On Friday night at the bar Public Assembly in Brooklyn, the band Trinity Jam played. This might not have made the Village Voice and Rolling Stone and Perez Hilton, but it did. That’s because Trinity Jam is made up of Patty Schemel, Melissa Auf Der Mar and Eric Erlandson. And when their former band mate got on the stage for a few songs, it really became an event; that former band mate is Courtney Love and suddenly, at a bar in Brooklyn on a Friday night in April, Hole was reunited.
The reason for this somewhat impromptu happening was the after party for a documentary called Hit So Hard; The Life and Near Death Story of Patty Schemel, which opened this week in New York (the Cinema Village showings on Friday night were sold out). Directed by P. David Ebersole, (with whom, full disclosure, I’m friends) the movie—which opens around the country over the next couple of months and premiered last year at SXSW and has shown at festivals around the world–is a vivid, back stage look at the life of drummer Patty Schemel. While she wasn’t the headliner of Hole, or anywhere near the kind of supernova of fame that Love was (is), Schemel makes a wonderful documentary subject. Her story is dramatic and empowering in equal measure; like many a rock star, she experienced a glamorous rise, a tragic fall and finally, movingly, true redemption.
This might all sound like every other Where Are They Now rock tale, but there’s much more going on in Hit So Hard. A lot of that is due to Schemel herself, whose clear-eyed, witty, smart presence and frank self-appraisal are all over the film; she’s someone you’ll definitely want to spend two hours with. And her story delves into so many varied arenas—women in Rock, women drummers in Rock, 90s Grunge, lesbianism, substance abuse, addiction and redemption, even, finally dog rescue—that the tale stays engrossing from beginning to end. What’s more, Hit So Hard is also incredibly moving—again, largely due to Schemel herself, who is utterly appealing. She emerges as both completely cool and extremely, well, warm. Shchemel might be the most likeable rock star ever.
Without Schemel’s involvement, in fact, it’s likely the documentary never would have been made. Ebersole had been friends with her for a while when Schemel asked his advice on preserving some Hi-8 footage she had from the 90s. When she came over to his house to show him what she had, he knew instantly he was looking at archival footage that had to be fashioned into a documentary. (While this is Ebersole’s first documentary feature, he’s directed other indie features and shorts.) It turned out that while touring with Hole, Schemel was videotaping everything. The footage—never-before-seen—is a vivid time capsule and often very, very intimate. Schemel was actually friends with Kurt Cobain first—he introduced her to Love—and for a while she lived with the couple. So everything’s here—Cobain’s intense charm, little Francis Bean as a baby, back stage shenanigans. It’s utterly fascinating to watch.
Bolstering Schemel’s own footage, Ebersole interviewed all the Hole bandmates. And yes, that includes Love herself, who provides her particular brand of loopy goodness—apparantly shot at midnight after she made Ebersole and his co-producer Todd Hughes wait in the lobby of her hotel for six hours. (Ebersole consciously shot the interviews with as tiny a crew as possible—he and Hughes, “Maysles brothers style”—so his subjects would be completely open and honest. It worked.) Also interviewed are a virtual Who’s Who of women in rock, including Nina Gordon of Veruca Salt, Phranc and phalanx of female drummers (Alice De Buhr from Fanny; Izzy from Care Bears on Fire; Debbi Peterson of the Bangles; Gina Schock of the Go-Gos; Kate Schellenbach from The Beastie Boys and Lucious Jackson) that are just about as awesome as any humans are likely to be. Even Schemel’s Mom shows up (and she’s a pisser too).
The portrait that emerges of Schemel is absolutely winning and the flashback to that particular time in Rock—and in this country’s pop cultural zeitgeist—is so thorough that Hit So Hard is nearly impossible not to find fascinating. And with Schemel’s coolest-woman-you’ve-ever-met vibe in nearly every frame, pretty much impossible not to enjoy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpLIhDHnw0U
Photo Credits: Courtesy Variance Wells/Well Go USA; Photo of Cobain, Francis Bean and Schemel Courtesy Courtney Love
