EXCLUSIVE: The Remains were a 1960s garage rock band from Boston, Massachusetts, who were given the honor of supporting The Beatles on their final U.S. tour in 1966.
The band is now the subject of a documentary – America’s Lost Band – that will premiere on PBS.
The group formed in 1964 with Barry Tashian, Bill Briggs, Chip Damiani and Vern Miller. They began making a name for themselves, and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Christmas Show in 1965 before signing to Epic Records.
However, the band broke up soon after their three-week jaunt with The Beatles.
They did reform later and America’s Lost Band captures the group on its return to Los Angeles for the first time in 40 years.
The doc sees the band, which toured across Europe in 2006 after recording a new album – Movin’ On in 2002, in a variety of settings: a rehearsal, the Underground Garage radio show, Amoeba Music, Guitar Center, cruising in a vintage Caddy, standing outside the iconic Capitol Records building, walking on Sunset Boulevard, and an LA club. It is about the bond between four close friends and the passion they still had for playing music together decades after breaking up and not quite reaching their final destination.
The film is directed by Michael Stich, a longtime director of The Bold and the Beautiful, who has won Emmys for his work on the daytime soap.
It will premiere on Connecticut’s PBS station, CPTV, in April and will also stream nationwide on CPTV’s platforms.
America’s Lost Band takes it title from quote by former Rolling Stone music editor Mark Kemp, who wrote about them in Paste Magazine in 2007. It comes after Jon Landau, Bruce Springsteen’s longtime manager, who was originally a rock critic, said, “They were how you told a stranger about rock ‘n’ roll.”
The documentary was adapted from a feature-length film that played at some film festivals over 15 years ago, but was never released for public distribution due to licensing costs and related issues tied into the first part of the film.
It is produced by Fred Cantor, who previously produced rock doc short, The High School That Rocked!, which was the only documentary short invited to screen at the 2018 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Film Series.
Cantor said, “I can attest to the fabulous job Michael Stich did in making this new adaptation so seamless. Plus, being a big fan of music documentaries myself, I feel that the concert footage Michael filmed and edited is right up there with the best such footage I have ever seen.”
