Circle Jerks - 'My Career As A Jerk' DVD Review (MVD Video)

I’m innately suspicious of music documentaries as too many of them follow the VH-1 “Behind the Music” story arc of ‘the band’s rise to fame and the turmoil beneath the surface that drove the band apart’. The Circle Jerks though are in good hands with director David Markey. While everyone knows Markey’s film “The Year Punk Broke”, he has been a part of the SoCal hardcore scene for a long time and directed “Desperate Teenage Lovedolls” and “Lovedolls Superstar” (co-written by Red Kross’ McDonald brothers).

“My Career as a Jerk” follows the history of the Circle Jerks – from their inception following Keith’s departure from Black Flag through the band’s current hiatus and combines current-day interview footage with Markey’s archival live footage which documents probably every lineup in the band’s career. In addition to the well-known lineup of Keith Morris (vocals), Greg Hetson (guitar), Lucky Lehrer / Keith Clark (Drums) and Roger Rogerson / Zander Schloss (bass), there is also priceless footage of lineups that never committed any recordings to vinyl [outside of the re-recording of “When the Shit Hits the Fan” for the Repo Man soundtrack] which included Flea (Bass), Chris Poland (Guitar - x-Megadeth), Chuck Biscuits (Drums - x-everyone) and Earl Liberty (Bass – x-Saccharine Trust).



The story starts with the band forming out the of the punk/SST scene that was based out of an old church in Hermosa Beach. The band’s rise to the top of the SoCal hardcore pack is told through period live footage and interviews with Keith Morris, Lucky and Greg Hetson. Nothing is held back - Keith tells stories about his early alcohol and drugs problems and Roger’s debilitating drug problems and Greg talks about the battleground conditions that the bands of that time were forced to play under. Lucky is the most nostalgic of the trio and talks about seeing slam dancing for the first time, putting his home phone number on the Group Sex album which resulted in ‘bizarre’ calls from around the world and his attempt to balance law school and the band (which ultimately got him ejected from the band). Earl Liberty, who dropped out of the music business after his tenure with the Jerks, also talks about his time with the band and there are some in-depth interviews with later-period bassist, Zander Schloss – who met the band during the filming of “Repo Man”.

There is some great footage of the Liberty/Biscuits lineup of the band on this disc, which includes a performance on Rock Palace with Morris in full “Michael Jackson” regalia. This lineup fell apart after Biscuits and Hetson got into a physical altercation over Biscuits refusal to play a free after-party at Madame Wong’s and Hetson ultimately kicked Biscuits so hard in the b*lls that it lifted him off the ground.



When the band regrouped in the 90s, they never seemed to capture the intensity of their early days. Whether it was the quasi-revolving door in the rhythm section, inter-band tensions (tensions over Hetson’s splitting his time between the Jerks and Bad Religion is a reoccurring theme) or a poor experience on Mercury Records, the band never seemed to find solid footing. One anecdote that was both amusing and sobering is that the band mentions that original bassist Roger Rogerson called the various band members out of the blue in the mid-90s to try to get the original band back together to capitalize on the major label feeding frenzy. The sobering note is that Roger never turned up to the band meeting that he called as it turned out that he had O.D.’d.



The film ends on a bittersweet note with Hetson and Morris talking about the band’s current hiatus. As I haven’t been keeping up with the circumstances around this ‘breakup’, it was news to me that this was all due to the band finally getting back to their long rumored seventh album. Producer Dimitri Coats thought Hetson’s songs were sub-par which resulted in Coats being fired and Morris following him to OFF!. Morris though describes the door to the Circle Jerks reunion as closed but not locked so the story of the Circle Jerks may still have another chapter.

Links:
Circle Jerks

Alice Donut - "Freaks in Love: A Quarter Century in Underground Rock" DVD Review (MVD Visual)

Aquarius Records, who have a huge number of CD reviews posted on their site wrote “With the release of Freaks In Love, from weirdo New York noise rockers Alice Donut, we realized we had never reviewed a single Alice Donut record. Ever.” I sort of feel the same way as Freaks in Love is my first exposure to both Alice Donut and their music.

Freaks in Love is an in-depth documentary that looks at the 25-year career of New York City punk rock band Alice Donut. The documentary runs just over 90 minutes and the bonus features include nine live songs that that range from a 1987 performance at CBGB to footage from the band’s 2009 reunion show at Southpaw. Alice Donut recorded their early discs for Alternative Tentacles and Jello Biafra described the band’s music as “the missing link between R.E.M. and the Butthole Surfers”.

I’m not sure I agree with Jello’s description as there is nothing that sounds like R.E.M.’s “The One I Love” included on the movie soundtrack. In fact, Alice Donut’s free-form psychedelic punk and Tom Antona’s garbled vocals (along with lyrics about the “perversities, odd details, and petty humiliations of life”) sounds closer in spirit to mid-period Butthole Surfers (who seemed to drop their psychotic edge after Teresa Nervosa left the band). Alice Donut’s song “"The Son Of A Disgruntled Ex-Postal Worker Reflects On His Life While Getting Stoned In The Parking Lot Of A Winn Dixie Listening To Metallica"” says a lot about where the band’s headset is.



The film starts with interviews with current and former members about the band’s beginnings on the Lower East Side which is mixed with some live footage of the band’s first show at CBGB. The band’s story is a familiar DIY story where the members spent most of their life in the van building mini-markets in various cities around the globe. The band wears their “freak flag” proudly with the introduction of cross-dressing friend Chet Mazur, who both opened for Donut with spoken word performances and was the ‘cover model’ for Mule. While keeping their indie-cred, Donut built a strong following through progressively higher-profile tours with bands that included Blind Melon and the Meat Puppets. It seems that the pinnacle of the band’s popularity was when they played the main stage at Reading Festival (and Donut went on after Primus, who seemed hugely popular at the time).

Unlike the bands on VH1’s “Behind the Music”, there is a minimum of inner-band drama as the members all seem to get along and actually like being around each other. Ted and Dave left the band due to “pent up frustrations” but there seemed to be no bad blood between the members. Donut called it a day in 1996 to which Jello commented that the band “broke up before they sucked”. The band members all went off and took real jobs but slowly came back together in ’01 and Ted and Dave rejoined a few years later.



Given the pull of ‘real life’ (Tom and Sissi are married and have kids), Alice Donut is quasi-inactive but the band released their tenth disc, Ten Glorious Animals, in September 2009 and played a very limited set of tour dates in support of the disc.

Freaks in Love was directed by musicians/film makers David Koslowski (x-Liquor Bike http://www2.citypaper.com/eat/review.asp?rid=13899) and Skizz Cyzyk (x-Berserk) who give a ‘front-row’ view of what it was like for an indie band in the pre-Nirvana era to ‘get in the van’. In an interview with MUSICFILMWEB (MFW), Skizz was asked:

MFW: Why Alice Donut? As in, why as a movie subject?

Skizz Cyzyk: Considering I was already in the middle of another music doc (Icepick to the Moon, about Reverend Fred Lane) and another doc about antiwar protesters (Hit & Stay), the last thing I expected to do was jump into another project. But my co-director, David Koslowski, had moved to North Carolina, where he became friends with Tom [Antona] and Sissi [Schulmeister, Alice Donut’s bassist]. They mentioned wanting a doc made to coincide with the band’s 25th anniversary. David decided he wanted to make it, and he asked me to make it with him. Their story could be the story of a lot of bands, and that is a story that hasn’t been told much. Everyone knows about the bands who made it huge, but not everyone knows about the bands who worked really hard yet stayed beneath the surface. For that reason Alice Donut seemed like a good band to make a documentary about.

Links:
Alice Donut

Dinosaur Jr. - "Bug Live at 9:30 Club: In the Hands of the Fans" DVD Review (MVD Video)

Last summer, Dinosaur Jr. went out on a small run of East Coast dates where they played their 1988 album Bug in its entirety. Bug was the band’s second release for SST and was the last disc to include bassist Lou Barlow prior to the band’s 2007 reunion album. Looking back, Lou Barlow reflects that the album that many fans cite as their favorite (and the disc is listed as one of the “1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die” was actually anti-climatic for the band. Barlow said. “In our own minds…we had already peaked, we had already become as popular as we’d ever wanted to be. The fight was over. The first two records represented getting the band over on people and not getting banned from clubs, all those torturous tours, that time was over.” In keeping with the band’s indie-rock aesthetic, Bug was reissued as a limited-edition, hand-numbered cassette last summer through Joyful Noise Recordings.

"Bug Live at 9:30 Club: In the Hands of the Fans" captures the band playing live at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC on June 25, 2011. The band has come a long way in the 13 years since Bug’s original release as they were playing small and mid-sized clubs at the time (Dinosaur Jr. played The Ritz on this tour) but this time out, the band played Terminal 5 (3,000 capacity). This DVD is the second in the “In the Hands of the Fans” series and the video was shot by six contest winners under the direction of Dave Markey (who filmed Dinosaur Jr. back in 1991 for "The Year Punk Broke").

The concert portion of the disc runs just over an hour and the band plays Bug from start to finish along with “Sludgefest” and “Raisans” from You’re Living All Over Me. As to be expected, there is the bare minimum of dialogue with the audience aside for some brief ‘thank yous’ from Lou. The longest bit of dialogue is when Lou explains that he blew out his voice early in the tour and he brings a fan from Arkansas on stage to sing “Don’t”.



The bonus footage on this DVD more than doubles the overall running time of the disc. This footage includes a live performance of “In a Jar” and “The Wagon” (I believed the band opened with these tracks), an interview with Henry Rollins where he talks about the significance of the “old” 9:30 Club, backstage interview footage where the six contest winners ask the members of Dinosaur Jr. questions, and a live on-stage interview where Henry Rollins interviewed the band prior to their set. The additional live footage is brilliant but the interviews are a mixed bag and the sort of thing you will scan through or skip the second time around. The Rollins interview footage is interesting in that it is amusing to watch Hank’s obvious hero worship compared with J, who looks completely disinterested in the interview and mumbles an occasional answer. The interview footage with the contest winners is a bit more interesting as Lou gives some insightful answers about his influences and whether some of the songs on Sebadoh’s first disc were considered for inclusion of Bug. J, on the other hand, delivers some pricelessly droll responses to seemingly innocent questions.

Track List:
01. Freak Scene
02. No Bones
03. They Always Come
04. Yeah We Know
05. Let It Ride
06. Pond Song
07. Budge
08. The Post
09. Don’t
10. Sludgefeast
11. Raisans

While Lou Barlow said “I do think there are some songs on Bug where I remember we recorded them and it was like ‘No we’re never gonna do that [live], that’s too weird'", the end-to-end live performance of the album sounds great. Dinosaur Jr. can still work up a wall of melodic noise (check out the number of amps on the stage) that lessor bands can only dream of.

Links:
Dinosaur Jr.

The Residents - "Talking Light: Bimbos" DVD Review (MVD Visual)

The Residents - Talking Light: Bimbos DVD is a live concert film from the final night of the band's 2011 "Talking Light" tour. This show was filmed in front of a sold-out crowd at Bimbo’s in San Francisco on April 16, 2011 and runs just under two hours. While the show was filmed in 3D (and there was a limited 3D-DVD edition of this show that was made available to project Kickstarter supporters), the ‘standard’ version is beautifully filmed and captures the live experience of a Residents concert better than I ever would have imagined. There is a lot going on at any given Residents show - between the vocals, the instruments (which are generally off to the side) and any lights/visuals but Talking Light: Bimbos captures and seamlessly blends all of these elements to give you the best seat in the house.



The set for the "Talking Light" tour is Randy’s living room, which is complete with a fireplace, B&W TV showing just fuzz and an old couch. Keyboardist Chuck takes the stage first and turns on the lights in the living room but singer Randy Rose is the focal point of the show and he performs wearing an old man mask, underwear and a bathrobe (and oversized tuxedo shoes). Randy takes on multiple vocal parts (including that of the old woman in “Talking Light”) and dances like a demented aerobics instructor while Chuck & Bob build up a noisy cacophony. Behind Randy are video panels that alternate between dark-toned colors and “space scenes” and videos of creepy characters telling twisted ghost stories; some of these stories ended up on the DVD Randy’s Ghost Stories.

For this tour, The Residents were down to a three-piece - Chuck and Bob are off to the side, wearing matching costumes, blackout goggles and deadlock wigs and stay seated throughout the show. In the opening portion of the show, Randy tells the audience that drummer Carlos went to Mexico to be with his mother but ended the show with the comment “F*ck Carlos, that guy was an assh*le”.

The band played an eclectic mix of songs from Lonely Teenager along with songs from their back catalogue and ended the evening with the encore of the cowboy folk song “Bury Me Not (on the Lone Prairie)” and “Die-Stay-Go” (from 1985’s The Big Bubble). Here is the complete track list:

1. Smelly Tongues (from Meet the Residents)
2. The Sleepwalker (from Lonely Teenager)
3. Talking Light (from Lonely Teenager)
4. Six More Miles (from Stars & Hank Forever)
5. They Are The Meat (from Wormwood)
6. Lizard Lady (from Duck Stab / Buster & Glen)
7. Perchance to Dream (from Chuck’s Ghost Music)
8. Semolina (from Duck Stab / Buster & Glen)
9. My Window (from Animal Lover)
10. Once I Went to Barstow (I don’t have Babyfingers but presume this is “Death in Barstow”)
11. The Unseen Sister (from Lonely Teenager)
12. The Old Woman (from Gingerbread Man)
13. Lilly (I don’t have Freak Show but presume this is “Lillie”)
14. Bury Me Not
15. Die-Stay-Go

Links:
The Residents

The Residents - "Is Anybody Out There" DVD Review (MVD Video)

While I’ve reviewed a number of Residents’ discs over the past few years, the DVD Is Anybody Out There had slipped through the cracks. Prior to starting in on the band’s latest limited edition, Night Train to Nowhere, I wanted to close out the last of the Bunny Boy and Talking Light discs.

Is Anybody Out There follows the Bunny Boy story arc – a large portion of this footage was posted to the internet as a multi-part docudrama as a run-up to the Bunny Boy tour and these original videos have now been edited and sequenced with some live footage from the tour. For anyone who missed the original YouTube video series, Is Anybody Out There isn’t a full-length “music video” but rather a “feature film” that has a lot in common with Blair Witch Project. The Residents’ music adds to the increasingly uncomfortable story line (and was documented in the tour-only disc Postcards from Patmos) but the music is neither a prominent nor focal part of the DVD. The story line follows Roger (aka “Bunny”) on his descent into madness. Roger is living in the basement of his x-wife’s house, recovering from an accident he had in Greece that he doesn’t remember. The basement is particularly creepy as it looks like a torture chamber, with a variety of weapons on the wall and “John Wayne Gacy” style clown paintings of Roger and his brother Harvey.

The storyline follows Roger’s “self-made” videos that he is posting on the internet asking for help finding his missing brother Harvey. Harvey is described as being obsessed with the apocalypse and he went missing on the Greek isle of Patmos (home of the “Cave of the Apocalypse”). After filling in the back story of Harvey’s disappearance, Roger’s sanity progressively slips and he makes the later videos dressed in an adult bunny suit. After selling some possessions on eBay (this really happened – how’s that for a bridge between film and reality?), Roger raises money to pay The Great Carson (an internet psychic) who told Roger that Harvey is in Patmos, Arkansas getting ready to do battle with “The Beast”.

Note: There may be a “Part II’ to this disc as the DVD ends with Roger/”Bunny” boarding the bus to Patmos.

The Residents have enjoyed many attachments over the years, but none more unique than "Bunny." Their relationship flourished in the 70's when Bunny's eccentric ideas often pointed the group in unexpected directions, but Bunny eventually grew distant and his appearances at the El Ralpho Studios declined. Then, after a lapse of several years, a video tape arrived in the mail. Looking like the product of a discarded Korean surveillance camera, The Residents quickly recognized the unidentified video as the "work" of the long lost Bunny. At first amused, the group soon became disturbed by Bunny's obvious cry for help, attempting to gain support finding his missing "brother" Harvey. Hoping that a project focused on their lost friend might stimulate his reappearance, and subsequent psychiatric care, The Residents reenacted Bunny's plight in a series of internet videos, resulting in this DVD. Unfortunately after a CD, a world tour and the video series, Bunny remains among the missing.

Links:
The Residents

X (the band) - "The Unheard Music" DVD Review (MVD Video)

Earlier this fall, the original lineup of X regrouped for a limited run of shows where they played the entirety of their 1980 debut Los Angeles and screened their little-seen 1986 bio-pic The Unheard Music prior to the show. While similar minded bio-pics like Decline of Western Civilization (1981) achieved cult status, The Unheard Music seemed to slip under the radar of most people at the time of its original release.



The Unheard Music was filmed between 1980 and 1985 by Angel City Productions – a group of first-time film makers. The film captures the evolution of X over the course of their first four albums and also documents the evolution and decline of the LA punk scene. All of this is set against the background of the Reagan administration’s “Morning in America” and a hostile and apathetic music industry that were looking for the next AOR stadium act.

Director W.T. Morgan and the Angel City team do an excellent job of capturing the personality of each of the band members through candid, ‘at-home’ interviews along with a number of high-energy live and rehearsal performances from X. This footage is inter-spliced with pre-MTV music videos (for the song “The Unheard Music” and “Because I Do”), a variety of topical and stock footage and interviews with various personalities from the LA music scene. These interviews range from Brendan Mullen giving a tour of his short-lived punk club The Masque (which was in the basement of a porno theater) to an MCA Records executive talking about how he didn’t hear the commercial appeal in X’s music and he and MCA were expecting Point Blank to become the “next big thing” (aka the next Journey). There is also a reoccurring thread about a letter that Slash Records received from a girl who claimed that the lyrics from “Los Angeles” were stolen from her life story (but she wasn’t going to sue) so Angel City turned this theme into a mini-video featuring actress Alizabeth Foley.

The individual footage with the members of X include DJ Bonebrake demonstrating a polyrhythmic beat that he came up with on his apartment stove, John and Exene playing an acoustic Hank Williams number in their apartment, Exene giving a ‘behind the scenes’ tour of the Whisky prior to its closing in 1982, Billy goofing at home discussing his musical upbringing (and there is some footage of him playing the clarinet) and John explaining how the band came together and how he was able to acquire the “X” from the marquee of the old “Ex-Lax Building”.

Songs, in order of performance:
· Los Angeles
· Year One
· We're Desperate
· Because I Do
· Beyond & Back
· Come Back to Me
· Soul Kitchen (w/ Ray Manzarek on backing vocals)
· White Girl
· The Once Over Twice
· Motel Room in My Bed
· The Unheard Music
· Real Child of Hell
· Johny Hit & Run Paulene
· I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts
· The World's a Mess; It's in My Kiss
· The Have Nots

"Well in the early 80s, there was a lot of attention on the punk scene then, because it was a revolutionary movement and was important and all that, and then students from UCLA wanted to make videos about us and we didn't really take it very seriously but further on we realized they were serious. Eventually they finished and it was called The Unheard Music and I'm glad they did it because I think as far as documentaries go, it's really good. It really is a good capture of that time and the music business. And it focuses on us, and it also focuses on the bigger picture. I'm a documentary fan. I love any kind of documentary, pretty much.” -- Exene Cervanka (from an interview with Helen Bach)

To celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the film, Angel City Productions released a “Silver Anniversary” special edition DVD on December 13th with a new film transfer and 5.1 mix of the original documentary along with bonus footage which includes previously unreleased live footage (“Some Other Time”), a current 25th Anniversary ‘look-back’ interview with John and Exene along with an inside look into the making of the film with the members of Angel City Productions (circa. 1983).



Links:
X (the band)

Johnny Thunders - "Who's Been Talking?" Live DVD Review (MVD Video)

With the release of the New York Dolls’ DVD Looking Fine on Television, I went back to check out some of the Dolls/Thunders releases that I’ve missed over the years. These first of the discs that I dropped on was Johnny Thunders Who's Been Talking which is a live DVD of one of Johnny’s last concerts. This show was filmed at Club Citta in Osaka, Japan on April 3, 1991 and this is the last known recorded show that Johnny played as he was found dead in New Orleans on April 23rd. The music on Who's Been Talking will be familiar to long-time fans as a portion of this show was released on the 2CD set Add Water and Stir and the full show was released on the two volume Japanese set Saddest Vacation – Last Live in Japan. What makes this release a treat is that it is the first full concert video of Johnny playing with the Oddballs as, outside of 10 minutes of bootleg footage from the Cat Club, I haven’t seen anything else out there.

This show is neither the barn-storming, ball-busting rawk of the Heartbreakers nor the troubadour-style acoustic sets that Thunders was playing around NYC prior to his death but contains elements of both. With the addition of Allison’s Gordy’s prominent backing vocals (she takes lead on the torch song “I Can’t Go On Without You”) and Jamie Heath’s saxophone, the show has more of a “Buster Poindexter” style flair than Johnny’s typical stage show. Johnny takes on a “showman” role for this concert but his illness has him obviously moving at a slower clip. He rarely plays guitar while singing but guitarist Stevie Klasson plays some nice leads with Johnny adding in some of his immediately-recognizable licks when he isn’t singing. The drug-fueled sloppiness may be gone but Johnny stays true to form by getting both the name of the city wrong (he gives a thank you to “Tokyo” at the end of the set) and improvising some dirty lyrics to “Hang on Sloopy”.

The setlist spans both the Dolls and Thunders back catalogues and Johnny plays some material (“Society Makes Me Sad” and “Disappointed in You” that was new at that time (and "Disappointed in You" was ultimately released on the 1993 Totonka bootleg Sticks & Stones which was later re-released by Cleopatra). It is an interesting and eclectic set list as Johnny skips “Chinese Rocks” and “You Can't Put Your Arm Around A Memory” from his ‘traditional’ set and includes covers of “Hang on Sloopy” and “You Can Walk My Dog” (which are in addition to the standard covers in the set list of “Pills”, “Louie Louie”, and “Stepping Stone”).

Here is the complete (and corrected) set list:

1. In Cold Blood
2. Hit The Road Jack > I’m Not Your Stepping Stone
3. Blame It On Mom
4. Disappointed In You
5. Sad Vacation
6. You Can Walk My Dog
7. Pipeline
8. I Can't Go On Without You
9. Louie Louie / Hang On Sloopy
10. Society Makes Me Sad
11. Too Much Junkie Business > Pills
12. Just Another Girl
13. So Alone
14. Personality Crisis

Encore: (w/ Kiyoshiro Imawano on harmonica and backing vocals)
15. Born To lose
16. I Wanna Be Loved

The disc runs for 66 minutes and also contains a bonus feature which is a short bio write-up by Betty Chienne. The audio quality is solid and on-par with any of Thunders’ previously released live shows but the video is a bit hazy. The video editing shows some ‘amateur’ camera jerks and rough edits but it is very watchable and there is a lot worse –looking Thunders footage out there. While video only shows a single camera angle, the show was filmed with multiple cameras so you get to see different visual perspectives of the whole band in action along with close-ups of the members.





Long-time Johnny Thunders fans will want to check out this disc if they haven’t already picked up a copy.

Links:
Johnny Thunders