Nas before Illmatic. A young Jay Z and Notorious B.I.G. Members of the Wu-Tang Clan, long before they topped the charts with Wu-Tang Forever. Those are just some of the would-be legends that appeared on The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show on WKCR in New York City.

From 1990 to 1998, the late-night radio program led by DJs Stretch Armstrong (Adrian Bartos) and Bobbito (Robert Garcia) captured some of the most golden moments in hip-hop’s golden era. Fans of the music look back on it as the most important hip-hop show of its day.

At 7 p.m. on Nov. 10, NPR is showing a new documentary about the storied show, called Stretch and Bobbito: Radio That Changed Lives. WAMU 88.5 is giving away about two dozen tickets to the event, and we’d love you to score a pair.

So… you want these tickets? Follow these simple instructions: Before noon on Friday, Nov. 6, send an email to bandwidth@wamu.org with the subject line “Stretch and Bobbito.” Include your full name and the name of your (one) guest, if applicable. If you’re among the first 20ish people to email us, you win.

Want a glimpse of Stretch and Bobbito? Watch the documentary’s trailer up top. Then come and get these tickets.

NPR is located at 1111 North Capitol St. NE in D.C.

Actor Colin Hanks — Tom’s son — loved Tower so much, he spent seven years making a documentary about the chain. It’s a love letter to Tower Records called All Things Must Pass.

“Tower sort of helped pave the way for your identity,” Hanks says. “For lack of a better phrase, music makes people, sometimes, where you sort of latch on to music as a way of identifying yourself or your tribe. I got that at Tower Records.”

In Hanks’ documentary, you see founder Russ Solomon and his innermost circle — many of whom were there when Tower was founded in California — having a ball building this thing together.

Everyone, from clerks to customers, could feel those good vibrations. During its flush years, Tower was a pilgrimage place for music fanatics — even for the world’s biggest stars. Elton John talked to Hanks about how he’d go into one of the Los Angeles stores every week to buy stacks of new releases.

“Tuesday mornings, I would be at Tower Records,” John says in the film. “And it was a ritual, and it was a ritual I loved. I mean, Tower Records had everything. Those people knew their stuff. They were really on their ball. I mean, they just weren’t employees that happened to work at a music store. They were devotees of music.”

Solomon let them decide what each store stocked, Hanks says.

“New Orleans had a huge heritage music section; Nashville had a gigantic country section,” he says. “Tower was, in essence, a bunch of mom and pop record stores, you know? Although they were all under the same banner, the same name, the same yellow-and-red signage, each one was run individually by the people in the stores: the clerks, the buyers for each individual store, the art department from each individual store. Each store represented its city or its neighborhood in the city. They all had their own style.”

Tower started out as an offshoot of Solomon’s father’s drugstore in Sacramento, Calif. He tells Hanks how he got his friends and relatives to help him get off the ground.

“Luckily, my cousin Ross was a builder — electrical, carpentry,” Solomon says in the documentary. “And so he volunteered, ‘Oh, I’ll go down and fix it up, put some lighting in there, put a new floor in, and paint it.’ And that was it. He went in and did it.”

Solomon’s California inner circle eventually became some of Tower’s top brass, and that family atmosphere spread as the company expanded. Jason Sumney started out as a clerk at Tower’s store at 4th and Broadway in New York before moving into its regional operations.

“Never in my life before, and probably never again, will I experience anything like that,” Sumney says. “Everybody got along, and it was such an amazing vibe. Every day was fun, you know? Even the downs were fun.”

Over the years, Tower grew and grew. It became a multinational empire, with stores and licensees from London to Buenos Aires to Tokyo. But in 2006, Tower declared bankruptcy.

Ed Christman has been reporting on music retailers for Billboard magazine for 26 years. “It took eight or nine years to unfold,” Christman says. “The things that proved to be a mistake, in hindsight, occurred in 1998.”

Christman says that Tower wasn’t alone in the hunger to expand that eventually proved to be its undoing.

“There was at least 10 or 15 large chains that were racing to be the dominant force in music, and Tower decided to take on $110 million in debt,” Christman says. “So they did a bond offering, and they were going to use that debt to drive global expansion. It was just the mood of the day — it was grow and go.”

Tower’s competitors weren’t just other record stores. Big-box outlets like Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy wanted music fans’ dollars, too. But they discounted CD prices drastically to get customers through their doors, in hopes that they’d also pile things like clothes, pet food, batteries and TVs into their shopping baskets.

“What they did was they looked at the basket — was the basket profitable?” Christman says. “So if there was a lot of other items in there, they didn’t care if it was music or not. Whereas at the record store, Tower Records, they needed everything in the basket to be profitable.”

Tower couldn’t afford to discount CDs much. And Tower couldn’t persuade consumers to spend somewhere between $12 and $19 for an album. Solomon couldn’t persuade the labels to lower their prices or start selling CD singles.

By then, music fans had already started turning to other options, from file-sharing sites like Napster to download stores like iTunes.

Hanks contends that Tower started acting as if it was just too big to fail.

“Tower, in almost 40 years, had always grown,” Hanks says. “It had always made money. It had never lost money. … Well, I think there was a lot of stuff that Tower did not see coming.”

You can hear that in a 1994 promotional video from Russ Solomon, in which Solomon says: “As for the whole concept of beaming something into one’s home, that may come along someday, that’s for sure. But it will come along over a long period of time, and we’ll be able to deal with it and change our focus and change the way we do business. As far as your CD collection — and our CD inventory, for that matter — it’s going to be around for a long, long time, believe me.”

Solomon and Tower had their critics, none of whom are in Hanks’ documentary. In the 1990s, for example, Tower — along with other megachains like HMV and Virgin — was often accused of putting independent mom and pop music retailers out of business. But for Hanks, making this film was a chance to revisit a time and experience that molded him.

“Tower was one of those places. It was special, it was unique,” he says. “You forged a connection with it, whether you knew it or not. I didn’t know it when I was a kid, and it wasn’t until I started making this project that I realized just how informative it was for me when I was growing up. And it’s like that for a lot of people.”

Even though it’s been nearly a decade since Tower closed its doors, its memory still burns bright for fans whose musical tastes were shaped below those yellow-and-red signs.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

From the 1960s until his unexpected death in 1994, Danny Gatton’s speedy fingers peeled off rock, blues, jazz and country licks to a small but passionate local audience. He called his music community in Southeast D.C. and Maryland’s Prince George’s County the “Anacostia Delta,” comparing it to the Mississippi region that birthed Delta blues and rock ‘n’ roll.

Anacostia Delta is also the name of Bryan Reichhardt’s forthcoming documentary about Gatton, one of two in the making — and Saturday night, the filmmakers plan to capture a tribute to the fabled musician at the Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia. Tickets to the event, called “Celebrating Danny Gatton and the Music of the Anacostia Delta,” have already sold out.

“The arc of the film is really around this concert we are having at the Birchmere,” says Reichhardt.

An Indiegogo campaign video for Anacostia Delta:

Gatton stunned the music community in 1994 when he was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on his Maryland farm. A Washington Post obituary captured reactions from both local and national musicians who “expressed shock about the silencing of a guitarist famous for his mind-boggling chops and blistering speed.” Gatton was 49.

As friends told the Post’s Richard Harrington, Gatton possessed an incredible talent, but he’d never truly capitalized on it. He remained a family man even after — as legend has it — John Fogerty offered him a job playing guitar in Creedence Clearwater Revival. Gatton didn’t like to travel, friends said, and he’d grappled with depression for decades. He preferred to stay near home, in the Anacostia Delta.

Born in 1945, Gatton grew up in D.C.’s Anacostia neighborhood and attended Ballou High School. In 1962 he and his family moved to Oxon Hill in Prince George’s County. A promising musician from a young age, Gatton played local gigs with artists from around town. Guitars weren’t his only passion: He loved old cars just as much.

Gatton had remarkable musical range. He recorded an album called New York Stories with noted jazz players Joshua Redman, Bobby Watson and Roy Hargrove. With his film, Reichhardt seems to want to capture how Gatton — like fellow Prince George’s County resident Roy Buchanan, named a top guitarist by Rolling Stone magazine — played with the greats, but still chose to stay at home.

“People knew [Gatton] here and celebrated guitar players knew him,” Reichhardt says, “but he was not in the popular mainstream.”

Gatton’s scene included the rockabilly, blues, jazz and country musicians who played honky tonks and dive bars across the Eastern Capital region. It’s a culture that Reichhardt has hoped to document for years.

“This is a film I have wanted to make since Danny was alive,” the filmmaker says.

Reichhardt says he’d discussed the idea of a documentary with Gatton before he died, but at the time he was “young and green,” and he didn’t follow through. When Gatton died, he attempted it again but didn’t finish. It wasn’t until he befriended Gatton’s bass player, John Previti — and was urged forward by writer Paul Glenshaw, with whom he’d worked on a 2009 film called Barnstorming — that he revisited the project. Reichhardt calls Previti “the spirit behind the film.”

“John has always wanted to do a film about the entire music scene that Danny came out of,” Reichhardt says. “That’s sort of the genesis of this project.”

Reichhardt fondly remembers his days seeing Gatton play live — and he aims to capture that feeling in his documentary. He and his brother used to see the guitarist regularly at Club Soda, now Atomic Billiards in D.C.’s Cleveland Park neighborhood.

“I would be in awe,” the director says. “Everyone would. It was impossible not to smile at what he was doing. It was just incredible how he would interpret songs… He’d do a funk version of a jazz standard, or a jazz version of a country standard. He was just phenomenal.”

Reichhardt aims to release Anacostia Delta in August 2016, around the same time as another Gatton documentary, The Humbler, is expected to come out. Director Virginia Quesada has been working on the biography film since 1989, five years before Gatton’s death. (Its title references Gatton’s nickname, which he earned for putting so many rival musicians to shame.)

An interview excerpt from The Humbler:

Reichhardt says Anacostia Delta will be more of an appreciation than a straight biography of Gatton. He’ll use footage from Saturday’s Birchmere concert — featuring musicians from Gatton’s universe, brought together by Previti — interspersed with interviews and footage of the guitarist. Bands in which Gatton performed, including The Fat Boys, Redneck Jazz Explosion and Funhouse, are planning to reunite for the show, with appearances from rockabilly guitar man Billy Hancock and octogenarian Frank Shegogue, whom some consider the D.C. region’s first rock ‘n’ roll guitarist.

Reichhardt wants Anacostia Delta to do for Danny Gatton and his community what the film Buena Vista Social Club did for Cuba’s forgotten artists. But there’s one problem: Gatton’s scene doesn’t necessarily have the same allure as the Cubans.

Younger viewers might view the Anacostia Delta scene as a bunch of over-the-hill roots rockers with a penchant for covers, unlike the Cuban artists living amid a U.S. embargo.

The director acknowledges that he has concerns. “I am worried,” Reichhardt says, “and the musicians are worried, too. Many of [Gatton’s] bandmates fear that his music will vanish. The fact that he was as great as he was and that this area as musical as it was will be forgotten.”

But Reichhardt has hope for what his film can accomplish. “Maybe we can create a renaissance for this musical scene,” he says.

Top photo: Still captured from the Anacostia Delta documentary.

“Celebrating Danny Gatton and the Music of the Anacostia Delta” takes place Sept. 26 at Birchmere. Tickets are sold out.

After making the rounds at film festivals and showings worldwide, D.C. punk-rock documentary Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington DC is now available for purchase on Vimeo. But that’s just one of the many downloads floating around the Internet, according to director Scott Crawford. He says Salad Days has been stolen widely online before its formal release later this year.

“There have been multiple versions of the film posted all over torrents and YouTube,” emails Crawford, who used to edit Bandwidth. “Overseas even worse. Really bums me out.”

Crawford and director of photography Jim Saah (who both appeared on a Salad Days panel I moderated for NPR in May) began selling downloads of the film on Vimeo for 30 days starting Aug. 4. It comes out on DVD in September, followed by Hulu, On Demand and other services, Crawford says.

But in the months leading up to the film’s release, multiple cuts of Salad Days have popped up illegally online. Crawford says he started noticing them about two months ago. “The versions I saw were ones sent to film festivals as well other versions along the way,” Crawford writes. He says he doesn’t know how pirates got their hands on copies; he says it “could be anything.”

When I checked today, torrent search engines Kickass Torrents and The Pirate Bay yielded more links for Mac DeMarco‘s 2014 album Salad Days than links obviously related to Crawford and Saah’s documentary, but the torrent universe is vast, and not all files may be labeled accurately. The same could be said about YouTube. Update: Crawford says that the film’s distributor, MVD Entertainment Group, had the illegal links taken down.

Online pirating of music has been a hot-button issue since the dawn of file-sharing services like Napster. But music fans might not know as much about the impact of movie pirating. An Indiewire op-ed written by Ruth Vitale of anti-piracy group CreativeFuture and Alamo Drafthouse Cinema CEO Tim League says illegal downloading could be partially responsible for a recent decline in film releases.

“Whether you’re employed by a major studio or a do-it-yourself creator, if you’re involved in the making of TV or film, it’s safe to assume that piracy takes a big cut out of your business,” the op-ed says.

It doesn’t sound like Crawford expected a certain amount of pirating. When he first saw people illegitimately distributing his film, he says he “was pretty shocked, actually.”

Salad Days debuted in New York in 2014, later selling out a string of local showings at AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland. It’s traveled extensively since then, screening in dozens of U.S. cities as well as Canada, Russia and Argentina. The documentary covers the early years of D.C.’s storied punk-rock scene, talking to musicians, venue operators, label owners and fans about the development and cultural impact of punk in the capital region.

Asked how pirating has affected his bottom line, Crawford writes, “[It’s] really hard to say.”

Crawford and Saah ran a successful Kickstarter campaign for Salad Days in 2012, raising nearly $55,000 to produce the documentary. But that hasn’t been enough for the filmmakers to break even, the director says.

Income from Salad Days is “not even close to covering the costs of the film,” Crawford writes.

The documentary Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in the Nation’s Capital is available on Vimeo for a limited time and on DVD starting Sept. 18.

A new documentary film called Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington, DC looks back at that scene. NPR Music will host a screening in, appropriately enough, the nation’s capital, and you’re invited. Salad Days captures an exciting time in this city by pulling together retrospective interviews with rare film footage from the days when harDCore punk was exploding. The film was made by Scott Crawford, a youngster back in those days who had a fanzine that covered those magical times.

Scott Crawford will be on hand after the screening to answer questions along with other panelists including Salad Days director of photography Jim Saah (who documented the scene as a photographer), musician Brian Baker (of Minor Threat, Bad Religion and Dag Nasty) and moderator Ally Schweitzer of WAMU.

The screening will take place on Tuesday, May 5 at 7:00 p.m. If you’d like to join us, go to this page to reserve your free ticket.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

A new film documents the vibrant pop music scene that existed before the Khmer Rogue. Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock And Roll, which took director John Pirozzi 10 years to make, opens this week in New York.

One of the artists included in the film, Sinn Sisamouth, still is considered the greatest Cambodian singer of all time, an artist who embraced and adapted Western styles for Cambodian audiences.

“I think he was actually both Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra,” Pirozzi tells NPR’s Robert Siegel.

During the 20 years when pop music exploded in Cambodia, the musicians incorporated influences from around the world. They would imitate what we would call surf rock. There’s also a very surprising Afro-Cuban music trend that started to blend in, and even covers of Western artists like Santana. The sounds from other countries were constantly changing Cambodian music.

One of the most fascinating things Pirozzi discovered while making the film was the very short lag time between music coming out of the West and the Cambodian musicians’ ability to pick up on it.

“I think,” Pirozzi says, “Western music for Cambodians was something that goes back to pre-rock ‘n’ roll. I mean, there were dance halls in Phnom Penh, and big band music and crooners were very popular in the ’50s. People like Perry Como, Pat Boone, Frank Sinatra were getting into Cambodia through the elite, through the wealthy Cambodians who were being educated in France and coming back with records.”

Initially, urban elites only had access to the ’60s discotheque scenes shown in the film. But as American GIs began broadcasting close to Cambodia, Western music opened up to more and more people. By the time the ’70s came around, right before the Khmer Rouge came into power, it was more accessible for Cambodians.

The rise of the Khmer Rouge spelled the end of the booming pop scene. Foreign sounds were banned and only traditional music was allowed. The capital city of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, was emptied out.

“I think most of the famous singers — like Sinn Sisamouth, Ros Serey Sothea — were so high profile, it was impossible for them to hide their identities,” Pirozzi says. “But the backing musicians — the drummers, the guitar players, the bass players — they weren’t as well known, so they could pretty much see what was happening and were able to hide their identities, some of them.

“You had to really pick up on the situation quickly, and understand you had to hide your identity or else you could potentially be a target.”

Sieng Vanthy is one of the few famous musicians who managed to survive.

“I told them I was a banana seller,” she says in the film. “If I told them I was a singer, I would have been killed.”

“When we interviewed her,” Pirozzi says, “no one had really asked her about this time in her life for a long time, and you have to remember these people had their identities stripped from them. They had to start whole new lives, even after the Khmer Rouge, coming back to a city that was completely destroyed, a country that was completely destroyed.

“So conducting the interviews and asking people to access this time was a very intense process.”

When Pirozzi started the film, he was told by many people that he wouldn’t find anything in terms of photographs and archival footage — but a lot of the music was still out there.

“People held onto it, people hid it, people saved it,” he says. “There’s so many people who came to me when they found out about the film who had little pieces to the puzzle — who had songs, who had photos, who had maybe a little bit of footage. And so the film sort of came together in a very communal way, with people who really cared about the music and cared about the country.”

The documentary plays April 29 at the AFI Silver Theatre And Cultural Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, with a concert afterward.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Filmfest DC’s 2015 offerings include two music categories: “Reel Jazz” and the hybrid concert/film series “Rhythm On And Off The Screen.” Subjects range from calypso stars (The Glamour Boyz Again) to steel drums (PAN! Our Music Odyssey) to fascinating figures in jazz (Be Known: The Mystery of Kahil El’Zabar).

But with such an eclectic lineup, the fest might leave casual filmgoers with no natural starting point. So our critic Andrew Lapin looked at one film from both music categories. He found one documentary worth the reasonable $13 admission, and another that doesn’t rise to the level of its $45 admission price on opening night. — Ally Schweitzer

Check out FilmFest DC’s complete 2015 schedule at filmfestdc.org.

See: Rahsaan Roland Kirk: The Case Of The Three-Sided Dream

It’s quite a sight — and sound — when, with three saxophones already strapped to his shoulder, blind jazz master Rahsaan Roland Kirk reaches over them and pulls out a flute. Or when he’s in close up and so many reeds are hovering in the frame that one drifts toward his nose… and then enters it, and he plays through his nostril while chatting away with the audience.

Jazz purists have argued that Kirk’s style isn’t a display of outsized talent but rather outsized showmanship. The biggest pleasure of Adam Kahan’s documentary on the New York-based musician, Rahsaan Roland Kirk: The Case Of The Three-Sided Dream (watch the trailer above), is seeing his artistry explained and defended by family, friends and bandmates, interspersed with archival footage of his performances so that we can judge for ourselves.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk

Even the existence of those performances, as we learn, was a hard-earned victory, as Kirk had to spearhead a protest group — the Jazz and People’s Movement — to persuade TV producers in the 1970s to air more jazz acts. Making noise on the set of The Dick Cavett Show, according to the movie, helped sway Ed Sullivan to book Kirk on his own show.

But to call Kirk, who died in 1977, a showman isn’t a knock against him. The film depicts the man as a large personality both on and off the stage, a political firebrand who insisted on referring to jazz as “black classical music” and to planet Earth as “Plantation Earth.” Kahan intercuts his footage with animated interludes exploring Kirk’s dreamy philosophies. A sluggish opening third aside, Rahsaan Roland Kirk is an exuberant, entertaining look at one of jazz’s most unique voices. And it’s one of several Filmfest DC documentaries on jazz, a lineup that also includes films about Kahil El Zabar, Jaco Pastorius and Clark Terry. — Andrew Lapin

The film shows April 23 at 8:30 p.m. and April 24 at 6:30 p.m. at E Street Cinema.

Skip: Tango Glories

Tango Glories

The opening night selection for this year’s Filmfest is a lifeless and mediocre attempt to weave together decades of Argentine history via the regional dance. But at least attendees who plunk down $45 for the evening will also be treated to a tango party. Hopefully it’s better than the film it’s celebrating.

In Tango Glories, Buenos Aires psychiatrist Ezequiel (Gaston Pauls) cares for Fermín (Hector Alterio), an elderly patient with one of those contrived, primed-for-catharsis mental disorders favored by the movies: He only speaks in lyrics to tango songs. We can guess that this ailment has been triggered by something from Fermín’s past, perhaps related to Argentina’s ugly political history. We can further guess that Ezequiel will decide to learn the tango in an attempt to better understand both his patient and his gorgeous dancer granddaughter Eva (Antonella Costa). Occasional flashbacks to the younger Fermín offer retro costumes and production design, but the present hangs on Ezequiel, who often seems more lifeless than his patient. The film also inexplicably condenses the part where he, in fact, learns how to tango.

Tango Glories was written and co-directed by Oliver Kolker, a professional tango dancer, and the tango scenes are the highlights, shot in a captivating fashion that captures the dance’s inherent eroticism. But the rest of the film suffers from lethargic pacing that doesn’t seem to befit the subject matter at all (a stereotypically overbearing Jewish mother isn’t helping, either). Rhythm-and-dance fans should save their money and seek out some of the festival’s other selections, including Colombia’s Ciudad Delirio (about salsa), the U.S.’s Tap World (tap) and Trinidad and Tobago’s The Glamour Boyz Again (Calypso). — Andrew Lapin

The film opens Filmfest DC April 16 at 7 p.m. at AMC Mazza Gallerie. Includes party with tango dancers.

WAMU is a media sponsor of Filmfest DC.