Dennis and Lois (2019)

The story of Dennis Anderson and Lois Kahlert and their mutual lifelong love affair with live rock music felt almost precious in synopsis and I put off taking a look for months. Now I'm sorry I did so I looked at it two times in a row to make up for that. It's nothing less than thrilling. Between them Dennis and Lois have seen (and have the receipts for) Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, Little Stevie Wonder ("when he was little") and lots of Motown artists, James Brown, the Shirelles—it's quite an amazing and long list. They met in 1975 at a CBGB show with Richard Hell, Talking Heads, and the Ramones. The Ramones was their first mutual love affair—they found they could be helpful by running the merch table for the band, selling t-shirts and memorabilia. The ever-evolving shift in their priorities across their impressive clubbing career (they claim 10,000 shows) is perhaps signaled best by their vanity license plates: first, RAMONES, which were constantly being ripped off and having to be replaced. Then MEKONS, which Jon Langford in interview here wryly notes have never been ripped off. There is an interesting missing piece in the adventures of Dennis and Lois, from about 1965 to 1975, with no mention of the Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, or other NYC artists of the period—strange gap. By the 1980s their interests lay squarely in British indie trends, focused especially on Manchester, where they followed Joy Division into New Order into Happy Mondays into the Stone Roses. Happy Mondays wrote a song about them in 1990, "Dennis and Lois"—it's on Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches. By then the couple had inserted themselves into the indie traveling circuit, offering floors of their home in Brooklyn for touring bands and even more often traveling along with them to work the merch tables and see great shows four nights a week or more. This is their life. (Are they independently wealthy? Their house is full of collectible toys, but how they survive is never explained.)

By the 1990s and since then their taste has evolved into shoegaze permutations, some of which I know, barely, e.g., Doves, and much of which I don't know at all, e.g., A Place to Bury Strangers, John Grant, or Fat White Family. All of it heard in the movie sounds wonderful and excellent, although that does remind me of one weak point here, which is there appears to be some licensing problems. The Ramones loom huge in the story of Dennis and Lois, it's their main working preoccupation for more than 10 years starting in 1975. But there is no Ramones music in this doc—there's some Ramones-like generic riffing that accompanies that part of the picture, which I noticed more going through it the second time. But let that be the takeaway: this documentary was literally so thrilling, with so much useful information (the epic story of Frank Sidebottom!), and with such solace and sensitive understanding of the life-affirming powers of live music, that you don't always notice things like Ramones music missing in action. Dennis and Lois was shot and put together before the pandemic—there's a next chapter to be heard from Dennis and Lois, if we ever get to the end of this. Even as is, the two in these scenes from maybe circa 2017 already look like grandparents, which is charming and also weird. No one knows it better than Dennis and Lois themselves but they also know why they are where they are and as such stand as a certain kind of role model for the pursuit of something I abandoned myself in my 50s. Kudos to them. Long may they rock. They stand to the mosh and the crowd surfing and the dancing and all the rest, like they were born to it. They seem to have great taste too. Remarkable stuff.