Let The Good Times Roll is a 99-minute nostalgia wallow recorded at two of Richard Nader’s Rock & Roll Revival Concerts held in 1972 at Long Island’s Nassau Coliseum and Detroit’s Cobo Hall, with footage added from a Fats Domino performance at Las Vegas.
To put the film into its historic setting – when Eisenhower was America’s President and Marilyn Monroe its queen – newsreel footage, film clips and front-page headlines were flashed on screen between the 33 musical numbers.
The peripheral figures, the bobbysoxers, youths with DA haircuts, and motorcycle gangs played their part in the making of the era but, in this movie, rock & roll was the raison d’etre.
The movie – which won a Special Jury Award gold medal at the Atlanta Film Festival of 1973 – owed more to its soundtrack than anything else . . .
Chuck Berry‘s solo on Maybelline, Bo Diddley with Hey Hey Hey and a dynamic joint workout on Johnny B Goode.
Little Richard, for many the quintessential 50s rock & roller, the pompadoured screamer who worked his tonsils only as hard as he worked himself, stole the picture with a frenetic set including Lucille, Good Golly Miss Molly and Rip It Up.
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