Apple’s ‘1971’ music doc series is a triumph of clever detective work

Welcome to Thanks, I Love It, our series highlighting something onscreen we’re obsessed with this week.

1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything makes a persuasive argument for the thesis laid out in its title by taking us on a trip back through time.

The new Apple TV+ documentary series chronicles the culture-shaking events of its eponymous year over eight roughly hour-long episodes. Each one dials in a focus on specific topics, such as racial unrest and the way music engaged with the struggle for Civil Rights, or the impacts of the drug culture that took shape in the ’60s. 

But the propulsive energy fueling this documentary’s multifaceted deep dives is an absolute treasure trove of archival footage and photos. From rare looks behind the scenes at icons like David Bowie and Sly Stone to stirring live performances from Joni Mitchell, Bill Withers, Curtis Mayfield, and others, 1971 offers a captivating picture of the world from 50 years ago.

For the team charged with assembling these valuable relics into a coherent piece — which 1971 does effortlessly — it all starts with research and detective work. 

“We spend quite a considerable amount of time coming up with a premise,” executive producer James Gay-Rees explained during a recent video interview with Mashable. “That comes out of a lot of conversations, and a lot of thinking, and a lot of reading, and a lot of research.”

Gay-Rees should know. His latest collaboration with series director and fellow EP Asif Kapadia adds to their growing catalogue of music documentary hits that includes the devastating (and Oscar-winning) 2015 Amy Winehouse profile, Amy, and Oasis: Supersonic, a journey through the history of the ’90s superstars behind “Champagne Supernova” and “Wonderwall.”

It’s much the same vibe in 1971, which makes deft use of archival materials to weave together a compelling narrative. After all the conversations and thinking and reading and research are done, the project’s archive producers head out to do the actual detective work of finding usable material. 

“It’s an organic process whereby you go very wide and deep, and you get thousands of hours.”

“It’s an organic process whereby you just go very wide and deep, and you get thousands and thousands of hours that you distill into this narrative over the course of about three years,” Gay-Rees added. It’s tricky work, and a process that’s often fraught with hard choices. 

“You have to be brave [enough] to do a process of elimination,” Kapadia said, referring to the mountains of material that don’t make the final cut. He notes that the kind of footage that makes 1971 special is often referred to as “B-roll.” But that’s not the way he sees it.

“It’s the ‘A-roll,’ it’s the bit that really matters,” Kapadia said. “It’s the stuff that people think is not important that we try to go back to fool with.”

The archive producers rely on a unique array of skills to dig up the materials needed for a project like 1971. It’s not like there’s some central repository for archival materials spreading across all of music history. All the early discussions and research dives amount to a starting point, surfacing the kinds of clues the archive producers need to get the job done.

“There’s a lot of detective work,” said James Rogan, who directed multiple episodes of the series and who first (and last) worked with Gay-Rees and Kapadia on the BBC miniseries Stephen: The Murder That Changed a Nation. Rogan worked closely with the archive producers on his episodes of 1971 and he has plenty of insight to offer on the actual process.

“One of the questions you ask yourself [for a project like this] is who’s likely to have a camera on them,” he explained. It was an easier question to answer when it came to bona fide superstars. “Obviously if you’re an ex-Beatle, you’re probably going to be followed around by a camera.”

Even there, though, you can easily end up with the same pile of material that’s appeared in dozens of other documentaries and news reels over the years. That’s why it’s vital that the research goes deep as well as wide. 

“You read all the books you can possibly get your hands on. And then, when [the archive producers] identify a moment, you think, ‘Is there likely to have been a camera there?’ and you try to dig into it,” Rogan continued. For things like press events, screenings, and concerts, the answer to that question is often “yes.” Actually finding that footage, though, is where it gets challenging.

The archive producers are tasked with looking beyond what Rogan described as “prepackaged clips of other shows.” They’re after the “rushes,” the raw, unedited, and often long-untouched footage that eventually becomes the heartbeat of a project like 1971.

“Occasionally they come back and say, ‘Yeah we found the rushes.’ And you do a little dance in the edit suite, because that’s the moment you know you can really start working with something,” Rogan said.

One of the prized discoveries in 1971 relates to one of the documentary’s recurring subjects, David Bowie. He’s what Gay-Rees describes as a “very central character” in this series because that year was a pivotal moment in the young musician’s career. He was still figuring himself out and finding his way to the art that would make him a superstar.

“When you find something that genuinely hasn’t been seen before, it’s such a buzz.”

“He had a very lo-fi year [in 1971]. He went to America for the first time, obviously met [famed artist Andy] Warhol, and we have that footage,” Gay-Rees said. “But we also found some stills of him which had never been seen before in one of the vaults of the record company. It doesn’t sound like much, but when it’s David Bowie and pretty much every stone has been turned over in the subsequent 50 years, then it’s a real joy to find something which genuinely hadn’t been seen by anybody else before.”

Despite being a central figure in 1971‘s ongoing story, weaving a whole narrative around Bowie was a challenge for the creative team. Again, this was early days in his career. There’s not even video footage available from his set at the first Glastonbury Festival in 1971. Instead we hear a brief snippet of “Changes” from his set overlaid on top of photos and general crowd scenes.

“He didn’t really do many interviews that year. He wasn’t really in the public domain that much, because he hadn’t worked it out yet,” Gay-Rees said. “So to make that story work with limited material was a challenge, and really satisfying.”

Not everything works out so well, of course. Rogan, a Led Zeppelin fan, felt some disappointment over not being able to include the English rockers in 1971. But he estimates that roughly “95 percent” of the figures that he and the producers hoped to focus on did make the cut in the end. That’s huge, and a credit to the immense amount of work that goes into digging up valuable relics from the past.

“There’s always archives in hidden places. We’ve been doing it for a long time and you’ve got to be really, really diligent in your detective work,” Rogan said. “It can come from anywhere; you speak to people who speak to people who speak to people who speak to people, and you get a little bit of a clue, and then you dig further. Sometimes it’s old photographers who haven’t archived their work for years. It can be all over the place. But that’s the joy of it. When you find something that genuinely hasn’t been seen before, it’s such a buzz.”

1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything is now streaming on AppleTV+.