"The best music documentary ever made, period. It is history on film chronicling the end of the sixties. Watch it all fall apart before your eyes."

"More than any other band, the Who put that thing in me that made me who I am now, and this documentary told their story in a way that really zapped me. That connection you see between Pete Townshend and Keith Moon: you rarely see people get so possessed by their music, their energy and connection to each other. Then there’s Roger Daltrey being this flawless singer, an angel, in the chaos of it all. This documentary shows how much of the band’s exuberance is in their music, and when we’re watching their performances being constructed, I don’t see them being fakes – I see them making art out of their imaginations."

"The last film I’m going to list is a documentary about Red Hot Chili Peppers recording Blood Sugar Sex Magik that was called Funky Monks. It’s about an hour long, it’s shot in black and white, and it’s about them recording Blood Sugar Sex Magik in this house in Beverly Hills. Blood Sugar Sex Magik was arguably the most important album of my young adult life. It sort of put me on my musical path. I guess now, looking back on it, it’s not at all ironic that Funky Monks was the first documentary that I ever watched. It sort of set me on a documentary path, where it wasn’t just narrative movies that interested me, but also real-life stories told in documentary form were now available to me. It greatly influenced me, not only in the Tower Records documentary, but also in all the documentary work that I’ve done. It is, I find, an incredibly engaging film about a subject that I am very passionate about, which is that particular record, and that particular time, not only for that band, but for music in general."

"The most influential rock film ever made (A Hard Day’s Night is probably second). It’s more than thirty years old, but it’s still the default reference for every rock group with a sense of humor (even if none of the band members were alive when it was originally released). It somehow has more cultural sticking power than most of the music it satirizes. There’s never been a real documentary about a real band that captures the nature of heavy rock as deftly as this unreal documentary about a fake band."

"This documentary is about the Leonard Bernstein-conducted recording of the score in the 80s, with Kiri Te Kanawa and José Carreras. That soundtrack was a staple at home when I was growing up – we had this glossy, massive four-cassette tape box of it. Bernstein is such an interesting person: temperamental, feisty, impatient, funny, smoking cigarettes in his red polo neck. And to see him conduct his music – this incredible, ambitious, interesting, crazy, heartbreaking music, which is never schmaltzy, but crunchy and angsty, and then with these moments of release – is really amazing."

"I've been listening to her for years, but I just watched a documentary about her – so much raw emotion! And free of so many complications that music has sometimes. The music is just very direct, simple and strong, free of filigree. She's direct to the heart. Her intimate collaboration with Portugal's poets is admirable. She definitely stuck by her rifles. And it's good to know that she was part of making the fado style. I first came across it, I would guess, 15 years ago. It has the same rawness as flamenco but it's less flamboyant, and more stern and stark somehow."

"Speaking of snake-ish charmers, enter a young Bob Dylan in D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 Dont Look Back. This may be a documentary, but don’t think for one moment that Dylan isn’t brilliantly putting on a performance as PYT (pretty young thing) “Bobby Dylan, the brilliant folksinger.” And while it’s not to my credit that I could never wrap my mind around folk music, even I am not immune from the oodles of bratty charm that Dylan exudes here."

"It’s known as the lost Scorsese movie. It’s a documentary he made about his friend Steven Prince, who worked in the music business in the ’70s – the height of their drug use. Marty, who was already a hot filmmaker then, is in it and talks 200 miles a second. The main character is fascinating, and so honest, snatched out of the Hollywood and music business and drug culture of that time. Steven Prince tells the story that Quentin Tarantino used for the needle in the chest in Pulp Fiction (1994); it had happened to him, he had put a magic marker on a girl’s chest and plunged an adrenaline needle into her heart."