“Harvey Kubernik: What was the wildest shit you ever saw in a radio station in the 1960s?
Marshall Chess: Hmmm. I’m not gonna tell you this DJ’s name, but at a station in Boston owned by a white guy. (laughs). I walked into his office, the radio was on through the speakers, he was sitting behind his desk, and all of a sudden he was squirming around, and all of a sudden this heavy black girl comes up from underneath his desk sucking his dick while he was talking to me! (laughs). That was probably the craziest thing I ever saw.” Harvey Kubernik, Sonic Boomers
“Bob Dylan had come in with his people during the first part of the show and retreated to a dressing room off-limits to everyone else. Halfway through the intermission, about 15 minutes before we were due back onstage with Bob, he decided he didn’t want to be in the film.
I wasn’t that surprised. Howard Alk (a film editor and Dylan sidekick) had been saying all week it wouldn’t work because Bob didn’t want to compete with himself by having The Last Waltz and Renaldo and Clara go head to head. But there was never a decision made until the last minute. This was it, the last minute. Bob’s lawyer came out of Bob’s dressing room with an awful look on his face. Robbie was pale. They said: ‘Bob doesn’t want to be in the movie.’
Scorsese went nuts. Without Bob there would be no movie. More than a million dollars were probably down the drain. Scorsese demanded to know why Bob wouldn’t be filmed.
Robertson said that Bob just wasn’t into it. He felt there was already too much film of him in his present state. There were 10 minutes to go. Albert Grossman was there but couldn’t influence Bob; Bob didn’t want to be influenced. So they asked Bill Graham to intercede. He went in and came out shaking his head. Bob, Bill said, claimed he didn’t even know anything about being in our movie. Never heard of it. Bob didn’t want to be filmed.
They sent Bill back in to explain to Bob how dire the situation was. I think Bill really pleaded with Bob for us, for the sake of the history of it all. He got Bob to the point where any film that might be shot would be scrutinised by Bob before being considered for use. No one could believe this. With about five minutes left, word came down that Bob’s last two songs could be filmed, and only the last two.
“The idea of Wesley Snipes as James Brown is old, right? Yes. Director Spike Lee has been threatening to make a biopic of the hardest working man in showbiz for years.” The Playlst
Mark Anthony Neal writing: “With Little Walter’s #1 single “Last Night” (“Last night, I lost the best friend the best friend I ever had”) playing in the background, Waters walks upstairs into a bathroom, off-screen, and utters a series of bone-chilling howls that sound like death itself.”
“The music is also a window into history, and “Cadillac Records” is an uncommonly astute treatment of race in America at the end of the Jim Crow era.” Read more from New York Times.
“Cadillac Records, the film that charts the rise and fall of seminal R&B label, Chess Records, starring Beyoncé Knowles, Mos Def and Jeffery Wright, and Adrien Brody (as Etta James, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and R&B magnate Leonard Chess, respectively)has itself a trailer.”, The Playlist
CADILLAC RECORDS chronicles the rise of Chess Records and its recording artists.
“The story of how the blues became popular and gave birth to rock and roll begins at a dingy bar on the rough South Side of Chicago in 1947, where an ambitious young Polish émigré, bar owner Leonard Chess hires a talented but undisciplined blues combo that includes quiet and thoughtful guitar prodigy Muddy Watersand impulsive and colorful harmonica player LittleWalter.”
