I leaped at the chance to interview Peter Asher, in 2015, because he had produced a breakthrough album for one of my favorite bands. How, I wanted to know, had he worked such magic with 10,000 Maniacs on In My Tribe?
“They were a little bit frantic,” Asher remembered. “The band weren’t getting on very well with one another, especially on the second album, and it was all a bit divisive — so there was a diplomatic aspect to producing those records as well as a musical aspect.”
While the new documentary Peter Asher: Everywhere Man highlights Asher’s musical contributions, it ultimately leaves the impression that diplomatic skill is what has kept Asher in the room where it happens for so many decades. As a producer, he’s the man everyone wants around, and because he’s so well-trusted, he has a unique ability to create space for musical alchemy.
For a subject who is discerning yet unassuming, director/producers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine take a suitable approach. Everywhere Man isn’t flashy or trendy: there’s not a single instance of an interview subject seen taking a seat and being mic’d up.
If anything, the film suffers from not having enough pretensions to style. The directors’ worst visual sin is a series of scenes in which Asher comments on his life and times while images are superimposed behind him using virtual background removal technology that is exactly as good as what you see on a standard conference call.
More effective is the use of Asher’s retrospective concert performance as a framing device. The musician’s onstage reminisces form the backbone of the film as it branches into interview clips and archival material, giving Everywhere Man the feel of an enhanced concert experience.
The film’s case for its subject’s significance is made in the words of its star interviewees, which works well since viewers are much more apt to believe something coming from the mouth of Linda Ronstadt or Carole King than from a narrator or whatever blogger happened to be available.
While Everywhere Man isn’t particularly distinctive as a piece of cinema, Geller and Goldfine did the work and assembled the troops to create a testament to the artist who carried a creative spark from Swinging London to Laurel Canyon.
Asher was also half of Peter and Gordon, and Everywhere Man doesn’t make viewers wait long to hear “A World Without Love,” the achingly beautiful Paul McCartney song that became a chart-topper for Asher and Gordon Waller after John Lennon rejected it. (When McCartney sang the opening “please, lock me away,” he recalls, Lennon would interrupt to immediately assent.)
Natalie Merchant also appears, all too briefly, in the documentary: she tells us that Asher has the ability to capture “this kind of ecstatic energy” within the limits of a three-and-a-half-minute pop song.
Listeners might never think to credit Peter Asher for the energy of “Hey Jack Kerouac” unless they check the album’s credits. Asher, we learn, helped popularize the practice of crediting session musicians on cover sleeves. “That changed everything,” says Sweet Baby James guitarist Danny Kortchmar in the documentary.
No wonder Peter Asher has been wanted everywhere.
Images courtesy 42West
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