‘Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher’ Review: Music Doc

I love when a project has a title that seems just a little off but offers a purposeful piece of wordplay. 

It doesn’t have to be distractingly askew. 

Take, for example, Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher, the new documentary by Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine (Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song). It’s a title you could skim a dozen times without stopping and going, “Wait, isn’t the idiom ‘life and times’?” 

It takes very little time into Geller and Goldfine’s slightly overstuffed and slightly imbalanced documentary to recognize what they’re doing. 

Peter Asher is one of several figures who served as the Forrest Gump or Zelig or Chance the Gardener of the counterculture — people who pop up in the background of seemingly every photograph taken across several decades, whose names grace the liner notes of every significant album, whose accomplishments merit acknowledgment in countless award show speeches.

If you’re a devotee of Swinging London of the ’60s or the Sunset Strip folk rock scene of the ’70s, he’s already an icon. But even if you’re not, his integrality to countless pop culture narratives beggars belief, because he has, indeed, lived many lives both in the spotlight and immediately adjacent. The pleasure of Everywhere Man is that every time you think you’ve seen the wildest piece of Peter Asher adjacency, the next chapter proves you wrong. Kinda.

The problem of having multiple lives, though, is that not all lives are created equal. At 117 minutes, Everywhere Man is a sprawling film, one that goes from exciting and unpredictable to the stuff of countless rock-n-roll biopics, but the directors treat everything equally — or else lack the material to make the second half of the documentary anywhere near as engaging as the first.

The bold-type version of Asher’s career is that he went from one-half of the British Invasion duo Peter & Gordon — you’ll recognize “World Without Love” — to the legendary producer who steered artists like James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt to the biggest hits of their careers. He has called himself one of the inspirations for Austin Powers, and his list of celebrity friends includes … everybody.

But it’s the little details and not the broad strokes that inspired Asher to write and perform the one-man show — or “musical memoir” — that Geller and Goldfine use as the spine of the documentary. 

To hint at only a few of the head-scratching biographical oddities of Asher’s lives: His father was the physician responsible for identifying and naming Munchausen syndrome. He and his ginger siblings had acting careers promoted with the unlikely headshot promo “All Have Red Hair.” He contributed, directly or indirectly, to the relationships between Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He helped introduce Taylor to Carole King and helped convince Carole King to perform as a solo artist. 

The first half of the documentary is a delightful and thoroughly unlikely progression through one of the most colorful artistic moments in recent history, steered by Asher’s own memories and appearances by friends including Twiggy, Eric Idle and many more. The music is wonderful and the archival footage a blast. 

I compared Asher to Zelig and Forrest Gump and Chance the Gardener, but that’s reductive. Some parts of his rise were absolutely based on happenstance and circumstance: His sister was dating Paul McCartney (interviewed here in audio only), who allowed Peter & Gordon to record “World Without Love,” a Lennon-McCartney composition that Lennon hated. But however self-deprecating Asher often is, it’s clear that he was more than just in the right place at the right time. He was talented, and there were bigger-picture societal trends that he helped bring together. 

Interestingly, as the documentary goes from the parts of Asher’s biography that might be interpreted as luck-driven to the chapters in which his genius is most obvious, it becomes less entertaining, albeit never unentertaining. 

Taylor is a guarded, but appreciative interview subject, and if you’re interested in his growth from the first artist signed to the Beatles’ fledgling Apple label into one of the most significant figures in the ’70s folk movement, this is good stuff. Is it better than the 2022 documentary (Carole King & James Taylor: Just Call Out My Name)that gives Taylor and King full focus? Probably not.

Ronstadt is a guarded, but appreciative interview subject, and if you’re interested in her growth from eclectic vocalist with a reputation for being “difficult” to one of the most versatile and beloved stars of the ’70s and ’80s, this is good stuff. Is it better than the 2019 documentary that gives Ronstadt full focus? Probably not. 

The stories of his production innovations and inspirations are nerdy and cool, especially the talk of Asher being one of the first producers to insist on giving back-of-the-album credit to the individual musicians assisting bigger solo artists. But the stories of wild tours, drug use and the like are strictly old hat. Asher’s eagerness to talk about the good times and his immediate reticence to engage on the disintegration of his first marriage (the topic of a James Taylor song, “Her Town Too”) made me wonder what else was being left out.

It’s also odd that after all of the depth given to Asher’s personal relationships with the Beatles and Taylor and Ronstadt, we reach the ’80s and ’90s and the documentary is pretty much, “And then he worked with Diana Ross and Cher and Neil Diamond and Billy Joel,” who are all absent from the documentary.

Everywhere Man simply falls victim to Asher living such a conventionally impressive life after having already lived several unconventionally remarkable lives. What a pity!