartney’s “Sgt. Pepper” party. He invited you. Go.” And he didn’t hear from her until like three or four years later.
Capone: A lot of the subjects in the film have at least one common theme, which is they all have crashed on Danny’s couch at one point or other. Have you actually also crashed on his couch?
BT: [laughs] Yes, yes. I’m glad you put that together. I am among the storied and collection of people that have crashed on Danny’s couch, and I still do. I was in Brooklyn for about a year, and then I ended up moving to New Haven, Connecticut. I would spend two or three days in New York each week and I’d crash on Danny’s couch. It worked out great, because then I could literally be inside the apartment and going through tapes and photos and ephemera and obviously soak up some time with Danny as well.
Capone: If anyone’s paying attention while they’re watching this movie, that is the one thing that jumps out at you—that everybody has crashed there at some point.
Capone: If you can’t explain what he did, you can at least say he gave famous people a place to crash.
BT: Yeah, yeah.
Capone: Has Danny seen the film?
BT: He has the DVD and he’s been kind of funny about it. “Well, how would you know if I haven’t seen it?” So just stopped asking. Originally months ago, the New York Times story came out and he told them, “I’m never seeing this thing.” Then that got some stories going like “It seems Fields had not much participation in this,” when in fact when you see the movie, it’s all led by his voice and archives; it’s entirely a movie with his cooperation, to an extent. The way we worked was that Danny would not look at any cuts I had along the way, or anything that I filmed or put together. He would offer up his Rolodex and encourage who to interview, and gave me a place to crash. So he was supportive in his own way, but I think he never wants to be self important, and it would be gross for him to commission somebody to make a documentary on him and be looking over their shoulder the whole time.
And he was a publicist. He knows how to shape and sum up people in the public light. Nobody likes hearing themselves talk on camera. So I hope that he sees it before hand.’m just super excited that this history gets its due, because I think it’s a huge part of rock-and-roll history after 1966 that is not necessarily forgotten about. My goodness, every contemporary band owes a great deal to the Ramones, to the Stooges, Patti Smith, Modern Lovers, a lot of the bands that Danny worked with. I just hope people get inspired to, instead of taking this sneery attitude about making all these lists about what you don’t like and yammering on about what you don’t like, get up off your ass and do something that you do like, or even just saying “Nice job” to the crazy shirtless singer on stage that you just saw. There are different ways of encouraging and nurturing, and I hope people get a sense of that.
Capone: Did you meet anybody making this film that you thought, as you did with your record store do, “This person doesn’t have a great documentary about them yet, maybe we need to follow up with them.”?
BT: Oh, everyone we interviewed pretty much is a documentary in their own right. I think we still have a list of everyone we interviewed for the project. Certainly not everybody who’s in the movie, but you know, it was just such a really crazy crowd. It wouldn’t be fair for me to say who should get their due first. I will say we’re extremely excited for the Jim Jarmusch Stooges documentary. From here on, I did whatever I could to get this film done. I didn’t have much help initially. We were fortunate to have a few grants, a successful Kickstarter campaign, but I didn’t pick up a producer, Pamela Lubell, until maybe the last year and a half. I just did what I needed to do. I moved to New Haven where I had a lot of friends and family, and I found some really good jobs that were borderline patron gigs. [laughs] People really gifting me jobs almost to get this done, and I’m super gracious for that. I’m looking forward to maybe not working so many part-time jobs and doing a film with a budget this time, and I know that might be a tall order, but we’ll see. We’ll see what people think of DANNY SAYS.
Capone: One of the weird offshoots of your film is, I just noticed that Judy Collins has announced a couple of shows here in Chicago, and because of your movie, I’m actually thinking about going to see her.
BT: Yeah, I’ve never seen her perform, but to walk into her apartment and look into those blue eyes, my God. She’s just the sweetest and the coolest too. She says it at one point, “Everybody sort of thinks of me as buttoned up and white gloved.” No, she’s way cooler than that. Especially if she loves Danny as much as she does. Yeah, she’s a super-cool woman and I’d love to see her perform.
Capone: Brendan, thank you so much, and best of luck.
