Get in the car, pull up the directions, and fire up the road trip playlist, because you’re going on tour with King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. If you’re not up for living out of a suitcase while following around the Australian psych-rock overlords that’s fine too, because you can go on King Gizzard tour from the comfort of your computer screen with a sprawling new fan documentary, Grow Wings and Fly.
The two-hour-and-40-minute doc follows a pair of friends as they chase Gizzard across the country on the band’s 2023 summer residency tour. The 13-date trek saw KGLW set up shop in four cities for three nights each from Tennessee to Chicago to Colorado to Washington, followed by a three-hour marathon show at The Hollywood Bowl to polish off the tour.
Grow Wings and Fly artfully begins at the end, with wistful reflections as our guides drive away from the last show of the tour.
“I was just thinking back to, like, the first morning of the tour,” Mikayla, who the film follows through the whole tour, says. “When we got in line so early and we both looked at each other, and were like, ‘I don’t know how much longer I’m gonna do this for.’”
But that lethargy melts away as we travel back in time to the start of the tour. Beginning with three nights at The Caverns in Pelham, TN, live music veterans are greeted with plenty of familiar sights. From the people getting to the venue at sunrise for a poster or a spot on the rail to the dedicated artists who make waiting in line a little prettier with their stickers and posters, to the reunions of long-lost friends from shows and tours past, Grow Wings and Fly highlights all the best parts of the community that forms around a traveling band (nicknamed the Weirdo Swarm for Gizz fans). Then, when the lights go down and the band comes on, the doc is filled with high-quality fan-shot videos taken from the rail at every stop of the tour.
“I feel people who follow their favorite band may be misunderstood or seem crazy or too obsessive, but I’m documenting a 22-day adventure to hopefully show why we do this,” narrator/director Carter Tate says at the beginning. “Not only is it about hearing amazing music; it’s so so much more.”
Related: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard Announce 2024 World Tour Dates
Along the way, viewers see many of the highlights from Gizzard’s residency tour. To kick things off at The Caverns, King Gizzard surprised fans with a full acoustic show and a concert played in drag to protest the state’s anti-drag law passed over the summer. At Red Rocks Amphitheatre, the band allowed attendees of their early and late shows to stick around and hear their new album PetroDragonic Apocalypse… over the PA a week before it hit shelves (the second time Gizzard has debuted a new album over the PA at Red Rocks). Following three-night stands at Chicago’s The Salt Shed and Carnation, WA’s Remlinger Farms, the tour came to a climactic finish with a three-hour marathon set at The Hollywood Bowl—the first to be performed as a single continuous set.
Check out the new King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard fan-made tour documentary Grow Wings and Fly. The band even offered its approval of the film on X (formerly known as Twitter), writing “Damn this is so sick.” Gizzard returns to the U.S. in August to embark on a monthslong nationwide tour set to run through November and feature several marathon shows. For tickets visit the band’s website.
Grow Wings And Fly [King Gizzard 2023 Tour Documentary]
[Video: Carter Tate]
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