Danny Fields is one of those mysterious figures in the music industry you often see in black and white band photographs grinning away with his arms around the talent, too hip-looking to be a venue manager, too square to be a dealer. Turns out, he’s an interesting character, a wry raconteur full of spit and vinegar even now in his late 70s, who has had a varied music business career, and who was canny about keeping recordings of conversations , which enrich this documentary by Brendan Toller. A hyper-smart, gay, Jewish boy from Queens who studied law at Harvard, he became a music journalist and was the guy who reported in the US that John Lennon had said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. A friend of Andy Warhol’s, Edie Sedgwick and the Velvet Undergound, Fields knew just about everyone in the hippest New York circles. He became a publicist for Elektra records (critic Robert Christgau once dismissively called him the label’s “house hippy”) and took a ton of drugs with Jim Morrison from the Doors, among others. Fields persuaded Elektra to sign MC5 and The Stooges, and eventually he ended up managing the Ramones; indeed, he is the Danny in their song Danny Says who compels the group to go to Idaho. Stitched together from extensive interviews with Fields and his surviving friends, including Iggy Pop, Tommy Ramone and record exec Seymour Stein, this is a delightful slice of pop history.
