5/23 Quincy, WA -    Sasquatch Festival
5/26     Chicago, IL    -     Riviera Theatre    On Sale 5/2, 10am
5/27     Detroit, MI -     Clutch Cargos     On Sale 4/29,10am
5/28     Columbus, OH    -    Newport Music Hall    On Sale 5/2, 10am
5/30     Minneapolis, MN    -    First Ave     On Sale 5/2, 10am
5/31     Milwaukee, WI    -     Eagles Club     On Sale 5/2, 10am
6/2     St. Louis, MO    -     The Pageant On Sale 5/1, 5pm
6/3     Kansas City, MO    -    The Beaumont    On Sale 5/9, 10am
6/6     Mountain View, CA    -    Live 105 BFD
6/12     Manchester, TN    -    Bonnaroo
7/31     Jersey City, NJ    -    All Points West

Next Tuesday (November 18th), The Black Keys, the fantastic blues-rock duo from Akron, OH, will put out their new full length concert DVD, ‘Live at the Crystal Ballroom’.

The DVD was filmed by director Lance Bangs at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland, OR this past April and features 17 live performances along with music videos and behind-the-scenes footage of the making of their latest album ‘Attack & Release’.

Watch the DVD Trailer:

Lance Bangs was kind enough to answer a few questions about the DVD:

More Cowbell: It seems like you’ve been doing more full concert films as of late, compared to mostly music videos & documentaries/films in the past. Has that been a conscious decision on your part? Do you have a preference between a scripted music video or a live concert?

Lance Bangs: I would say that I’ve been filming bands live since I was a teenager, but that in recent years there is more use for performance footage being released online or on DVDs, and fewer outlets for music videos.  It’s generally more fun to travel with a band or performer to an interesting venue while they are on tour and figure out tactics for filming a great performance that will be happening in real time in front of an audience at 11 o clock at night than it is to meet that same band on a film set at 9 o clock in the morning while they are doing publicity several weeks before their tour begins and film some aspect of the same song over and over without a real audience.  I love everything that goes into filming live performances, and over the years I’ve built up an arsenal of custom rigged/hot-rodded cameras that give my footage a different feel that what most traditional concert films might look like.  I’ve also enjoyed assembling a sort of band of camera operators out of artists/musicians/photographers/personal filmmakers/friends that I can travel with, instead of using traditional “professional” camera operators.

More Cowbell: What are some of the biggest challenges involved in shooting a live concert film vs. directing a music video. I’d imagine it can be fairly hectic at times, knowing you’ve only got one take usually (unless it’s shot over multiple night shows), not to mention the live concert factor where anything can happen.

Lance Bangs: I definitely prefer when a band plays in the same interesting venue over multiple nights, as has happened with Arcade Fire, Slint, Sleater-Kinney, Fugazi, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Sonic Youth.  It helps to shoot in venues that are well set up for my style of filming, like the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, the Showbox in Seattle, Irving Plaza in New York, the 40 Watt in Athens Georgia.  I’ve had some funny things go wrong when there was only one night to film.  I directed a large HD concert shoot a few years ago where I hired some of the camera operators from the Star Wars films because the venue was a union house, and if I’m hiring union camera operators I at least wanted them to have shot a Star Wars movie, right?  The footage and sound recording were going well, but between songs the performer announced to the crowd that he “wasn’t really feeling it” and the performance sort of drifted off semi-detached.  I’m not sure they ever even watched the subsequent edits…

More Cowbell: The lighting and overall stage show seems a bit more elaborate than I’ve seen at Black Keys shows in the past. Have they just been adding more as of late, or was some of it added specifically to this show for the DVD filming?

Lance Bangs: The band happened to have a great young lighting designer named Mike Grant with them for that tour, and they had also asked for the footage to be pushed towards the look of old grimy film, which ended up accentuating the lights as they flare and bloom.  The sensibility was to treat it like old damaged film instead of clean High Definition video.

More Cowbell: From what I’ve seen of the DVD, you not only captured the band’s raw energy extremely well, but the crowd energy as well. Did the band have much say in what they were looking for in terms of the overall look and vibe, or did you sort of have free reign?

Lance Bangs: To be honest, it was just a camera test I was shooting myself, not a commissioned shoot by the band, record label, or management.  I had gotten to know the Black Keys when they toured with Sleater-Kinney years ago, and then shot a phenomenal performance at Arthurfest in Los Angeles in 2005 which I was directing a concert film of.  But when they played the Crystal Ballroom that night with Jay Reatard opening we hadn’t planned to make a releasable concert DVD, I was just shooting the show for my own archives as a camera test.

The Crystal Ballroom is an unusual venue and I’ve often had to film there but had trouble with it’s particular idiosyncracies:  the floor has springs in it so that it bounces up and down, making tripod shots vibrate and handheld operators have to battle against seasickness.  The stage is in a corner, and the soundboard is pretty far away but near a staircase that can’t be blocked by risers or tripods.  To accommodate all ages the venue has a divider running from one edge of the stage through the middle of the room dividing the drinkers in the back, so wide shots from the back of the room show an empty strip in the middle of the crowd, with low-energy people drinking beer from plastic cups taking up half the frame.  There is usually no photo pit, and you can’t put a riser out in the crowd to set a tripod and shoot over the crowds heads because they need the middle of the floor clear as a fire escape lane.  There isn’t room to shoot out at the crowds from behind the bands because the stage is in a corner with solid walls behind it.

I wanted to test some new theories about how to shoot better in the room than previous attempts, so my colleague Aubree Bernier-Clarke arranged some friends to do a multitrack recording, and we tried some new camera positions and approaches to deal with the peculiar layout and the bouncing floor.  The show ended up being great, the band had a particularly good performance and the crowd was even wilder and more demonstrative than I had expected.  When our editor Kjerstin Rossi had assembled a song or two I sent it to the band, and their management and label got excited about releasing the footage as a concert DVD.

More Cowbell: Do you have a favorite moment or song capture that turned out even better than you’d imagined? Any funny/amusing behind the scenes moments that didn’t make the DVD cut?

Lance Bangs: “I Got Mine” was skullcrunching, and shows what is great about the Black Keys live.  “Girl Is On My Mind” has the single best moment though and came early in the set, perhaps my first sense that things were working and this should be seen by people and not just disappear into my archives.  The handheld camera between the band and front row of the audiences reveals a kid so stoked that they yell “YEAH!” directly to the camera with stage lights hitting their braces and then they flash a double thumbs up while dancing

…..This was exactly the sort of personal moment of what is so transcendent about live music that I live for and that I don’t regularly see in the way other people film live performances.

Thanks so much to Lance for taking time out of his busy schedule!

And lastly, More Cowbell would like to give one of our lucky readers an autographed copy of the bands latest album courtesy of Sneak Attack Media. To enter to win, send your name, email, and mailing address to kyle@morecowbell.net with the subject ‘Black Keys Giveaway‘ by this Sunday (11/16) at 7pm.

Good Luck!

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