old punks web zine
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Movies and Video, Part II

English Beat In Concert to The Little Shop Of Horrors

The English Beat - In Concert At The Royal Festival Hall (DVD review): I'm sad to report this twenty song live set is a minor disappointment. While perfectly rendered it's somehow dull and slightly off-kilter. The English Beat are out of this world fantastic, but this thing does little more than exist.

English Beat - In Concert at the Royal Festival Hall was taped on February 7, 2003 and everyone's old. Dave Wakeling looks like Burt Ward playing with the Beach Boys. Ranking Roger is thin but healthy, his energy level AARP-tastic! Saxa's still on sax, which is great for him but find me three people who thinks he's still alive.

It's hard to tell there's even an audience. You can see them out there somewhere, but while people are dancing thirty yards away you also get the sense many are waiting for the main act, Quiet Riot, to come on already. Roger's constantly provoking them to get involved but it appears he's being ignored.

This would have worked better in a hot, packed club on a tiny stage -- like the olde days. There's nothing wrong with the band. It's the venue. I have the same problem with Devo - Live.

Epitaph's Wilder Kingdom #5 (comp video collection review) (Epitaph): If I cared about music videos I might rant and rave about how much I hate them and how stupid, shallow and pretentious they are. But, I’m old, tired and would rather eat some cake right now. Punk labels like Epitaph figure videos will give their bands exposure. Woop-tee-do.

This thirteen song video compilation was distributed to record stores for in-store play. How many punk stores have TVs and VCRs set up to play something like this? Would they play them if they did? Do major chain stores play this? Is Epitaph going through the motions by putting this out or is there real promotional value in videos? Is Epitaph a major label? Am I asking too many questions?

Videos that annoy me the most focus exclusively on fashion and attitude. Second are bands who make socio-political statements. If you have to go through the indignity of making a video, have some fun with it and don't take yourself too seriously.

Here's the bands, songs, and some quick comments: Rancid - "Bloodclot": for the price of this video an indie label could operate for years. Slick and professional. All attitude and style. Yeah, have a guy wear a derby and wave a baseball bat for punctuation. Encourage kids to be violent cretins. Pennywise - "Society": childishly clever montage of newsreel footage of war, famine, urban violence, etc. If I was twelve I might be impressed. Powerful but not original. Voodoo Glow Skulls - "Left For Dead": cool looking Mexican "Day Of The Dead" props. Dropkick Murphys - "Barroom Heroes": great song but the tough drunk stance is a pose when presented in a lip-synched music video. Hepcat - "No Worries": these cats gots it right! Fun, simple, bright colors, bring in your friends and let them bop around. Bouncing Souls - "Eastside Mags": are they seventeen years old trying to impress fourteen year olds? Everything about this is d.u.m.b. Everything. Humpers - "Plastique Valentine": fun, simple, funny, invite your friends, drink beer. Great stuff. All - "World's On Heroin": neutral score on this one. The Cramps - "Like A Bad Girl Should": short,sweet and simple. Ta da! The Pietasters - "Out All Night": so, like, they've been partying so much all night they look dead, so like the band pretends they're zombies and this one guy bounces on a trampoline. H20 - "Everready": the Sons of Dag Nasty hire 300 extras and make a video. Nice hooded sweatshirt, nice big "X" on the back of the hand. Nice holding the microphone like Kevin Seconds. Nice view of your back teeth. Did I leave out any straight-edge stereotypes? Down By Law - "Question Marks and Periods": The band's matured nicely. I'm surprised. The song and video remind me of good early Elvis Costello. Gas Huffer - "Rotten Egg": good Ramones sound. Nice use of simple pastel colors that bleed into each other. Not bad.

Eraserhead (DVD review): David Lynch is Rainman with a movie camera and a large vocabulary. He's nucking futs but seemingly harmless - plus he's a great filmmaker. For years he was the only source for an Eraserhead DVD, and it sold for $40! Damn you capitalism!! For some reason probably not fully understood even by Lynch himself you can now walk into (your local retailer here) and buy it for $20. Sure it doesn't come in the 8"x8" box with a 20 page booklet, but life is about choices.

Eraserhead came out in 1977. I saw it a number of times as a midnight show at the Mini Cinema on Long Island. I always managed to stay awake somehow, and at the time it made little sense because I never dared consider it might have an actual plot. It was just a series of weird events I experienced at the face value of its strangeness. Looking at it now it's really a simple story expressed weirdly. After decades of watching strange and senseless movies the WTF factor is gone, and the symbolism of Eraserhead is easy to figure to the extent any simple Freudian theory is pretty much as good as another. Lynch claims nobody has interpreted the film exactly as he envisioned it, but the guy's so out there if he did explain it you'd think he was lying.

The feature length video of Lynch talking about Eraserhead is a treat. A slight wind sound blows in the background. Lynch wanders from thought to thought and I finally understood why he's never recorded a commentary track. You might as well have Edith Massey discussing Desperate Living. Hearing Lynch explain his fascination with dissecting a dead cat I can fully believe the internet rumor that the baby was a puppeteered cow fetus. The baby is great.

Eraserhead was shortened twenty minutes after a test screening, and it did need it. Why he didn't keep most of the extra film is a mystery even to Lynch. His mother's reaction to the film was "Oh, I wouldn't want to have a dream like that." In Eraserhead, everything is fine.

Evil Dead II (video review) (Anchor Bay): This is one of my top three favorite films of all time. I own it in both VHS and the "Limited Edition DVD Tin", which wasn't worth the extra ten smackers for a reprinted Fangora article, an oversized Altoids box and a comically small postcard replica of the UK movie poster. Just as I was about to moan that my life won't be complete until a book is written on the Evil Dead trilogy, I see one just came out in January. Well, cut off my legs and call me Shorty...  [update: It’s not that good].

The DVD is worth it just for the commentary track with star/producer Bruce Campbell, writer-director Sam Raimi, co-writer Scott Spiegel and make-up effects artist Greg Nicotero. At first I was pissed they’re all on one audio track, since the DVD for the first Evil Dead had two. Also, the marketing material for the tin made it seem as if it had at least one more commentary than the standard DVD. I think this was intentional. I'm over it now because 1) that was a while ago, and b) the track plays out like an episode of MST3000. They make fun of the movie and each other, imitating voices and offering snide commentary on the implausibilities and technical errors in the film. They go way back and their shared joy of creativity on the cheap is evident. Every aspect of the film is covered, from small technical details to hilarious personal stories. It's the rare DVD commentary you can appreciate without the movie playing.

For FX geeks there's a promotional featurette called "The Gore The Merrier", with behind the scenes videotape and the only existing footage of Evil Ed with his head partly sheared off. Rounding out the DVD are stills, the theatrical trailer, talent bios (CD ROM-era infotainment lives!) and a shameless Video Game preview.

Evil Dead II is the best and purest horror-comedy ever made. The Evil Dead kicked off a new Golden Age of horror-comedy in 1983, soon followed by Re-Animator, the later Basket Case movies and the best from Team Troma. The first wave of horror-comedy hit in the late 1940s with five Abbott and Costello "Meet" films (Frankenstein, Boris Karloff, Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, and The Mummy). These were classic vaudeville comedies with only enough frights to scare children too young to sleep with the lights off. In 1959, Roger Corman's beatnik Bucket Of Blood begat its re-written cousin of 1960, The Little Shop Of Horrors. That would be the second great wave. Some say 1968's Night Of The Living Dead is funny, but it's not a horror-comedy. Neither are The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Halloween (1978) or anything from Herschell Gordon Lewis. What passes euphemistically as dark humor isn’t horror-comedy, and don't get me started on the adolescent Nightmare On Elm Street series or the simple-minded irony of Scream. The best horror-comedy of the 1990's was Peter Jackson's Dead Alive (1992), the director's homage to Evil Dead II.

Evil Dead II is not a sequel to the first Evil Dead. I’m amazed there are people who wonder why Ash goes back to the same cabin. The second movie is a re-working of the first one, this time with a higher budget, better effects (from stop motion to full body prosthetics) and an emphasis on howling comedy and power hoses filled with blood. It's Sam Raimi's love of The Three Stooges and another opportunity to physically abuse Bruce Campbell. The two films have as much in common as the Corman films mentioned above. Please people, read the tea leaves. They say you're an idiot.

I was scared to death the first time I saw this film. Then again I don’t have the stomach for a lot of straight horror. Even though I was told it was a comedy I shrieked like a leetle skool gurl. It took me two more viewings to settle down enough to see the perfect balance of horror and comedy. After twenty viewings I see Evil Dead II mostly as a comedy, but I know if it was the first time again I'd cry for my mommy. This keeps me humble.

The camera work is innovative. There's the famous "Shakey-Cam" (camera mounted on a board with someone on each end holding ropes as they run through the forest), the "Sam-O-Cam" (camera mounted on a motorcycle that Sam crashes through the house, breaking Bruce's jaw on the last day of shooting), the "Bruce-Cam" (camera taped to his chest as he crashes to the earthen floor of the cellar) and the "Ram-O-Cam" (camera encased within a heavy steel beam, shoved through a cabin window and the front and back of Ash's car). I would love to know how they did the shot that spirals up after Ash wakes up in the puddle just before sundown.

The foley and other sound effects are amazing, and in the commentary you learn many of the techniques. The phrases I've taken from the film and use in everyday life for no apparent reason are "You bastards. Give me back my hand", "Someone's in my fruit cellar. Someone with a fresh soul", "Who's laughing now?", "I'll swallow your soul, I'll swallow your soul... Swallow this!" and the oddly timed "Work shed".

Is Evil Dead II the greatest film of all time as implied in High Fidelity? Nah, but it rules the horror-comedy wasteland. 

Family Guy Presents Stewie Griffin - The Untold Story (DVD review): Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane descended into a hate-spiral that's ruined his show. Whatever charm there was in the old series has been replaced with open hostility. Only 1/3 of the new season is worth seeing, and only 1/3 of this (string of three episodes) film is worth watching. I read raves about the new product, along with sorrowful laments from old fans. I can say with great surety that, if you love this film and most of the new episodes, you're either a child or a scumbag.

Something similar happened to John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren & Stimpy. On disc 3 of the DVD for seasons 1 & 2 there's "Out West", a non-stop mockery of Southerners with no jokes. The cartoon opens with one redneck saying "We're ignorant" and the other saying "And proud of it." It ends with one singing "I'm ignorant", the other "And I'm ugly", and then Stimpy chimes in "That you are boys." In the Family Guy movie there's a flashback to Condoleezza Rice in college. She's depicted as a crack whore screaming in a dorm room. No jokes, no nuthin' but depicting her as a skank. MacFarlane is one bitter fugg.

Alex Borstein (Lois) wrote the middle episode,  and she thankfully gave it some heart and soul. The first and last chapters are crap, the third featuring a wife for grown-up Chris who curses non-stop. That would be hysterical if I was fourteen. Jeez. The payoff on "Like the time I..." setups have also diminished in direct proportion to the increase of their frequency. It's only funny now when they break up the pattern of obvious setups and punchlines.

The only good bits in the film are: calling Quagmire "Captain Syphilis", Peter advising his daughter "Shave a man's back and he'll purr like a walrus" and re: the Book The Joy Of Sex, "Evidently the razor wasn't invented till the late ‘80s". That's all folks. Nothing to see here. Move along now.

The Filth & The Fury (video review) (New Line): The world needs a new Sex Pistols documentary like I need a fourth nipple, but here it is, and it's very good. As an elderly gent I forget that recent generations have an ever-decreasing curiosity about the past, so new films are the only way to explain to kids that what they wear and listen to didn't just magically appear on the shelves as overpriced retail items.

Footage for this recent theatrical release comes primarily from what ended up on the cutting room floor from director Julien Temple’s own 1980 film The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle. That was told mainly from the perspective of band manager Malcolm McLaren, a cultural carny whose only talent may have been his entrepreneurial spirit. Like any good consultant he had the balls to claim expertise even when he had no clue. Malcolm was a horrible manager, the worst example being the venues he chose for the Pistol's ill-fated American tour. Redneck bars in The South – brilliant! Maybe Malcolm was trying to destroy the band. He let in Sid Vicious, worthless friend of love/hate object Johnny Rotten. This only shows Malcolm was either incompetent or self-destructive.

I don't know if Temple made The Filth & The Fury at the behest of band members or to avenge how Malcolm snowed him twenty years back into releasing a self-serving set of lies and half-truths under the guise of a documentary. Part of the new film comes from the old release, part from hundreds of extra hours of film, and new footage of Rotten, Cook and Jones speaking in darkness, which works well because to show them older and wider would only distract from what is a strict focus on an era long gone.

The Filth & The Fury is the band's version of the story, but the presentation is even-handed, or at least it allows the open-minded the chance to decide on their own. Richard Bedford, who also edited the original, does an amazing job, never allowing the images to become heavy-handed. BBC comedy shows (Benny Hill!), TV ads, concert footage, newscasts, cartoons, other documentaries and old movies (especially Richard III as allegory) are blended perfectly. 108 minutes flew by for me, a rarity with documentaries.

There’s no need to rehash the history of the Sex Pistols in this review. You can get that anywhere. The Filth And The Fury does great job encapsulating the main points. Rotten has a good line, no matter how long he's rehearsed it -- "Words are weapons. Violence is not something I'm not very good at. I don't think you can explain how things happen other than sometimes they just should. And the Sex Pistols should have happened and did." 

The Best Of Flipside Video #1 (video review) (Flipside): Flipside is now long out of print. In the ‘80s Flipside, along with Target Video, put out a large assortment of average looking and sounding concert tapes. In 1993 Flipside compiled three bands each into a series of Best Of tapes, along with a monster DVD of Bad Religion, The Weirdos, The Dickies, and The Circle Jerks. This 1993 VHS has five by Agent Orange, ten from Bad Religion, and the Circle Jerks provide seventeen tracks. The shows were recorded between ‘83-‘84 in the Los Angeles area. I spent most of the time watching this not caring about the music per say but thinking about the bands and their fans.

I was impressed by Agent Orange, a band I knew from only one song ("Bloodstains") and their first LP, which I’veheld in my hands at various stores a dozen times.  Everyone calls them a surf punk band but on this tape they're America's answer to the Jam, with the same energy and creative flair. "So Strange" sound slike Translator's "Sleeping Snakes”. The set is filmed on video with a lens that distorts like a bubble. It wasn’t that weird except when the camera moved. Then I felt like vomiting.

I can't stand Bad Religion as a concept, but I like four of their albums. The band you thought would never sell out sold out the hardest, making every preachy statement on their part an act of hypocrisy. I also never forgave them for championing Gnome Crapsky. Their set is generic and the slammers who get on stage are idiots. These future accountants, insurance adjusters and smog check monkeys all sport a dumb "Look at me while I make wacky faces and skank in spastic yet codified dance steps. Now I’ll jump onto that guy’s head while he’s not looking." I forwarded though most of it.

The Circle Jerks were great for a while. Keith Morris had an old man's face on a young man's body. He looks like and was probably as nutty as Alan Vega of Suicide. Watching this the first thing that comes to mind was how important it is for a band to record in a studio. Live, hardcore sounds like mush. Often it takes me a while to figure out what I'm hearing, even if I know the song by heart. In one shot Keith picks his nose and sucks his thumb at the same time, which is clever in a retarded way. The Circle Jerks had probably the fastest drummer around, and the bass player looks like Andre The Giant.

I've never gotten much excitement from taped concerts, and while this one is better than most I'd rather listen to a record. I find these to be more like snapshots than actual events. To save trees I also wipe my tush with both sides of a piece of toilet. Why I threw that in I'll never know.

The Best of Flipside Video #2: Minor Threat & Minutemen (video review) (Flipside): This long-running video series has been around at least ten years, and you could order them (with better sound and editing) through Flipside magazine, until they stopped printing (duh). They were as cheap to buy as the production values that went into them. White lines of electrical interference distort most of the Minutemen's set, and only one video camera captures both bands. Minor Threat & The Minutemen make sense on the same tape because they both preferred to start and finish as quickly as possible.

The Minutemen rip through 22 songs faster than D. Boon could bankrupt a buffet. Boon's death in 1985 tore a hole in the heart of the punk scene. He must have been truly loved because his memory is granted deference akin to Mother Teresa's. The Minutemen were hardcore's answer to The Gang Of Four, mixing free form jazz, funk and punk to create short blasts of kinetic mayhem. Just when you thought you could dance to a funky Minutemen rhythm they would crash the instruments, leaving you no choice but to crash with them. Sometimes they remind me of Frank Zappa if he was a black socialist. Don't ask me what that means. I love the Minutemen in small doses. They were truly different in a genre infamous for generics, but after a few songs I get the point and want to move on. Maybe if the picture and sound quality were better....

Popeye, I mean Ian MacKaye, leads Minor Threat through a typically sweaty set by Dischord Records' flagship band. Here a five piece, with Brian Baker switching from bass to lead guitar. It's too packed to slam, so the lemmings crawl up on stage to skank and stage dive. It gets so packed during "Screaming At A Wall" the microphone breaks, forcing Ian to lead the kids in a sing-a-long as he did in the film Another State of Mind. Minor Threat were great. The whole straight-edge thing is a mixed blessing which I can equally defend and deride. Here's a philosophical question: What does "12XU", a homophobic song, and "Guilty Of Being White", a racial song, say about the politics of straight edge? 

Foetus - (live video review) (Atavistic): I think this 1992 live show was called “MAN!”. If you want to see who brought berserk power and thunder to electronic music, Jim Thurwell is your psycho. All techno/industrial that claims to be Evil comes directly from Jim Foetus' womb. Clint Ruin, Foetus, J.G. Thurwell - they're all the same person, just as You've Got Foetus On Your Breath, Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel, Industrial Foetus, Foetus Inc., etc. are all his bands, often with Jim creating all the music himself in the studio. He may add swing, surf or classical violin to the mix, but a Foetus tune is guaranteed to crush your senses. Much of his work is overblown but you have to admire the depths of his sonic nightmares. Underneath the noise damage is enough complexity to warrant comparisons to Thelonius Monk. In comparison, Nine Inch Nails is The Spice Girls.

Raised in Melbourne, Australia, Jim moved to London in the late ‘70s and worked in the noise/no wave scene along with Throbbing Gristle and SPK. In the early ‘80s he relocated to New York at the tail end of the no wave movement. Word has it he's released 32 recordings under 19 band names. He's also remixed songs for bands from Megadeth to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who know Foetus can take any receording and transform it into a whole other monster.

I saw Foetus live around 1981 at Danceteria in NYC. Singing to a tape, Jim had a case of Perrier at his feet. He'd open a bottle, swing it around while singing, then open up another bottle once he realized he just emptied it all over himself and the stage. This more recent live tape has Jim backed by a large band of long haired speed-core musicians. The recording is panicked and as intentionally grainy as an Iowa wheat field, so it's hard to see much, but maybe it matches the music itself and the whole point is panic and delusion.

I'm not a follower of industrial so I didn't watch for too long. He has an old song I've been trying to track down called something like "Dyin' With My Boots On". It's hard because Foetus albums don't list song titles. Bastards!

The Forbidden Zone (video review) (Media): The box says 1980 but I remember seeing this earlier as a midnight movie at the Mini Cinema on Long Island. Or did I? The easy take on The Forbidden Zone is that it was a cheapie made to cash in on the bizarre b&w aesthetics of Eraserhead, but that wasn’t the case. The list I made of the film's influences runs both deep and wide. In approximate order they are: Yiddish theatre, Fleischer Bros. cartoons (esp. Betty Boop), Spike Jones, Alice In Wonderland, Ralph Bakshi, the Marx Brothers, Fellini, The Little Rascals, Eraserhead, Rocky Horror and Dada. The total effect isn't the sum of its parts, but The Forbidden Zone has aged nicely and should interest B-movie cretins all over.

The name Elfman is all over The Forbidden Zone. Richard Elfman directed, Marie-Pascale Elfman stars (she also created the sets) and Danny Elfman & his "Mystic Knights Of The Oingo Boingo" make what may their first appearance. Danny also appears as "Satan" and his musical contributions to the soundtrack are firmly rooted in his trademark funhouse style. Herve Villechaize, the tall midget from Fantasy Island, stars as the King of the 6th Dimension, where, uh, a man in a tuxedo wears a big paper-mache frog's head, the Queen is fashioned after Divine, performance artists The Kipper Kids box each other while make funny faces, and....... Let's just say that if you're into comedic dry-humping The Forbidden Zone is your Citizen Kane. (As a side note, the Kipper Kids' act once involved them literally beating each other senseless as "boxers". If that's Art, so are my used Kleenex.)

There’s a great amount of goofy racial stereotyping involved, but the cultural sources and intentions are obviously benign even if they aren’t PC. Nothing's sacred and the absurdity of every minute of this 75 minute film is more of a head-scratcher than an exercise in bad taste.

While not a great film, the more you know about obscure film and culture the more you'll appreciate what's being attempted. I didn't have too many good memories of this one but now that I own it I watch bits and pieces of it and have a few good laughs. The alphabet song was swiped from The Three Stooges.

The Frighteners (Director's Cut) (DVD review): I felt compelled to pick this up because the theatrical cut of The Frighteners  seemed to be missing something, and after the director's cut of Leon: The Professional blew me away with its extra fifteen minutes I figured Peter Jackson wouldn't let me down. He sorta did because the film is still a confused mess - one I see once every few years only because I love Dead Alive.

The making-of documentary is four hours long. This edition provides the first Peter Jackson commentary, and once a deluxe Dead Alive DVD comes out with all deleted footage, a making of, commentary and a hat with this guy on top, I'll be able to die with a smile on my face.

On the plus side, the cast is great, especially Jeffrey Combs, whose extra scenes should never have been cut. Jackson is great at filming action, and he knows just how far or close to shoot a scene. The interplay of live and "ghost" actors looks great considering the complexity of making it work.

On the downside the script veers away from sense, and some of the CGI shots don't work. After seeing this and Hellboy (ten times) I'm convinced CGI should mix with by never replace live actors in scenes with live actors. In an obvious sizing error The Reaper goes from taller than normal human size to what must be twenty feet tall. Frighteners has a scene where the police shoot wildly in a crowded room, which they'd never do. The worst script error is the scene where three babies fly around a room, and when Michael J. Fox comes in to save the day he's exposed as a con artist in a newspaper article. But what about the freaking flying babies!??!!*&%^#!!

I like this movie but they shouldn't have written it as it was being filmed, ya know what I'm sayin'? I understand Jackson was restricted by the PG-13 rating imposed on him at the onset, but he should have still delivered a standard Peter Jackson film.

Frog-g-g (DVD review): Frog-g-g is an unwatchable b-movie and it took two sittings and a liberal use of the fast-forward button to finish it. I waded through to catch a fleeting glimpse of Miss Togar, Mary Woronov, who holds the mutant frog baby at the end and looks appalled. It wasn't worth it.

MST3K fans know that the process of choosing selections to mock involved sitting through screenings of mind-warpingly unwatchable films, many with not barely enogh setups for good punchlines. Frog-g-g is one of those films. During this fiasco all I could do was imagine James Lipton walking in every eight seconds, saying softly to the actors "....and...begin".

There's good bad movies and bad good movies. In both can be found true b-movie classics. Then there's films that do and are nothing. Frog-g-g is a bronzed version of that. The only thing I liked was the actor in the frog suit dancing to the right of the closing credits.

Director Cody Jarrett was in a band called China White and now has a band called Teen Machine. His China White (there was more than one) might be the 1981 Huntington Beach beach-punk band.

Fugazi: INSTRUMENT (video review) (Dischord): I had no intention of turning this off, honest. It wouldn't end, no matter how long I pressed fast forward. It's a good movie shot and edited with flair and grace, but the subject isn't worth 115 minutes. No band warrants this much celluloid, even Fugazi, them doin’ it for the kids these thirteen years and counting. The problem with Instrument is that it makes its points and then repeats them over and over enough times to turn a short film into a feature length documentary. Maybe filmmaker Jem Cohen sorted through hundreds of hours of film, shot over a ten year period, and couldn't face the truth only sixty minutes was usable. Whatever impact the film generates in the beginning is diluted by an end that never seems to come.

Instrument is more than a concert film. It's an artistic document of a band and the culture that surrounds it. Instrument should be judged in terms of how non-fans, like the selection committee of a film festival, might see it. Instrument fails as both art and statement because it lacks coherency. It's one thing to have a loose structure and another to repeat a loose structure ad nauseam. I doubt Cohen's goal was surrealism.

Over a ten year period Fugazi is shown on stage, in the studio, in cheap hotels and collecting money after shows. They travel to Hawaii, Alaska, Japan and hundreds of U.S. cities large and small. The overriding image is of a working band with intensity, integrity and both financial and artistic success. The live clips show the blinding intensity of Fuguzai on stage, especially Guy Picciotto, who works it like Iggy Pop in search of a jar of peanut butter and some broken glass. Fugazi connects with their own music like no other.

Cohen uses an old Andy Warhol technique to peer into the souls of Fugazi fans. On line before a concert, the camera and fans conduct a staring contest, which the camera always wins. The subject's facade breaks down and you glimpse the real person behind the mask. Most people eventually smile while a few retain their detached, blank expressions. Maybe they're truly lost souls.

Ian says he’s compelled to explain Fugazi because if he doesn't others will. He's aware that when you talk about yourself like that it comes across as propaganda. Ian’s looking more and more like Sean Penn. Straight Edge was an idea he never meant to blow up into the monster it became. It's one thing to explain your personal politics in an interview and a whole other thing to preach it from a podium like Bad Religion. Ian’s a political pedophile like Bad Religion, but I find him must less offensive.

There's a great line in the film where Ian's berating some thugs for slamming violently. Someone else, probably Guy, cuts them down a peg by saying he saw them eating ice cream before the show, like little boys. He yells "I saw you eating ice cream, pal, oh don't you deny it. You were eating an ice cream cone... ice cream eating motherfuggers." Over shots of the band enjoying the majesty of Alaska as winter turns to spring, Ian is heard saying "We're no longer sitting at home waiting for moments to come to you, we're out going to the moments." There's not a trace of preciousness in that statement. It's true.

If anything, Instrument is a film about a group of talented friends doing what they love most on their own terms. I wish the film was shortened by better editing to get this, and other points, across better. 

The Gate To The Mind's Eye: A Computer Animation Odyssey (video review) (Miramar/BMG): Hey new wavers! Remember Thomas Dolby? He wrote "Lucky Number" for Lene Lovich and had a hit with "She Blinded Me With Science." He also looked like a 1920’s-era nerd. Well, he provided the soundtrack to this seamlessly edited collection of random computer animation segments, and WOW is the music as dull as the visuals are exciting.  It’s new age electro-crap for computer-age stoners.

Dolby's career is similar to Warren Zevon's. Both created one album of note but kept busy producing, writing and playing for other bands (in Dolby's case Lovich, George Clinton, The Thompson Twins, Foreigner (?), and Joan Armatrading). Dolby's fifteen minutes of fame can be found on the all-around excellent The Golden Age of Wireless. Here, though, he's not even scoring a film. This is a collection of short works created by some of the world's small computer animation houses. The first segment looks like a violent video game because it was created for Sega. Other pieces were commissioned by the National Air & Space museum or by large corporations for promotional use. The effects are spectacular to say the least. I'd say there's no visual effect these people can't create.

In the olde days there was a genre of cinema known as the "stoner film". You watched these at midnight at some tiny old art theater after a night of serious partying. Classics of the form include "Reefer Madness", "Eraserhead", "The Grateful Dead Movie", "Fritz The Cat", "Heavy Traffic"and "Heavy Metal". If The Gate To The Mind's Eye came out twenty years ago people would have freaked out from the hallucinations being projected on the screen. LSD sales would have shot up 400%.

I'd recommend this to anyone into computer animation. The lame music detracts from the experience, but I guess Dolby was paid, and he’s not Satan or anything.

Gigantic (A Tale Of Two Johns) (DVD review): I like They Might Be Giants. I like them a lot actually, but at this point (and especially in 2002) I don't think they warrant a feature length film. Gigantic (A Tale Of Two Johns) is an hour-long appreciation stretched to avoid short film status. The same can be said for the Fugazi documentary.

Gigantic is a love letter to a band that deserves a few hugs. It’s a 60 Minutes segment that lasts 102 minutes. Celebs sing the band's praises and speak song lyrics, Senator Paul Simon gives a lecture on President Lincoln, videos prove their cleverness, John and John participate fully, and Joe Franklin, a god of NY kitsch, speaks of them with great emotion, which for him is like a rock crying. Ira Glass and Sarah Vowell appear often, and it hits me that TMBG are the perfect NPR band.

The history of the band is interesting but I wonder if anyone would come away from it thinking TMBG has been innovative in ways never seen before. Maybe that’s true in the context of alternative music of the mid-to-late ‘80s, but definitely not before that. The new wave era is littered with clever bands with clever gimmicks. TMBG rate highly on the clever-meter but they didn't invent that wheel. That's just the old guy in me telling you kids you don't know nuthin'.

Here and there I got the impression the filmmakers were trying for the same eccentric vibe as True Stories, with the East Village of NY standing in for Texas. My favorite factoid from the film is that many of their early songs didn't have long, sustained notes because they tended to shut off or rewind the thrift store answering machine they used for their free Dial-A-Song service. 718-387-6962 just keeps ringing but they have a website now.

There's no story arc, just a story. There's no tension, no conflict and no tragedy to be overcome. It's a nice movie about nice people who record nice music. Wheeeeeeeee!

God Bless Bloc Party (DVD review): Warning: there’s a very bad pun at end of this review.

God Bless Bloc Party is a bit of a gip because half the listed songs are seen in the documentary and not much in the concert section. The concert portion of the DVD ends just as it's warming up. Show's over folks, drive safe (lights flicker off). I'm going to trade this back for credit.

Bloc Party are a great band and Silent Alarm a treasure if you like The Cure, Joy Division and Gang OF Four condensed like milk. I watched about fifteen minutes of the documentary because Bloc Party aren't that interesting, and whoever put this together took random, mundane footage and combined it with concert clips blender-fashion using every visual effect on hand. No offense, but most bands are not worthy of a documentary, and if I want to watch a skinny, shirtless Asian kid who looks like both a Jewish accountant and Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite eat a lot of food I'd join the fetish site.

Singer and guitarist Kele Okereke has personality and is fun to watch. Matt Tong on drums eats and doesn't like talking about influences. Gordon Moakes (bass) and Russell Lissack (guitar) are from that planet of skinny, pale guys who seem personality free but friends swear they're wild nce you get to know them.

The concert footage is so disconnected and artificially flavored it doesn't seem live at all.
If Bloc Party were anarchist vegetarians the hidden message might be to Smash The Steak.

Gothic Industrial Alternative Visuals (video comp review) (Cleopatra): Having just this week visited a full-blown goth club for the first time I thought I'd drop 99 cents on a goth video collection. In the early ‘80s you’d hear Bauhaus and Joy Division at new wave nights. Now new wave is dead and goth clubs pack 'em in. Go figure.

Either this tape is old or goth hasn't progressed much in the last fifteen years. Leaether Strip's "Evil Speaks" turns the drum rhythm of the Stray Cat's "Rock This Town" into a techno number. Penal Colony recycles ancient Kraftkwerk beats, and Rosetta Stone steal from both the Beatles and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Nik Turner, the Klaus Nomi of Death Rock, puts in a D.I.Y. new wave performance I haven't seen since the I.R.S. Record days of ‘80-‘81. Spahn Ranch here sound like Depeche Mode.

Something tells me the real innovation in this genre has been the influence of speedy techno industrial bands like Nine Inch Nails, who figured how to bring the death disco of Ministry and Skinny Puppy fully into the video game age. NIN is disco for pissed off, bi-curious white guys. New Wave was dance music for nerds. Goth, at least as represented here, is dance music for both high school drama club women with strong attachments to their Emily Dickinson, and pale guys who masturbate to comic book images of death.

The fascination with serial killers and vampires may be real, but the unsmiling, dangerous looks of these bands are chuckle-worthy. Show me a goth and I'll show you an educated geek who can quote the atomic weight and gaming capacities of a Troll. I've worked out since high school and have been to my fair share of martial arts schools. Truly dangerous people carry themselves in certain ways that denote training or at least cocky meanness. Punks try to intimidate through an aggressive style and attitude. Goths do it through an unsmiling look of cinematic evil. This is not to say goths are all wimps, I know a few who aren’t. I don't think violence is a real concern in that scene, compared to other punk subcultures..

These videos all look cheap, as if the bands shot them that day as an incentive for signing with Cleopatra. Scenes are improvised and shots are used only because they look innovative. The budgets are tiny. The earliest new wave videos had bands like Elvis Costello and The Attractions playing on the beach or in a studio. They're laughing constantly because pretending to play is just goofy. These videos lack that humor and come off all the more pretentious for it.

The Great Rock'N'Roll Swindle(1980) (Video review): This movie is strange. On one hand it's nice that England's most popular punk band made a movie, and on the other it’s so dumb you wish it never saw the light of day.

Designed to be a shockumentary, The Great Rock’N’Roll Swindle is a little of everything and a lot of nothing: it's a sarcastic history lesson on the Sex Pistols and how they suckered the press and the kids into making the Pistols a cultural scandal. It's a detective story. It's a joke-fest. It's a concert film. Mostly it's a failed effort by band manager Malcolm McLaren to take credit for everything Johnny Rotten contributed to the band.

Johnny wasn't even involved with this. He was either fired, or quit, before filming began. Malcolm mimics Johnny in the film, spewing out his "lessons" to a punk midget - like he's a god. Then there's a teenage girl he turns into a punk slave. What that's about I'd like to remain a complete mystery. Please.

Then there's the lessons themselves - the film's plot points. "Lesson Four: Do not play. Don't give the game away", "Lesson 3: Sell The Swindle", "Lesson 2: Establish the Name Sex Pistols". Malcolm transforms the Sex Pistols into a pre-fabricated concoction like the Monkees orBanana Splits. This is not entirely true, if true at all, since Malcolm had no master plan until after the fact, but McLaren must do this if he wants to take credit for everything. He imagines himself a naughty and witty puppetmaster. What absolute bull, but this is his film and Johnny was out, so history was rewritten. The lessons might make sense for a punk band, but it sure didn't happen that way for the Sex Pistols!

The Sex Pistols had little control over their destiny. Scandal brought them fame, but a marked inability to control their fate (and themselves) destroyed them. By simply owning a retail store Malcolm had more business sense than the blockheads who frequented his shop. He was the one the kids turned to manage their bands, yet Malcolm was no visionary, and he wasn't a good manager. He fell back on saying he was into CHAOS when it was obvious he hadn’t a clue. At the time Steve Jones and Paul Cook may have thought he was a genius, but between the two of them they were still shy half a brain. Malcolm wanted to do was sell more clothes and make more money. All his Machiavellian claims of manipulation and control are lies, and while watching The Great Rock'N'Roll Swindle you can't but scream "poser!" over and over again while banging your head against the screen. At least that's what I did.

The film cleverly mixes old concert, video and newsreel footage with new set-pieces to create a full-length motion picture. You can't even tell Johnny was gone by that time. The old footage is excellent while the new footage stinks. The worst is a sub-plot where Steve Jones plays a hard-boiled detective in search of Malcolm and his "Swindle". Damn that Swindle - it's always just..out..of..his..reach. The dialogue in the beginning sounds like it was recorded in a toilet stall. Sid Vicious looks like crap and acts like an ass. Nancy looks even worse. Sid's referred to as "The John Travolta of Punk" and is listed in the credits as "The Gimmick". Catch the irony? Sid was a gimmick and they're admitting it right on the screen. Brilliant!

The Great Rock’N’Roll Swindle was partly financed by Ronnie Biggs, the infamous British train robber who skipped with the cash to Brazil. There's film of Cook and Jones hanging out on the beach with Biggs, and the financier even gets to sing. He can't. Who cares. The soundtrack album is a double-wide and contains new tunes along with old demos and novelties. The new Pistols songs, without John, mostly drag. Sid does a decent enough job on "My Way”. Ten Pole Tudor is brought in to sing "Who Killed Bambi" and "Rock Around The Clock". To say he chews the scenery is an understatement in line with "That Elvis, he sure loved his mama and his fried foods."

Whoever edited this should have won an award. The great old footage is mixed so well with the crappy new stuff that the crap doesn't stink as much. Malcolm McLaren's big point in making this film was to say the Sex Pistols were a joke, and the joke was on you. This fatalistic cynicism was a slap in the face. On one level it's only music, but to the UK punks music was a release and a possible way out. If you think it's cool that what you believe in is a joke, your problems go deeper than listening to anti-social music. If you have even a shred of self-respect you have to walk away from The Great Rock’N’Roll Swindle convinced Malcolm is the biggest asshole in the world.

Groove (video review) (Sony Picture Classics): This is the video with the cover shot of a techno-mandroid lovingly caressing his swollen metal disco ball.... Ah yes, to be young, dumb, and full of Methyl-dioxy-meth-amphetamine. That's the fancy-pants term for Ecstacy, and according to Groove the world would be paradise if we all took hits, danced to techno, hugged each other and were there for each other when the walls morphed into day-glo snakes and, like, freaked us out. One of three recent films on this laughable manifestation of the hippie zeitgeist, Groove supposedly gets it all right when it comes to the rave scene, the players involved, and especially the sense of community that’s somehow supposed to gloss over the fact it's a big excuse to drop acid. That's just super, but please don't expect me to be impressed or care when things go wrong. When carloads of ravers fly off cliffs - now that's entertainment!

Drugs and alcohol have long greased the wheels of popular music, yet the rave scene is the only one to exist exclusively for the drug experience. The music itself is secondary if not irrelevant. Groove features a number of real rave DJs, and great care is given to show how DJ ScoobySnack takes over for DJ SoftScrub by lining up a record and then pushing a knob, changing The Beat That Never Changes ever so slightly and sending the amped dancers into an even more manic frenzy (which to quell would require injections of morphine directly into a neck vain).

The Grateful Dead wrote actual songs you don't have to be stoned to appreciate. Rave music is the same beat, scientifically determined to match the energy level of the drugs being used. I can see the skill involved in hip-hop scratching and real time sampling. In Groove the only talent involved is buying the latest 12” singles and then making sure every "song" blends into each other for eight hours. I  don’t think rave can be called music. It's an effect for an effect, like muzak.

Oh, yes, this is a movie review. Groove, for all of its naive stupidity, is a nice little film about nice little people with nice little problems and dreams. The rave scene is by and for rich, smart, techno-savvy white kids. The one black person in this film is an oreo, and there must be a term for the Asian DJ who's as white as Dan Rather. The Asian woman is "white" but also dressed up like a Martian. Maybe I've seen one too many Godzilla films, but when I think of Martian women I think of Japanese women dressed like her.

Groove was written and directed by Greg Harrison, who has a burning passion for the material. He sees Ecstacy as a misunderstood gift from the gods (or that cute little E.T.) and laments how outsiders ruin the vibe by taking "bad" drugs. Ecstacy is acid and speed combined, and Groove is a love letter to this compound in the form of an episodic story that does no more than detail how to find the parties and drugs, how to take the drugs, what to do once you're high, and how in the end everything is just super. The plot is light, simple and not without unintentional laffs, as when someone says of the upcoming rave, "I hope they don't play any of that happy house crap." It's all crap, my orange juice swigging, body-painting, cat-in-the-hat hat wearing, pacifier-sucking teddy bear hugging friend. The fascination with childhood totems is also a scream because it's falsely presented as a positive manifestation of the innocence and purity of childhood. What you really have is a group of 20-something rich kids who don't want to be adults or to be held accountable to their actions.

The best line of the film is when a cop says "Keep on spreading the love, right on out the door." He knows these are Good Kids with rich parents whose lawyers would go nuts if their offspring were charged as common dopers. The moral lesson of Groove is that it's all fun and games until it's really time to grow up. There's nothing wrong with having fun, even if the most painful non-music ever conceived is involved. I find very little gets accomplished when I talk to a pot smoker because the stuff creates a mental disconnect that's more distracting than alcohol. You're relatively helpless and useless when you're on acid, and I have no pity for anyone who willingly takes the risk and then screws up. It's sad that so much money is spent to clean up after the screwups of middle and upper class people with too much time, money and stupidity on their hands. 

The Gun Is Loaded (video review) (Mystic Fire): Lydia Lunch's gimmick is a million times better but not that different than G.G. Allins' - they're both damaged goods out to destroy the world with their words, music and bodies. With this 1988 video she mirrors G.G.'s one-liner of his body being a gun, his words the bullets and the audience the victims. The only difference is that G.G. was a hapless nobody while Lydia is a major player in New York's cultural underground. She hit the scene in 1979 with Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and since has been involved with an endless parade of bands and projects. She acts, sings, writes, performs spoken word and runs her own label. Her talent is uneven and can be grating in its single note of intense bitterness, but in small doses she's a lot of fun.

She began her spoken word career in 1984, before Jello Biafra and her friend "Neck" Rollins realized people were dumb enough to pay to hear them talk, no matter what they said, be it Jello's nonsensical paranoia or Henry's bad stand-up routine. Lydia is by far the best of the three, her rantings well thought out and delivered in consistently professional and confrontational tones. She operates at only one speed, so it's best to watch this tape in small doses. She dispenses heavy attitude and dialogue that requires effort to keep up with. For the most part it's worth it, but she beats the same horse too often for long viewings. 

What follows is not from the tape but her website. From this you'll get the idea of what Lydia Lunch is all about: "New York City did not corrupt me... I was drawn into it because I was already corrupted. By the age of six, my sexual horizon was over-stimulated by a father who had no control of his fantasies, natural tendencies or criminal urges. Like father like daughter. Before my teenage years I had already experimented with mescaline, THC, pot, acid, Quaaludes, tuinals, valium and angel dust. I was already an experienced pickpocket, shoplifter, short shift hustler. New York is a giant candy store, meat market, insane asylum, performance stage. Surrounded by five million other junkies, addicts, alcoholics, rip-off artists, dreamers, schemers, and unsuspecting marks, New Yorkafforded me the luxury of anonymity. The devil's playground."

Lunch's performance style can sound like a sermon, but generally it’s beatnik in pacing, image and tone. You can always tell by a test of my own creation I call the Scat Test. If you can add lines of scat to a piece and it sounds normal, it’s beatnik. Read the paragraph above like a Beat (pre-hippie coffee house intellectual) and throw in random scat lines like "Skeet Bop Pow Skeedle Do Wa!" and "Skoodle Da Peep Pop Poop Pee Yeah!". Oh, it works.

The Gun Is Loaded is multimedia and the mix of spoken word, film, video, words printed on the screen and background music (provided by old pal Jim Foetus) adds to but never detracts from what is basically a one-woman show. Lydia performs on a stage, in a diner filled with riends, walks through the worst parts of NYC and stands under the Brooklyn Bridge. She's eloquent in her sarcasm but you might find her hyper-bitterness a bit contrived, since someone with that level of bitterness could not exist as a real person and not be homeless or institutionalized. G.G. was like that all the time and look how broke and truly friendless he was.

Lydia's topics are politics, family dysfunction, how society screws you over, and other themes I lost track of both because her tone is unrelenting and her use of the English language is so heavy it dares you to keep up. She talks about herself as if she's the center of controversy and a raging cult of personality. She makes it sound like most people want her dead and gone, but she's tougher than that and screw you for underestimating her. It's the same tone as gangsta crap and I have no idea why she thinks anyone care’s about her feud with West Coast performance artists (I made that last part up, but my point is that Lydia Lunch should not refer to herself as an Icon).

Lydia Lunch is fun to watch because she looks like a cross between Joan Jett and Roseanne, both on a super pissy day. She talks like Roseanne too. She's going to be a fun old lady because she'll be in movies as the grandmother who curses like a sailor. The Gun Is Loaded is a good piece of performance art. How much you can take of it at one sitting is the only variable.

GWAR - Phallus In Wonderland (video review) (Metalblade Video): Gwar spews in the tradition of Grand Gignol, everything from blood, guts, spit to sperm. If it's a gooey substance Gwar will spew it like the Monty Python sketch "Tennis, Anyone?", the Evil Dead series Peter Jackson’s horror-comedies, every decent film from Troma, Street Trash, and, but of course, Spewey the alien from Chris Elliot's "Get A Life" ("I brought Spewey to meet my old high school buddy, the Pope"). Spew, spew, spew - a great word that sounds more filthy each time you say it.

Gwar is a comic heavy metal band who sometimes play thrash not unlike Tesco Vee in recent years. The singer can yell in the same operatic tones as Fear's Lee Ving. Otherwise the music and lyrics are standard slow heavy metal, and I have no stomach for it. It makes me want to spew. Originally college students from Richmond, VA, Gwar's gimmick is that they're spawns of aliens stranded in Antarctica. It’s kinda like Scientology. They dress in bulky foam rubber and paper mache costumes, and sing about their own mythology while acting out scenes of the grotesque on stage. Then there's the gallons of spew. There are about eight members in Gwar, with names like The Sexecutioner, Gusher Jizmax and Beefcake The Mighty.

Gwar put out a few scripted videos. This one from 1992 is so well made I watched in awe even as the intermittent heavy metal songs made me lunge for the mute button. Funny? You got it. Great special effects for the budget? Yes indeedy! Professional acting from a large cast of unknowns? Ye-es! The plot made little sense but endless cool images and great gore made that irrelevant. Whoever wrote this is a genius. Each scene is a self-contained gem of comic weirdness. The set and costume designs also win kudos. Every fan of cheap horror and oddball independent film should rent this, if not now, then when they have the chance.

Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King (video review) (Facets): This obscure 1993 documentary on the obscure rock-blues-folk-noise band Half Japanese (HJ) has just been re-released on DVD with a director’s commentary track and the whole 23 skidoo. The marketing and appeal seem to be based on surface comparisons to This Is Spinal Tap, a film some dim-watts still think is a documentary. Spinal Tap did tour a few times, so that muddied the waters. The Band That Would Be King isn’t a put-on… or is it? The line “the greatest band of all time” Half Japanese fans throw around is an in-joke of cruelly ironic proportions. HJ fans are as a group intelligent and well-versed in all kinds of music, as are Zappa freaks. They know HJ is at best a cult band. They know friends and loved ones exit stage left whenever a needle hits a HJ record. Still, it’s a grand act of musical eccentricity to champion bands like HJ, and the participants in The Band That Would Be King run with it. The results are sincere fandom and improv silliness. Another film that comes to mind is 1999’s American Movie, a documentary that explores the ups and downs of obsessive American geek optimism.

HJ’s David and Jad Fair are quaint misfits from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and their DIY career and trueness to their own vision are immeasurably instructive and inspiring. It’s also funny because they’re humorous by nature and design. David’s explanation of the science of guitar playing is deadpan genius – with truth and humor assuming equal roles. The film opens with the words “Jad and David Fair start the band Half Japanese in their bedroom. Though neither can play a single note on any instrument, they go on to record one of the greatest albums of all time. This is their story.” This is hype since, until you learn how, nobody knows how to play an instrument. Even The Shaggs knew, in a sense, how to play their instruments. The D.I.Y. lesson of HJ, and of The Stooges and MC5 who inspired them, is that it’s not important how well you play, only that you have good ideas and play.

Director Jeff Feuerzeig couldn’t have known beforehand his film would be this funny. The Fair Brothers might have been a safe bet for kookiness, and Penn Jillette never fails to entertain, but when David and Jad’s sweet, polite, conservative mom talks about her suburban house being called the birthplace of punk rock, and isn’t that really exciting, you can’t help but think you’re watching Waiting For Guffman. Other touches also point to parody, like David signing his first record contract in print letters, how David is not seen again on film after it’s noted he left the band in 1986 to get married, HJ’s filmed gig at a senior citizens’ center, Jad’s Harry Potter look and Church Lady voice, how at one time Jad wrote only love songs and monster songs, and even how their first record came out as a three LP box set. Adding to the suspicion is that so much of their past has been filmed. It’s one thing to talk about a pick-up gig at an old folks home – it’s another to bring along a movie camera.

Like too many other documentaries, The Band That Would Be King stretches out to  feature film length by keeping in fifteen minutes of boring filler. What starts and ends as a great feel weird - I mean feel good film - is mired down in the middle with nasty rants about the sorry state of indie music and corporate manipulation. The tone shifts to a dark cloud of doom and bitterness, and it feels out of place.

You don’t need to be a Half Japanese fan to like this film. With tighter editing in the middle it might qualify as a midnight movie classic, to be shown after the 1984 HBO movie The Last Polka, starring Eugene Levy and John Candy as Yoshe and Stan Schmenge (“Ladies and gentlemen, The Shemke Brothers”… “Schmenge!!!!!”) 

NoMeansNo/Hanson Brothers - Would We Be...Live? (DVD review): Weighing in at three hours, these two 2002 london shows are a bargain at $19.95 retail. Punkervision uses a video editing board that's always in sync and deploy enough cameras to catch everything. It also sounds great on my mono tv! Heh heh eh...uh. A steal if you stole it or your money's worth if you buy it.

NoMeansNo have been around for 28 years or so, recording a schizophrenic catalog of various punk, hard rock and jazz-influenced music too challenging for most but rewarding for those so inclined. That's an obtuse yet objective statement. They're like The Big Boys in that they both switch between styles that usually didn't appeal to the same audience. They both also have one great Ska song in their catalog.

Brothers Rob Wright (bass) and John Wright (drums) are the tightest rhythm section going, bar none. Rob plays bass like a lead and John is (I swear) Buddy Rich sitting in with Killing Joke. Their best songs are pounding, unpredictable and manic. Their worst songs never end and are overly dramatic via hard rock histrionics. I have no metal blood in me at all but even I know I'm right about the song length issue. This DVD finds them playing mostly in the NoMeansNo style I like.

"The River" is a true classic. You must seek it out. Other keepers include "I Have A Gun", "I'm An Asshole", "Dark Ages", "Body Bag" and "Oh No! Bruno!"

The Hanson Brothers are NoMeansNo with John singing and, in the case of this DVD, Ernie on drums. They perform in character: Tommy is a drooling moron, Rob a dimwitted Jason in a goalie mask, Ernie licks his chin like a cow and John chews gun and is in total control. Some shots of Tommy drooling are not for the weak. I love, Love, LOVE the Hanson Brothers. They apply the power and precision of NoMeansNo to the Ramones' sound. I'm loathe to say anyone rules, but the Hanson Brothers rule the wasteland.

"Jackoff" has the greatest piece of concert footage I've ever seen. John starts singing the first chorus when Tommy kicks at someone grabbing at him in the audience. He kicks, points, stops playing, steps back and puts his hands behind his back. John looks over and without missing a beat on his gum or changing his facial expression he walks over, grabs the offender like a ragdoll, tosses him around a bit, probably says to him "Don't make me angry, you wouldn't like me when I'm angry", steps back to the mike, Tommy steps up and they HIT the right note on a dime like nothing happened. I've looked at this twenty times by now. Man that's cool.

Hardcore, Vol I, The Films Of Richard Kern (video review) (Film Threat): This collection of short films and rock videos by NYC photographer Richard Kern has nothing to do with hardcore punk and little to do with hardcore porn. There is plenty of frontal nudity, simulated sex and Lydia Lunch graphically tooting a happy tune on the meat flute, but the title is mostly a reference to how the denizens of Kern's world live the fabled NYC junkie/alcoholic/rock'n'roll/degenerate/artist lifestyle to the fullest (or lowest). It’s low budget but some of these shorts are effective and overcome their inherent faults with creative shots and enough weirdness to tweak the interest of even the most jaded b-movie nut.

Born in 1954 in North Carolina, Richard Kern, a self-proclaimed hick, was introduced to photography and voyeurism by his father, the editor of the local newspaper. He didn't move to NYC until 1979, but when he did he fit in perfectly with the artists and musicians who shared the lower east side with junkies, winos and $10 hookers. The major difference between the two groups was a belief their lives were exercises in artistic expression as opposed to a hellish daily punishment.

In 1983 he purchased a $5 Super-8 movie camera and filmed his friends acting out what Kern calls "statements" in a genre of his own coining called the "Cinema Of Transgression". Lydia Lunch, Henry “Neck” Rollins, Karen Finley, Nick Zedd, Sonic Youth, Clint Ruin and others appeared in a series of home movies from ‘84-’87. Then Kern burned out, sold off his belongings and moved to San Francisco. He soon returned to NY to make a few cheap rock videos and then settle into his present gig as master photographer of NYC kink, with shows all over the world and premium prices paid. His work involves a lot of lite bondage, NYC "realism", and nods to the kind of ‘70s Times Square sleaze fondly remembered by some as a kind of perverse vaudeville. I lived through that era and have mixed feelings. Overall I’m glad the Times Square sleaze era is over. His successful New York Girls is one of those large format Taschen books that repackages retro-kink as art.

Kern's best film work is in ultra grainy black & white, and combines elements of Kenneth Anger, David Lynch's Eraserhead and George Romero's Night Of The Living Dead. These films range in length from a few minutes to about 22 minutes. Acted out as silent films (music and sparse dialog were added later and seems to have been recorded in a tenement hallway), Kern's films work just as well with the sound off. Home movies that elevate themselves to the zenith of b-movie cult status, Kern's films are worth checking out. John Waters did the same thing much earlier but Kern is more graphic and his depiction of NYC is as vivid as Water's Baltimore. It also helps that he always maintains a healthy respect for the comically absurd. The video box quotes Kern as saying "I've tried it all: crime thrills, drug thrills, sex thrills, but nowadays I get most of my thrills by offending people with my films."

Much of the music is provided by Foetus, along with the The Dream Syndicate, Sonic Youth and The Butthole Surfers. Lydia Lunch, the Betty Boop of anger, appears a few times and rubs herself all over while making "sexy" faces. That's when she's not giving a graphic hummer to a skinny rock/junkie type.

My favorite scene in this collection is of the man who commits suicide by loading up a hollow weight bar with what must be 65 lbs of plastic weights (filled with concrete lumps), more than double of what he used a few minutes before, and then letting it crush his windpipe. Most guys over 98 lbs. warm up with twice that weight so on film the scene just looks funny. Is 65 lbs. a lot of weight if you're a NY junkie rockstar? Maybe so. Or maybe I'm so damn macho I've lost all perspective.

Hard Core Logo (video review) (Miramax): This 1996 film barely made it to a theatrical release, and then it languished on the shelf for years. It's now a catalog item in Quentin Tarantino's vanity distribution company, Rolling Thunder Pictures, like Troma but more indie in appeal. Lead actor Hugh Dillon auditioned for a part in Tarantino's Jackie Brown, so there might be a personal connection involved in the deal.

Every review I tripped over compares Hard Core Logo to Spinal Tap, annoying because it's both wrong and lazy. Hard Core Logo is not a mockumentary, it's a rock'n'roll road diary drama. It's trying to be Real. The last thing it is is funny. It's the least funny thing I've seen in a long time. Just about every movie ever made has something funny in it, or has at least one clever visual, line or piece of action that can make a person involuntarily smile. The "I'm invisible" bit in the bar was cute and I laughed at that. The line "Welcome to the old days" was clever, and Joe Dirt's crowd insult of "You don't know s--t from good chocolate" was hysterical, but that doesn't make this a comedy. If Noel S. Baker wrote this as a comedy, he's failed miserably. If director Bruce McDonald filmed this as a comedy, he also failed.

The production values of Hard Core Logo are surprisingly top shelf. It’s a visual achievement for the director and his crew. The cinematography, editing, lighting, sound, effects and locations are all killer. I would hire Bruce McDonald in a heartbeat to direct a major Hollywood motion picture. The acting is also excellent all the way around. Hugh Dillon, who sings in a real band called The Headstones, is a little bit Lee Ving and a lot Bruce Willis in the lead as Joe Dirt. Callum Keith Rennie, who gets a decent amount of indie film work, is perfect as the band's lead guitarist and resident pretty boy eager to make the jump to a more famous band and a regular paycheck. Joey Ramone makes a cameo as himself and he's on the edge of laughing out loud as he talks up the imaginary band Hard Core Logo. Can such an odd looking person be any more lovable?

The script is consistently underwhelming. It's not exactly boring or riddled with cliché, but it moves from frame to frame without leaving an impression. It plays like improv where everyone speaks and acts correctly but nothing worth keeping happens. It's a story about a once famous Canadian punk band on the road for one more tour. There's drama, humor, action, betrayal, trust, reconciliation, warmth, sadness, honesty, friendship, anger, violence, insanity, disappointment, pathos and anything else a good story can have to help it on its way. Still, the script just sits there begging to be punched up by a pro. It does cover all the bases, and that's the best thing I can say about the writing.

The soundtrack is nice, and while the punk concert scenes help limit this film's appeal to a tiny segment of a tiny genre to begin with, the use of The Ramones' late career, largely unknown "Touring" is brilliant. It's played over a slo-mo shot of the band walking along is if on a death march.

If you made it through 1998's Still Crazy, Hard Core Logo may hold your interest. If you're expecting another Spinal Tap, you'll be sadly disappointed. What you will come away with is fine acting and great production values. It's not enough, but at least it's something.

The Harder They Come (video review) (International Films): I rented The Harder They Come because I thought it was a porno, but it turned out to be a reggae movie instead. Starring Jimmy Cliff and featuring an appearance by the legendary Prince Buster, the reggae soundtrack to The Harder They Come was immensely popular and also an inspiration to the UK punk scene who took some of its political posturing of the oppressed masses directly from the Rasta movement. Credit in this regard must be given to DJ and filmmaker Don Letts for spreading the word. Taking place in the Shanty Towns of Jamaica, it's a gangster story about a country boy (Cliff) who comes to the city after the farm is sold, gets his belongings ripped off, can't find work, records a hit song for a sleazy record producer for $20, turns to dope dealing and then becomes a cop-killer hero until he's gunned down. I can give away the plot because Cliff is a tragic hero and they never life long enough to read the credits.

The police are corrupt, the record producer is corrupt ("I make the hits, not the public"), city people are corrupt, religious men are corrupt - Cliff's character never really has a chance. The cover art is a copy of American black exploitation films and the story follows similar plot lines of the tough hero protecting what's his from both the good and the bad guys. In a class system where most people are poor, heroes tend to be those who break the law and get away with it. The poverty is tangible in The Harder They Come, especially the scene where adults and children rummage in the city dump. I doubt these were actors.

How many movies have you seen where a character's song becomes a hit and the truth is the song stinks, and you think the actors deserve an Oscar for pretending it doesn't stink. "The Harder They Come" is an classic for the ages and better than the film surrounding it. It's a cheap movie, the acting is fair and the subtitled Rasta-to-English gets a little annoying, but my god what an excellent soundtrack. Seeing Toots perform "Sweet & Dandy" was enough to make me fall over, and I can't imagine anyone in the theater not wanting to dance when Jimmy Cliff is shown recording a studio take of the title track.

If you don't own the soundtrack to The Harder They Come – uh, well, you should. The Harder They Come is not a great film while you're watching it ,but it gets better as you think back on it. Maybe it's just that great soundtrack playing tricks on me.

HATED: GG Allin and The Murder Junkies (Video review) (Film Threat): "GG Allin is an entertainer with a message to a sick society. He makes us look at it for what we really are. The human is just another animal, who is able to speak out freely, to express himself clearly. Make no mistake about it, behind what he does is a brain" -- John Wayne Gacy.

This quote opens the film and says all you need to know about serial killers like Gacy and serial singers like GG Allin. People actually worship sociopaths like Gacy and Allin, and they try to intellectualize it by talking about reflections of a sick society and events of rage almost warranted by the human condition. Please, if you like Gacy it's because you’re a sick scumbag, and if you like GG Allin it's because your mind is on holiday. Merle Allin, GG's brother and the brains of the operation, appeared on a TV talk show to defend Gacy. He switched back and forth between claiming Gacy didn't do it to pronouncing Gacy’s victims were killed because the earth is full of scum who deserve to die. It's like nazis who deny The Holocaust as a hoax but then brag how they're going to kill six million more when they get the chance. Admiration of serial killers is a pathology, not a hobby.

Hated was a labor of love from director Todd Phillips, who paid for GG's bus ticket to NY for concerts and interviews. Contrary to everyone’s intentions, Hated actually diminishes GG's reputation as the King Of Depravity. Don't get me wrong - you'll see GG vomit on his own face after drinking shots of hot piss, only to drink some more; you'll also see GG crap on the floor, lick it, rub it on his face and toss what's left at the audience - but in every aspect he comes across as small and an absolute zero with few fans and nothing to show for his life but the clothes on his back, missing teeth, a body odor Gacy himself described as worse than a wino's, endless streams of empty hat slogans ("My mind is a machine gun, my body's the bullets, the audience is the target") and laughable claims of personal freedom. For a guy who got into so many fights he punched like a girl, and with a penis that tiny you could barely call his nakedness "Indecent Exposure".

A number of people who saw his concerts were their only to see GG either kill himself, or beat him up. Since many of his concerts only lasted ten minutes anyway, nobody went for the music. He played drums and guitar, and made it a point to sing on cue when he wasn't getting beaten up by his fans. You couldn't say the same for Darby Crash or Sid Vicious, the other two stars in punk’s Cavalcade of Losers.

When GG wears his hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses he looks exactly like the police sketch of the Unibomber. When he's bloated he looks more like El Duce of the Mentors. At least El Duce was good for a few laughs.

The secondary characters in Hated are fairly interesting. Merle Allin, bass player for The Murder Junkies, sports a Hitler mustache and was probably the driving force behind his brother GG. GG's stupidity and hatred had little focus, and I wager it was Merle who set him up in bands for fun and profit. Hell, he still peddles GG Allin tapes and videos for a living. The drummer, Dino, drums naked and was arrested for flashing a little girl. He's probably legally insane. While on camera he tries hard to pretend the fifteen voices in his head aren't screaming at him all at once. He says of GG, "He's also a serious social comment on the problems of violence in the human race." Yes, Dino, and rape is how shy fellows show affection.

Unk, a NY GG fan, gets a lot of film time. He's a meek, hateful coward in Klark Kent glasses who lives vicariously through GG and visits to Gacy in prison, so I'm sure the FBI has quite a profile worked up on him guy by now. He says of a GG Allin concert, "It's kinda like going to see the most bizarre freak show you'd ever want to see in your life." Here's the difference between intellectual curiosity and mental illness: if you look into it once in a while you can never claim ignorance, but if you seek it out over and over again to the point where it defines you, you're more than a little touched in the head.

Each year toward the end of his life GG threatened to shoot his brains out on stage on Halloween night. He never did it. I always thought if he did kill himself he would be showing a twisted integrity I couldn't hold against him. He instead chickened out and instead overdosed on heroin. Darn.

The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (video review): Don't let the title fool you. His name was Ed Wood. The full name retro-respected thing just doesn't cut it. That aside, it's an accepted, unwritten law in underground culture that you have to love bad movies. Cheap exploitation flicks, horror comedies with bad special effects, anything by John Waters or Troma, intentionally campy and trashy films, but especially any film made with complete seriousness and artistic pretensions soooo poorly done you can't help but roll over with laughter and amazement at the obliviousness of all involved. Ed Wood was the king of this kind of film. There are dozens of films of even lower quality than 1956's Plan 9 From Outer Space (The Creeping Terror and Robot Monster come to mind), but Ed Wood was a nice allegory for an America where a talentless yet charismatic hack could achieve some level of fame and recognition through sheer force of will and blind gumption. Ed Wood combined optimism and corny dementia in a fashion that partly defines America.

The Ed Wood revival started years ago with the release of the Golden Turkey Awards around 1980, basically a way for two young critics to make a name for themselves, just as Blackwell draws attention to himself each year with his list of fashion casualties. They chose Plan 9 as the worst film of all time and the rest is history. The choice was a bit arbitrary but they couldn't have chosen a more interesting subject.

Ed was a war hero, transvestite, womanizer, writer of cheap porn novels, alcoholic and last employer of Dracula himself, Bela Lugosi. Rumor has it Bela drank formaldehyde because straight booze didn't provide the old kick anymore. This co-dependent relationship was the basis of the 1994 biopic Ed Wood. Even more interesting was Ed's transvestism, which he turned into the autobiographical 1953 film Glen or Glenda (Also released as He Or She, I Changed My Sex, I led Two Lives, and Transvestite). It’s a melodramatic rationalization and plea for acceptance on the part of Ed Wood. He liked to wear men's clothes but he wasn't gay. Ed was a man's man, but not a man’s man, if you know what I mean. He was said to be a notorious womanizer. His mother wanted a girl and she dressed Ed in girl's clothes for years, the infamous Angora fabric his favorite trigger to a happier, safer time. Ed looked like a poor man's Walt Disney. At age 17 he won a medal from President Roosevelt for being the fastest typist in New York State. And they say Ed had no talent. The fools!

The Haunted World Of Edward D. Wood, Jr. is a great made-for-video documentary, much better than the other cheepies released at the time of the Johnny Depp film. Ads put this in the same league as Crumb, but it's not. Crumb was a major motion picture while this is a well done video in line with the subject matter and his films.

Many of the old Ed Wood players give testimonials on surreal stage sets that often make no sense yet somehow fit. Vampira, looking like Anne Rice at Ruth Gordon's age, is the most interesting because she looks back with mild scorn. She fell in with Ed because she hit Hollywood's bottom and Ed's offer was her only work. Her rap that Ed was below her talents is a joke on her she’s not getting. On a cheesier level she’s Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd.

Dolores Fuller, Ed's former Angora-wearing girlfriend and co-star of Glen or Glenda, is a bit oblivious herself. She claims she didn't know Ed was a transvestite, even during filming, and only left him after she found out the truth. She went on to write songs sung by Elvis in his films. Bela Lugosi's son says "To me, Ed Wood was a loser and a user". Of course he's going to say that. Ed Wood was the only person giving Bela a job. He loved the guy. Bela had no chance elsewhere, with his addictions and thick Hungarian accent that typecast him forever as Dracula.

Ed didn't use anybody. He was a charismatic, optimistic man who desperately wanted to make motion pictures. His troupe consisted of actors on the way up, the way down and the never had a chance. Steve Reeves, Tor Johnson, Vampira, Criswell, Bela Lugosi - this kind of casting is John Water's bread and butter! Vampira describes Ed as "pretty, but ineffectual and tragic". Many others loved the man for his friendship and enthusiasm. He died of a heart attack, a broke alcoholic and author of cheap pornographic novels, some of which have been reprinted. His transvestism filled him with guilt and self-loathing some say was the root of his drinking problem. His lack of success didn't help either. Did Ed know he was a crappy filmmaker? Probably not, otherwise he would have stopped earlier. If spirit were talent Ed would have been bigger than his idol Orson Wells.

Here are some of my favorite bad films of all time: The Little Shop Of Horrors, Evil Dead II, Killer Klowns From Outer Space, Dead Alive, Street Trash, Class of Nuke 'Em High II, Bucket of Blood, Pink Flamingo, C.H.U.D., The Creeping Terror, The Bone Yard, and Basket Case parts II & III. 

The Monkees - Head (video review) (Rhino): Here's why a lot of nostalgia is a kind of pose. Many Monkees fans weren't alive in the late ‘60s when they were popular. Watching reruns doesn’t disqualify you from being sincere, but ever since camp became cool and irony our cultural barometer for deeper understanding, “found" nostalgia is often little more than a goldmine for corporations who dictate what's cool (not the other way around).

Growing up in New York we had extra TV channels that ran old movies, reruns, local news and sports - even Bowling For Dollars, where people won nine dollars. They ran anything that was cheap to get, like The Monkees, The Munsters and Mr. Ed. Today's corny nostalgia comes from the cheap programming of Baby Boomer's youth, who now run MTV, Nick at Night and the rest. They take clunkers like My Mother The Car and through spiffy promos convince kids this is retro-cool of the first order, and of course the kids go nuts for it because everything they believe (even their nonconformity) is dictated to them by corporations and the media.

Was The Monkees a good series? The shows may be cute but they've aged as well as Ford Pintos. They were four adorable psychedelic hippies for the Tiger Beat set, as Beatles Lite as you can imagine. They were each talented as musicians but they were as packaged as the Spice Girls. Who were they competing against, The Banana Splits? A few cool songs were written for them, like the "Monkee's Theme", "Last Train To Clarksville", "Daydream Believer", "I'm A Believer", "Pleasant Valley Sunday" and one of punk's greatest influences, "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone".

Head was their attempt in 1968 to break free from their TV image. The plan was to destroy their past with self-ridicule and emerge as a real band in touch with a public old enough to shave. Sadly, Head failed them on every level. Desperate, confusing, endless, and with only one decent tune, "Porpoise Song", this is a big mess.

Written by Jack Nicolson and director Bob Rafelson, Head took the series' episodic plot-lines and dips them in acid (of the drug variety). The Monkees protest the Vietnam War and their own non-identity crisis. Fans call this film "unconventional", "dreamlike" and "stream of consciousness" - the deluded fan's code words for weird, poorly written and mindless. There's cameos from Victor Mature, Annette Funicello, Terri Garr, Sonny Liston, Frank Zappa and a young Jack Nicolson. None are effective.

I like The Monkees but this film stinks. It failed when it came out twenty years ago and its only value today is to sit on the video store shelf waiting to disappoint the next sucker who picks it up and exclaims "Wow, the Monkees! They're so cooool! I saw an original lunch box selling for $150.00 on e-Bay!!"

Hedwig and The Angry Itch (DVD review) (Fine Line): The first half or so of this screen adaptation of the off-Broadway musical is as fierce and creative a piece of acting and filmmaking as you'll ever see. John Cameron Mitchell, reprising the role he wrote and originated on stage, dominates the screen with every movement and expression. His face reminded me at various times of David Spade, Dana Carvey, Iggy Pop and Jennifer Aniston, which I found distracting, but Mitchell is a great talent and far and away the best actor of his facial type. He has a commanding focus and intensity.

The second half or so, beginning when the Tommy Gnosis character makes his entrance, abruptly skids on its heels to a stop and then saunters home. Rage, fast pacing and brilliant comic energy is replaced by Hedwig's sadness and absorption with the endless search for his "other half". This is seemingly important to the sensibilities of the play's primary audience, the gay community, which I accept at face value. I'm sure Hedwig nailed the sexual existential crisis down cold. As someone just watching the film for hetero yucks and punk rock stuff, all I could think of was how slow it started moving, and how the end reminded me of the end of both Rocky Horror and Ziggy Stardust. The running time is listed at 95 minutes but it seems like it could have been covered in 85.

The direct musical inspirations for the work are The Rocky Horror Show (a general sense of madcap fun), Cabaret (Joel Grey one liners and audience participation on the voyage of the damned) and Tommy (how the songs tell the story as directly as the text). From a rock and roll perspective, songwriter Stephen Trask took inspiration from Lou Reed, David Bowie and Iggy Pop for what he wrote as a stage musical. The easy thing to do would be to say Wayne/Jayne County was a direct inspiration, but his name doesn't come up once in the movie or 83 minute documentary that appears on the DVD, and between these two everyone but the Pope is given credit for inspiring the filmmakers.

The integration of brightly colored charcoal illustrations is beautifully handled, and for a while there's enough visual surprises and leaps of logic and faith to make Hedwig and the Angry Inch a major accomplishment. My favorite one-liner is "It's a car wash, ladies and gentlemen", and Hedwig as a little boy dancing on his bed to music is hysterically spazztastic. The song "Angry Inch" is great, like Jerry Lee Lewis brutalizing "Saturday Night Is Alright For Fighting". The line "Six inches forward and five inches back...I've got an angry inch!" is pretty damn funny.

The DVD documentary is worth watching if you want to get a sense of the creative process from vague concept to finished product. There's much more work, hassle and disappointment involved than most people suspect.

Hey Is Dee Dee Home? (DVD review): Hey Is Dee Dee Home is mandatory if you want to see Dee Dee Ramone talk about Johnny Thunders and his own tattoos for an hour. Released to cash in on the death by heroin overdose of Gummy The Stabbing Hobo the year before, it's an interview of Dee Dee by director Lech Kowalski for an unfinished Johnny Thunders documentary, whose other finished work is Story Of A Junkie. There's a theme with this guy.

The Dee Dee who sits for this might be the drug-free one he claims to be, but who knows. He's president of the good posture club for sure, and the way his body and face moves reminds me of Charles Nelson Reilly. Dee Dee was always fun to read, look at or listen to -- in a sadistic way since he was always only moments away from some kind of insanity. Recounting a domestic dispute, his psychotic girlfriend Connie pulled a butcher knife from her purse and Dee Dee was lucky enough to bat it out of her hand with a broom handle. Then, as the maestro tells it, "I went to go cop. I thought I'd make her happy.. and I got stabbed that day. I came home all bloody. Then we made up." He then gives the standard Dee Dee look of extreme innocence, a gentle soul stranded in a crazy world.

If I had a nickel for every time he uses the word "cop", as in buying drugs, I'd have $1.25. Buying drugs seemed to be his full-time job. He tells how Thunders demanded he cop drugs to earn the right to hang out with him. I don't know, Thunders looked like a small, strung-out ferret to me, so I take Dee Dee's side. Dee Dee also wrote better songs, including "Chinese Rocks", which Thunders stole.

Dee Dee was clinically nuts and on a Psych 101 level you can enjoy this as an exercise in mental pathology. There’s Dee Dee the reluctant heroin addict. Dee Dee who can't be within a mile of H without falling off the wagon. Dee Dee the passive-aggressive knife nut. He never portrays himself as pro-active, it's always Dee Dee taking abuse until he can't take it no more. Then there’s the "good person" Dee Dee whose revenge fantasies might shock even Jack The Ripper. Oh yeah, he talks about himself in the third person, as in saying the shirt he's wearing is "Very Dee Dee-ish".

Hey Is Dee Dee Home is a chore to get through even at an hour but it ages well in the mind. His two autobiographies are definitely worth reading.

The History of Rock and Roll Volume 8 - The 70s: Have A Nice Decade (video review) (Warner Home Video): This is an excellent video from an excellent series. Interviews and narration are seamlessly edited around music, concert footage and videos to paint a picture of the ‘70s - ten short years that produced the best and worst in modern popular music. Volume 9 of the series is about punk and also covers the ‘70s. This tape is a non-punk overview of a period defined by variety, experimentation and excess. I feel weird calling this a "non-punk overview", but you all wear your punk-colored glasses pretty tight.

I began my own teen years in 1974. I never knew of the Stooges or the MC5. I liked Bowie, The Who, Jethro Tull, Yes, ELP, Steely Dan and The Rolling Stones. I never liked heavy metal, which to me is just hairy, alcoholic hippies playing hard r&b. On this tape Pete Townshend says of Led Zepplin, "I haven't liked a single thing that they've done. I hate the fact that... I'm even slightly compared to them. I've just never, ever liked them." Pete tries not to sound mean-spirited when he says this, but right on Pete! It’s mods vs. rockers all over again. When punk bands turned metal in the early ‘80s they lost something vital.

In the ‘70s all kinds of music became widely accessible and American radio was no longer driven by Top-40 singles. The ‘90s saw the trend reverse itself. Reggae, Motown, glam, hard rock, southern rock, new wave, punk - they all had a chance to be recorded and either succeed or fail in the marketplace. Early new wave was a microcosm of this spirit, with everything from Buddy Holly to The Sex Pistols to ska getting its turn in clubs. You'll hear that punk was a reaction to the excesses of ‘70s rock and a return to basics - which is true and false. Iggy and the CBGBs bands may have sneered at Led Zepplin's private jets and faux- glamorous lifestyles, but punks damn sure wouldn't have said no to the money these dinosaur rockers were making. They did as many drugs though!

The ‘70s was a decade of bigger-than-life rock stars, overproduced concept albums and the dreaded, unholy, evil plague of disco. They show wonderful footage of disco albums being blown up while a stadium full of long-hair rockers riot like mad dogs. Disco star Gloria Gaynor explains that disco is simple r&b for white people who can't follow the more intricate rhythms of funk and soul. Disco nostalgia is screwed. Only two groups are into it - kids who think it's cute, and fat, bald old guys who haven't been laid since the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack dropped off the charts. Bruce Springsteen is shown to be the savior of rock over disco. I was never into The Boss myself but I agree 100%. He snatched rock music away from the Zepps, Aerosmiths and disco ducks and brought it back into the bars where average folks drink and dance. Joe Strummer of The Clash was influenced by Springsteen. British pub rock, UK punk's (and especially oi's) breeding ground, came from the same tradition.

The tape ends with a great sight gag. Gerald Ford is shown in a speech saying, "My fellow