A few weeks after screening the DC hardcore punk documentary Salad Days and less than two weeks after showing San Diego scene look It’s Gonna Blow, the Somerville Theatre is bringing another acclaimed music documentary to its Davis Square big screen tonight with the area premiere of I Need a Dodge! Joe Strummer on the Run.
The screening is presented by Kevin Hoskins and Rock Shop. Released last October via Tindog Films, Nick Hall’s film centers around Strummer’s 1997 quest to find a car he left 12 years earlier in a Madrid parking lot. He enlists the Spanish people to help find the Dodge, and, as the description reads, the “film discovers what Joe Strummer was doing in Madrid in 1985 while the Clash was falling apart, finds out the truth behind the production of the 091 LP and investigates what happened to his beloved Dodge.”
I Need A Dodge received special jury mention at Barcelona’s In-Edit Festival.
Read the extended bio below, and check out a preview from the Guardian after the block quote.
Soon after the filmmaker started investigating Joe Strummer’s refuge in Spain in 1984/5, they’d heard a recording of an interview on Spanish national radio from 1997. In the interview Joe talks about a car he had in Madrid some years earlier. One day he left the car in a carpark but couldn’t remember which one. And there it stayed. In the interview Joe appeals to the Spanish people to help him find his car. The filmmaker couldn’t help wondering what had happened to Joe’s Dodge and what he was doing in Madrid without the rest of The Clash. I thought I’d dig around… Joe Strummer touched many peoples’ lives in Spain during this period. He became friends with the biggest stars in Spanish music and produced an LP for a rock band from Granada. Everyone interviewed for the film tells an interesting and often funny tale of their time with a rock star at a professional and personal crossroads. It was a story that needed to be told and an investigation that needed to be carried completed — just in case!
And here’s a behind the scenes look at I Need A Dodge while it was still being created…
