It’s hard to watch Peter Asher: Everywhere Man without comparing it to such similar films as Zelig and Forrest Gump. The film, which played to packed houses at the SBIFF in February and now gets its proper run at the McHurley Film Center, shares with those films the deliciously implausible narrative angle of a central character who finds himself, improbably, at multiple catalyst moments in history.
The key differences are that this is a truth-based documentary and that the subject is pop music, in which Asher shifts seamlessly from artist to entrepreneur and tastemaker, directly involved in the worlds of the Beatles, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Carole King, and many others. The tale is, indeed, stranger than fiction — and still playing out wherever pop music of yore is heard.
Boomer music docs are not all created equal; some drift into tired formulae and rely on the nostalgic voltage of the music itself to carry the day. Here is an example of a doc which casts deserving light on a figure both deep in and behind the scenes of pop history. Directed by Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller, who draw material and inspiration from Asher’s cabaret show A Musical Memoir of the ’60s and Beyond, they have concocted a fascinating and fine documentary that finally tells this tall tale in vivid sight-and-sound dimensions.
Of course, they have a master popster and saga to work with. On a local note, the film opens at the Montecito home of Steve Martin as part of a list of interviewees that includes Taylor, Rondstadt, Marianne Faithfull, Eric Idle, and others. The Renaissance man of pop’s sage story unfolds, logically and otherwise. There he is in London, a child actor with his sister Jane Asher. There he is as one-half of the cheery pop duo Peter and Gordon, who scored a hit with “World Without Love” by Paul McCartney, then dating Jane. There he is in his first gig as a “suit,” signing the young Taylor to the Beatles’s Apple Records imprint.
From there, the Taylor connection led him to Los Angeles and a busy life as a cultural architect, managing and producing prominent artists and many on the sidelines. In short, his name has appeared on many an album and in places that matter.
As a musician who knew the music world from many angles, Asher was ideally suited to become a taste-making and taste-directing producer who knew how to package and sell artful pop music. He had wanted to take on that role since his work with Peter and Gordon, he said, because “you get to hire musicians who are better than you, and boss them around.”
And yes, the doc reminds us, on a less serious note, Mike Myers did fashion Austin Powers after the London-era Peter. Fast-forward to the 82-year-old model: Asher continues, stoking the fires of his retrospective memoirs and busting out in song — even showing up at the Lobero Theatre, as he did in 2018 with “An Evening with Peter Asher and Jeremy Clyde.”
Everywhere Man provides much-valued context and backstory for the wunderkind-turned-elder statesman of pop.
Peter Asher: Everywhere Man is playing at the McHurley Film Center. For more information, see sbifftheatres.com. Watch the trailer here.
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