I’d never heard of Dudes, a Jon Cryer as a punk road movie, until I posted the Vandals song Urban Struggle last night. The YouTube video I found of US was played over clips from Dudes, which looks truly terrible. So, I was disturbed this morning to discover that Dudes was directed by Penelope Spheeris, who made the documentary, Decline of Western Civilization, and Suburbia, a roughly made but excellent teen movie that takes place along the periphery of the LA punk scene in the early 80s.
Here’s a clip from Decline.
And I posted this clip from TSOL in Suburbia last year on Oscar night. It’s just a taste.
With video from the TAMI show, and Lesley’s vocals, so you don’t really have to sing. But listen knowing that You Don’t Own Me was written by two guys, a great song about being a teen.
This doesn’t seem to be a version of Pa Pa Power that Sweet Little Demons’ guitarist Lydia Night played on. There is no guitar here. Instead it is an epic music video, longer I think than Scorsese’s Thriller for Michael Jackson, featuring the band of actor Ryan Gosling performing at a nursing home or extended care facility, with a choir of children singing. And everybody eventually dances, too.
There is even a segment with puppets in a field in the middle, kind of like Children of the Corn, but only one child and not all that scary.
The comments on Youtube are full of people raving about the genius of Gosling, asking how could any one person be so talented. That wasn’t my reaction, but at the same time I kind of admire him for embracing (in the other Dead Man’s Bones songs and videos, too) an aesthetic of messy edges and crepuscular whimsey. He could have done many things better that would have been far worse.
These guys never broke out in any meaningful way, but in those golden days of rock ‘n’ roll they were soldiers on the front line. I loved this song, played this single constantly for a while, because it was so clued in to all the different sounds we rocked to. Anthemic without being bossy, devoted without being chaste.
You tell me the year. The We Are Family Pirates were playing the Orioles in the World Series. I was working for a film distribution company, specializing in arty European movies. We had a hit with a bit of sexploitation called Wifemistress, about (if I’m remembering correctly) an Italian revolutionary who had to go in hiding in a barn across from his old apartment, and thus witnesses his beautiful wife’s liberation, after which she chooses to bed many of his old foes and friends. Laura Antonelli was brilliant as, The Wifemistress.
On this particular October day, it seems that we had a routing problem with the prints of the film, and the only way to get a copy of the movie to the theater in Old Roslyn, on Long Island, for its Friday opening, was for me to personally drive to Harrisburg and pick up the print after the last show on Thursday night, then drive back and deliver the print on LI when the theater opened the next morning.
I listened to the World Series on the radio that night, drove through the PA night past Three Mile Island, which had only recently almost gone China Syndrome, stayed in a cheapo motel somewhere, and then hit Long Island the next morning, delivering the print in time for them to begin their regular schedule. Success!
There was a record store in Old Roslyn, and it was there I found a copy of the Hombres’ Let It All Hang Out. I bought it because of the cover photo, which shows the band dressed in serapes and those big round Mexican hats, hanging out around a dumpster. Also, probably because it was cheap. Maybe fifty cents or a buck. The revelation came when I got home.
This was cheese. These guys were going for the novelty hits, the way, let’s say Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs did, but they were just as tight and fun as Sam et al were. This was cheese with chops. The bottom line was, if you take off from this post and play any of the songs on the elpee, including the hit, Let it All Hang Out, or the cover of Lee Dorsey’s Ya Ya, or whatever, you will be charmed. By an album that coughed up one semi hit and laid down a winning mix of New Orleans/Memphis style rock roots tunes and soul.
I give you Hey Little Girl, tonight, which reflects the band’s blue-eyed soul roots, an abiding interest in the rhythm part of I Fought the Law, and a video of ace go-go dancing. The band’s organist was brother to the bass player in the Box Tops, for what that’s worth. Memphis is a small town it seems. Let It All Hang Out.
After the initial rush of great punk UK bands there came a cascade of second-wave punk bands that were so clearly copping punk rock’s simple structures that there should have been outrage about the copying (and there was), but who brought catchy tunes and direct subject matter and filled a hunger for new material that the best bands alone couldn’t keep up with.
Sham 69 was one of these bands. A party band, to be sure, with the deft cartoonishness of the Ramones filtered through the eyes of English estate lads, with just enough outrage to seem politically relevant and enough sense of the drinking song singalong to touch all the bases. In other words, strong attitude and solid execution trumps any type of originality.
According to YouTube this is the dirty version, which was apparently recorded at a sound check with no audience, since if Jim sang such stuff about cocks to the crowd just months after getting arrested in Miami for exposing his own, well that would be stupid.
Whatever.
The power of this music is that the Doors, by plan or by psychosis, played every show differently. Morrison was obviously the wild card, but how the band adapted to his, um, excursions mattered a lot, too.
And the power of Morrison’s music cannot be underestimated. He’s the voice, the face, the vibe of this band, even if Manzarek and Densmore are super players. Which they are. They pale beside the mountain of good and bad news that is Morrison. We all would, wouldn’t we?
In any case, I love the video here, even though it obscures or maybe recontextualizes the song. It is old archival video, which is gold but doesn’t always suit the meaning of this particular audio.
At the same time, I know Patti Smith heard this, and good for her.
A guy named Mario Wienerroither stripped the Beastie Boys Fight For Your Right (to Party) video of the music. In the process he dropped the shots where the boys are singing, so you can’t just fill in with your head.
