Sometimes When We Touch

Right from the start it's a technical mess. The audio is a Disaster.

Ignoring that, the editing, writing, pacing, storytelling is downright amateurish. Like the people who made this have no clue about the subject they are documenting or have never made a documentary before.

There's no coherence to anything here. It talks about the death of 70s soft rock by showing images of punk...then late 80s Bad era Michael Jackson? It talks about the 70s and shows clips of the late 60s.

Then it just randomly starts profiling early 70s artists and songs and cultural attitudes but then a moment later randomly jumps to referencing '76 Kiss and '77 Alice cooper. Then jumps to talking about electric piano and Drew Barrymore and random musicians and bands. And it jumps all over the place in time. Here's Pablo cruise in '77, now ambrosia in '80. But now let's talk about kick drums. No wait here's stuff from Barry Manilow in 74!

No wait heres a musicologist with a word about soft rock brain chemistry! No wait here a mini captain and tenile bio!

There's no direction here. No story. Just a random assortment of clips and talking heads.

Utterly pointless.

The first episode of Sometimes When We Touch is pretty good. It touches on the diversity and range of soft rock, from whites, blacks, jazz, folk, R&B and everything in between. A lot of the big hits get a 30 second sound byte, though there is a truly unfortunate amount of Captain and Tenille's "Love Will Keep Us Together" which I hardly consider as important as any song from America, The Doobie Brothers, The Commodores, or even Air Supply. However, there are a couple of interesting background stories (can you believe Sometimes When We Touch was written by a 19 year old about his first relationship, from which he was dumped???) and a general overview of the 1970s radio and music television.

Here's the thing: I'm an Xennial. Soft rock was my early childhood, and it did not end with the beginning of the 1980s. In typical MTV format, the second episode condescendingly blasts soft rock as "nerdy" and calls the toxic masculinity of Boomers in the 80s the general tone of music from that decade. This was not my experience at all, and especially looking back as a middle aged adult, The Police are included in my soft rock rotation they're certainly not a "ruination" of the overall sound. A lot of early 80s New Wave overlaps heavily with soft rock, ranging from Joe Jackson to Jackson Browne to some of the mellower hits of Michael Jackson.

There was a soft rock station when I was growing up called Super 102 and there was the hard rock station that played 1980s metal and 70s guitar rock that was 105 FM. More often than not, The Police and Madonna were grouped in with Kenny Loggins or Lionel Ritchie than the opposite. I found everything about this MTV documentary juxtaposing its early days so harshly to 70s soft rock utterly laughable. Soft rock was alive and well into the mid-80s, and that includes artists making videos such as Johnny Hates Jazz and Duran Duran.

MTV gonna MTV, I guess. I don't recommend the second episode of this series to anyone who isn't the kind of Gen Xer who posts memes on Facebook that brag about the brutality of their childhoods compared to the "snowflake" Millennials. Must have been all of that England Dan and John Ford Coley at grandma's house.

There was a technical problem on the first episode when the show premiered but now it's been fixed. Enjoy the show!

Here's what Sean Ross at Radio Insight said in his review:

Working in radio music research, I noticed something interesting about "Sometimes When We Touch" years ago. Besides being surprisingly enduring at AC and Classic Hits radio, Dan Hill's 1977 hit was often liked even more by younger demos than those who had lived through it as a current. Those younger listeners never knew they weren't supposed to like that song.

Sometimes When We Touch: The Reign, Ruin, and Resurrection of Soft Rock runs with that premise, suggesting that '70s/early '80s soft rock has found acceptance with younger listeners in the same way as '60s garage rock or '70s funk, accepted as timeless music that no longer needs to be couched as a guilty pleasure. But even those whose relationship with soft rock is more complicated will be drawn to the three-part documentary that debuts January 3 on Paramount +. So will many Ross on Radio readers.

Those three episodes are structured exactly as the title suggests, but are interspersed with mini-profiles of '70s/early-'80s acts, including Air Supply, the Captain & Tennille, Ray Parker Jr., Kenny Loggins, Christopher Cross, Michael McDonald, Rupert Holmes, and Hill, who recalls scaring off his first, older girlfriend with the song's candor and intensity. McDonald and Loggins are saved for the climactic moments of the third episode about the resurgence of '70s/early-'80s soft rock through Hip-Hop sampling, Yacht Rock, Mamma Mia, American Idol, and more. The artist vignettes provide many of the series' best moments. There's even a tribute to 1975's cult film, That's The Way of the World, in which Harvey Keitel wants to sign Earth, Wind & Fire, but is pressured to help create a new Carpenters-type family act instead.

Writer Chuck Thompson and director Lauren Lazin do a good job of letting the '70s acts speak, and surrounding them with newer artists (mostly from the generation immediately after - Susanna Hoffs, Richard Marx, Darryl "DMC" McDaniels) and current pundits who have an actual considered opinion on the music, something not always found in today's music documentaries. A procession of music videos means that the archival footage used here is also an upgrade from similar endeavors.

There's also a small but key representation of radio, particularly "Mellow Rock" KNX-FM Los Angeles PD Steve Marshall and Jhani Kaye, whose AC KOST helped put KNX-FM out of business in 1983. The KNX-FM to KOST transition paralleled a shift in musical leadership from Donald Fagen to David Foster, a subtle change that is quickly alluded to, but soft rock never really went away. Some acts (Loggins, Hall & Oates, Lionel Richie, Don Henley and Glenn Frey) followed the trends and remained radio hitmakers. Others like Chicago and Steve Winwood were back in the high life soon. Even Hill managed a comeback. The new-wave disruptors fostered by MTV (a producer here) ended up as soft rockers themselves-Tears for Fears, Spandau Ballet, even the Police, although Stewart Copeland appears here as the voice of the next generation.

But other 1979-83 hitmakers did experience "reign/ruin/resurrection" on the timetable portrayed here, particularly those acts now associated with Yacht Rock. That phenomenon's creators Steve Huey and David Lyons are especially prominent in that third (and best-observed) episode. Sometimes When We Touch's thru-line works best as the story of those jazz/pop/R&B fusion acts who dominated radio in 1979-83 and helped fuel a Soft AC revival five years ago. (Huey and Lyons are writing their own history of the more tightly defined Yacht Rock sub-genre they helped identify and popularize.)

Sometimes When We Touch will resonate with viewers who made The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart a surprise hit for HBO two years ago, especially if they prefer "How Deep Is Your Love" to "Night Fever." I was surprised by the magnitude of the reaction to that documentary at the time, but shouldn't have been. Ironically, soft rock's dominance in 1980-82 was in part a radio reaction to disco (something not explored here), but as writer/producers, the Bee Gees were a big part of this era as well.

Edit ~ I have been back to watch and as of Jan 20th the audio is still buggered. Apologies if you are offended.

I really was looking forward to this doc because, it's about 'soft rock' and I don't believe I've ever seen a doc series on soft rock. I also wanted to see some great clips of some of the bands/singers mentioned in the trailer, and to be honest, the trailer got me a bit hyped. I didn't get very far as a large part of the audio track seemed to be missing. I'm thinking they didn't have permission to use certain sound bites or something? You see lips moving but no words can be heard. They have terrible music playing over certain scenes and it is obvious that something is not quite right. Not sure what the deal is but this could have been so much better. It seems the producers thought is was okay to release this steaming pile just to put something 'out there' but as I've said, it could have been better. I do not recommend this short series.

As a child of the 70's, this is my jam. Learning about Captain and Tennille was such bittersweet nostalgia - my very first memory is of "Love Will Keep Us Together." I was 2 years old and I remember my parents dancing to it in our basement "rumpus room" where just a few years later they'd roll the rug back so my brother and I could roller skate to the "Xanadu" soundtrack. These days I blast these hits and others while wheel around on a stool in my research lab working on drug safety testing. Same roller disco vibe, just as a way cooler adult.

It would be a 9+ if the sound worked consistently. There are long periods of silence that I think are supposed to be filled with narration or something informative?