Peter Asher: Everywhere Man
(USA, UK, 118 min.)
Dir./Prod. Daniel Geller, Dayna Goldfine
Peter Asher: Everywhere Man opens with a quote by Asher himself. Black text fades in on yellow parchment revealing, “Obviously, a great deal of everything is luck – except there is no such thing. The skill is in taking advantage of what does come your way.”
As luck would have it, many viewers recognize Asher as an influential and irreplicable aspect of the sound of the ’60s and the ’70s, and yet many people are truly unaware of the impact of his work. Asher’s story is one that people may write off, as a man who was everywhere by chance, by coincidence, or by his prolific nature. But as the film, and Asher’s opening quote depicts, to truly be everywhere, across space and time as he was, one constantly has to make something of and from wherever one is.
The genius of Everywhere Man lies in the fact that much like the man that the film seeks to immortalize, it entertains, electrifies, and above all, defies expectations. One would anticipate a doc of this nature to be an assemblage of talking heads, a stellar celebrity line-up showering praises on Asher and his underappreciated impact on music, art, and culture over time. But from the very jump, the film establishes that it is not going to do exactly that. Centred around and largely influenced by Asher’s marvellous stage performance titled A Musical Memoir of the ’60s and Beyond, Everywhere Man retains Asher’s perspective as he recounts his life and the events that shaped him and his career. Of course, the film is packed with interviews from legends like Paul McCartney, Carole King, and Natalie Merchant, but Asher’s voice, humour, energy, and charm ground the film, validating the stories that his friends and family share about him and their time together.
As clips from Asher’s stage performance intercut the interviews and archival footage, directors Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine (Leonard Cohen – Hallelujah) re-construct Asher’s myth in real time. People might be familiar with Asher as one half of Peter & Gordon, one of the groups that was part of the British Invasion, and from his close association with the Beatles both personal (his sister dated Paul McCartney) and professionally (he was the A&R for the Beatles’ Apple Records), but before these icons have a chance to speak about Asher, he gives audiences his own stories about them.
For instance, Asher’s account of his relationship with the Beatles is a truly spectacular story of how his sister Jane became an actor and began to date Paul McCartney. Peter tells of how Paul ultimately moved into the Asher residence in central London and gave “A World without Love” to Peter & Gordon. Meanwhile, the stories explain how Asher started the Indica Gallery alongside John Dunbar and Barry Miles. It was there that John Lennon first met Yoko Ono at a showcase of her work.
There is a dynamism to the retelling of these events owing to what one already knows about the Beatles. The film could have one learning facts that one might not have been aware of, seeing how the story connects to Peter & Gordon and Asher’s personal life, from hearing how it expands Asher’s ever-growing network, and ultimately from how it all crescendos into the reception Asher gets when he regales audiences with the story about Lennon and Ono meeting at his gallery.
The film understands that due to the sheer impact that Asher had on people and the culture, his story would be incomplete if told standalone, independent of the multiplicity of stories by which his own tale is inextricably wound. As the film develops beyond Asher’s early career exploits and his time with the Beatles, into his American expeditions, beginning with James Taylor and Carole King, the rhythm does get predictable, but never tiring. The more one learns about Asher, the more one wants to know about how this fantastic story ends. The more one finds out, the more fascinated one becomes by the generous manner in which Asher connected with people, which allowed him to be “everywhere.”
This sense is best encapsulated when guitarist Danny Kootch recounts that his first album working together with Asher, Taylor, and King, Sweet Baby James, featured the names of the contributing musicians on the back of the record. In Kootch’s own words, it was the first time he’d been recognized for his work on someone else’s album. Asher attributes this respect to his own frustrating experiences as a music fan and record collector, when his desire to know of the personnel that created a work was often left unsatiated owing to the absence of due credits on the back. Asher’s simple gesture, which is quite common in the music industry and on streaming platforms nowadays, reflects how beyond everything else, he valued the effort that people put into creating art. The film emphasizes the importance of collaboration for Asher, a quality that is also echoed in the fact that you rarely see him alone in the film, for he’s either speaking to an audience or offering his interviews alongside others.
The film ends with Asher speaking of Gordon’s demise. He offers a story of joy about the opportunity to collaborate long after they’d split when Paul Shaffer put together a tribute for Mike Smith in the form of an homage to the British Invasion in 2005. The vulnerability that Asher portrays when talking about losing Gordon is truly moving. It instantly reminds the viewer of the film’s and Asher’s beginning, when he and Gordon were mere schoolboys performing at clubs and crafting an identity for themselves. As a montage shows Asher performing the duo’s breakout hit “A World Without Love,” in different locations alongside a variety of musicians, a glorious full circle moment demonstrates the film’s accomplishment of a rather insurmountable task: to successfully recount the lives of Peter Asher. However, it is to the film’s credit that it does so quite spectacularly, and in a manner that is authentic to the man himself.
Peter Asher: Everywhere Man is now playing in theatres, including Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema on Aug. 1.
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