The Ramones, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed & more in new documentary about music biz legend Danny Fields
If HBO’s tone-deaf series Vinyl left you cold but wanting to learn more about the NYC music scene of the ’70s, you may want to keep an eye out for new documentary Danny Says which is about legendary music biz figure Danny Fields, who helped the careers of The Ramones, Iggy Pop, The Doors, The Velvet Underground, MC5 and more. (Vinyl protagonist Richie Finestra was at least a little based on Fields.) Here’s the synopsis:
Once dubbed the underground “mayor of New York,” Danny Fields (née Feinberg) has played a pivotal role in the music and culture of the late 20th century, working for The Doors, Cream, Lou Reed, and Nico, and managing groundbreaking artists like The Stooges, MC5 and The Ramones. DANNY SAYS follows Fields from Harvard Law dropout, to “hippie yenta” at Warhol’s Factory, to Director of Publicity at Elektra Records, to punk pioneer and beyond. Led by Fields’ hilariously droll commentary and largely crafted from over 250 hours of interviews and items from his immense archive (thousands of photographs, audio cassettes and ephemera), the film features outrageous anecdotes recounted by Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, Judy Collins, Tommy Ramone, Lenny Kaye, Wayne Kramer, and John Cameron Mitchell, among many others. They tell the wild story of a man whose taste and opinion, once deemed defiant and radical, turned out to have been prescient.
Danny Says will be released by Magnolia Pictures on September 30 in theaters and on-demand/digitally. You can watch the trailer and check out the poster below. A few pictures of Fields hanging out with folks in the ’70s are in the gallery above.
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