Meryl Streep revealed awhile back that Neil Young gave her a guitar lesson to help her prepare for her role in the 2015 film Ricki and the Flash, in which Streep plays an aging rocker.
Turns out there’s a video snippet of their meeting, and you can watch it above.
Using a black Fender Strat through a Fender amp, Young coaches the three-time Academy Award winner on the finer points of playing rock guitar. The video opens with Young dialing in a distorted tone on the amp and Streep plunking away on the Strat.
“All I did was I turned everything all the way up,” he explains. “That’s what you always do. Everything!”
After Streep hands over the guitar, Young spends a minute doing some impromptu riffing.
The film's director, the late Jonathan Demme, set up the meeting between Young and Streep, who received guitar lessons from others after she and Demme decided she should actually play the instrument in the movie.
“From our first conversation, we agreed it was going to have to be live performance which, as you know, is a departure,” Demme told Entertainment Weekly. “On most movies, [performance] is done through playback [i.e. post-production dubbing]. So we agreed implicitly that Meryl, who did not play guitar, was going to have to learn to play electric guitar credibly.”
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