“THIS FILM SHOULD BE PLAYED LOUD BITCH!” reads an opening title card in John Early‘s Max special, John Early: Now More Than Ever, an explicit reference to the beginning of The Band’s iconic concert documentary, The Last Waltz (the same card appears, but without the “BITCH”).
“The struggle with filming a live show is that when you put a camera on something, it loses all of its life,” laughs Early in TV Insider’s video, above. With his special, he and his collaborators decided to go with a “shaky, gritty, New York-y rock doc style” to capture the “sweatiness” of his live shows.
Early’s special, which came out last June, is reference-heavy. We asked him to break down some of our (and his) cultural touchstones in Now More Than Ever. He sings four songs in the special: “Oops (Oh My)” by Tweet featuring Missy Elliott, “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer, “After the Gold Rush” by Neil Young (though he is covering a cover of the song by Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt), and “Overprotected” by Britney Spears. Watch Early explain the key to a good Britney Spears impression above.
“I just think ‘I Feel Love’ is the greatest song ever made,” gushes Early. “There’s nothing cooler than this song. No one tops this.” Early attempts to hit Summer’s high notes in the special. “It was genuinely scary.”
From Donna Summer to The Band, Neil Young, and Bob Fosse, the decade’s culture Early is most attracted to seems to be the 1970s. “I was self-conscious of the ’70s aspect of the special, because there’s so much of that in film right now,” Early says. “There’s a sweatiness to a lot of the stuff from the ’70s and that seemed appropriate here.” He also shared that his love of disco is the biggest draw, saying, “The spirit of disco is always what I’m trying to do in my live shows.”
Watch Early break down the references in John Early: Now More Than Ever above.
John Early: Now More Than Ever, Streaming now, Max