Sometimes When We Touch

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?

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.

I don't know if it was the fault of the original film or, how I received it. The sound kept disappearing from time to time. This meant I could not enjoy what was, a big part of my life growing up.

I could fill in the gaps where the music was because, I knew the songs. And being a musician, I could get the feel of the documentary.

However, one thing I could not fill in, was the comentary of the various contributors to the documentary. And that was a bummer.

It could be a fault in the showing, it could be a fault in the documentary itself, I don't know. In the end, for the moment; this was about sound, and sound was missing.

I hope it is resolved, IF there is a problem. This history is too big a thing in music, to be lost, just like Mowtown.

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.