Ah, the Butthole Surfers. Technically my 11th most listened to band of the last 18 years… But oh so much more than that.
In my teens, I was a metal guy… I primarily listed to metal (mainly Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Mercyful Fate, Saxon) and Hard Rock (mainly AC/DC, Van Halen, Def Leppard). But by 1983-85 all of those band’s started to suck, releasing lame album in attempts to become more commercial (well, not Mercyful Fate) and I needed a new musical direction. Cut to a fateful trip to our beachhouse with my sister and her “punk rock” boyfriend. The hearing of one song specifically led me down a whole new musical direction. Not only in terms of the style of music that I listened to, but also in terms of having “expectations of intent” in terms of what I think that musician’s should be expected to uphold. The Surfers provided a “purity” of non-commercial “we’re doing just what the hell we want, just because we want to” ethic that I have generally looked for ever since.
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I’ve found that some of the most satisfying music for me this year has been performances on KEXP. These are some of my favorites of 2020:
Back in the day, as the proverb goes… I fell into rap music fandom from a double-edged sword… In 1986 (or 85?) I saw the Beasties video for She’s On It on USA Network and was totally hooked. In pursuit of them I started going to 2nd Ave records, which was the only store I knew of in Portland that sold rap records. I bought whatever BB I could fine there, first was the Rock Hard EP. But I ended up grabbing She’s on it, Cooky Puss, Brass Monkey… I remember distinctly finding the It’s The New Style EP downtown at a record store and thinking… I now have five EP’s from the Beastie’s, can’t they just throw them together and make an album? Later that day I stopped in another record store and they had just put up a display of Licensed to Ill! Both myself and my friend Jon bought our copies that day (Jon is also the person who got me into Public Enemy and EPMD)… Beasties also led me to find Schoolly D (Who has been my favorite rapper since then, and remains so). Because, when I heard the Gucci sample in Time To Get Ill, I just had to have it.
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Yes, it is catch-up time again (super twice catch-up, as I wrote this draft in 2012 and didn’t publish it until 2019)…
In brief…
Desperate Man Blues…
A Documentary about Joe Bussard, a record collector since way back with an enormous and unique collection of old americana records. The film is a fascinating tale of the history of record collecting and the appreciation of the music, starting long before it was considered collectible. He discusses how he started collecting records in the South of the 1950’s, a time in which these were considered pretty worthless by most. He would just stop by people’s houses looking for unwanted records and he could get 400-500 in a day. But, even more so than his stories, some of the high points of this movie are the many times when he plays some of the great things from his collection: Charlie Patton, Dave Macon, Jimmie Rodgers, film of Son House (I’ve never been a big fan of Son House, but watching him play guitar is pretty amazing), Clarence Ashley, and even an original Robert Johnson record!
Bussard is quite charismatic in a way as he is an incredibly enthusiastic fellow whose collection is not only fascinating, what with the old blues, bluegrass and jazz records from the 20’s and 30’s, but is also an important archive of American music, one which he wants to share… Even to the extent that, as a teenager, he started a radio station in his house, until the FCC came and visited him and shut him down.
He also quite opinionated, voicing such sentiments as: “rock is a cancer of music, it killed everything.” and “1933 was the last jazz record. 1955 was the last country record”. Sentiments that may be a bit hard to take at face value but, considering the source, one assumes that there must be some merit to the opinion. All in all, I would say a must see movie for anyone who is serious about classic american music or record collecting. Just a great story.
Un Flic.
Another Melville classic! This 1972 crime caper has everyone’s favorite frenchman, Alain Delon, working on the side of the law (for once…) to track down a notorious bank robber, and nightclub owner, played by Richard Crenna.
It starts right off with a memorable scene of four men in a Plymouth in the lead up to a bank robbery on a rainy waterfront street. Everything is tinged blue and quiet. In fact, I find the whole movie to feel quiet and memorable. Through the movie we quietly follow the thieves as they go about trying to avoid being caught by the flic on their tail. And, no matter how it ends up for them, I find it to be very nice to watch it unfold … Who needs gratuitous gore and scary music when you’ve got class and style?
Predator
We’re all gonna die…
Yes, it’s a classic, but you have to make it through the first ten minutes, where we are treated to a slow moving festival of a group of super dudes going comically out of their way to look as macho as possible (while we also get assaulted with a slew of some of the worst one-liner’s that have ever graced the silver screen) as they are flying into the jungle in a helicopter. Once they get on the ground though, the situation improves dramatically… Okay, the stuff with Carl and Arnold is pretty bad so maybe once they get into the jungle the situation, at least for us lucky movie goers, improves dramatically.
Oh, but the story? Well, for anyone who doesn’t know, a bunch of macho dudes (Arnold, The Body Ventura, Sonny Landham, Bill Duke!) are flown into the jungle on a mission to rescue some diplomats downed behind enemy lines. Of course, as with anything involving the government, that story is just a cover up. They get joined by Carl Weathers and run off into the jungle where they start getting pursued by an invisible super-hunter from outerspace. This hunter, or predator shall I say, makes them look pretty silly as he picks them off with his cool alien technology, including some classic ridiculous scenes such as when Mack just starts shooting into the jungle, then he is joined by everybody else shooting and they shoot hundreds of rounds into the same little area mowing down tress. Yes, it’s a dramatic bit, but it is safe to know that all of these guys know that if there was anything there it would have been taken out early in the fireflow and that most of that time they had just been wasting ammunition for dramatic macho sense.
With his usual smarmy attitude, old style MTV t-shirt and a gun that is like a lawnmower cannon against the jungle, The Body was one of the most entertaining aspects of the movie. However, the most memorable scenes involve Bill Duke and Sonny. Anyway, what the hell can you say? It’s a classic.
Listening to a bout of Cirith Ungol recently got me thinking… Were they the first real American heavy metal band? Being a rather opinionated person, and as a fan of Metal for 37 years, I have been stuck forming all sorts of opinions about what is and isn’t Heavy Metal. Traditionally, I’ve ignored the Blue Cheer, Sabbath, Zeppelin, Purple, origins of heavy metal to say that, regardless of Pre-Metal origins, Heavy Metal started with Judas Priest, with the sounds that they emitted between 1976 and 1977 on Sad Wings of Destiny and Sin After Sin. By 1980, after following those up wtih Stained Class and Killing Machine, they had basically laid the entire groundwork for Heavy Metal, before anyone else had started. Iron Maiden’s first album didn’t come out until 1980, Saxon’s Wheels Of Steel was also 1980 (Venom didn’t even release an album until 1981!), Accept not until 1979, Diamond Head not until 1981. Listen to Unleashed In The East to get a good earful of what Priest was doing way back in ’79…
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Well, Mark Shelton died yesterday. As is not unusual, this led me down the path of metal ponderings. However, counter-intuitive as it may seem, this post is not about Manilla Road, or even regular heavy metal. Rather Manilla Road leads me to think of Darkthrone…
Until 1998, I was pretty unaware of “extreme metal”. I’d been a fan of metal since 1981 when I first heard “Hot Rockin'” and I got pretty into the commercial thing: Priest, Maiden, Saxon, Accept, etc… Even branched out a bit into Raven, Mercyful Fate, the first Anthrax and Megadeth albums… But then it all went downhill (as in, JP released Turbo) and I fled, which caused me to miss Metallica (pretty much the whole thrash movement, death metal, etc). I lived in pretty much a media blackout for the late 80’s and most of the 90’s. So while I was familiar with the look of some Nu-metal bands, I had no idea what was happening in metal. For me, it really ended when Turbo came out and I never looked at anything past that again.
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Trying to piece together my concert going history. Why? I don’t know. Just to test my memory?
As I’ve worked through it, on and off over the years, I’ve remembered seeing many bands that I had forgotten I’d seen, so there is that. Speaking of forgotten, in 2008, someone put up a blog post of What is the first concert you went to in Portland. I was looking at it today and saw that he mentioned seeing Arlo in 88/89. I also saw that show, so I left a response on his post. Then went back and read through the comments only to find that I had also left a similar comment on the same post in 2009! Also saying that I was putting together a list of my concerts attendance history. Seemingly, I haven’t made much progress in the last nine years. Ay….
So yes, a month and a half of nothing. I know that my readership (by which I mean Myself) finds that very obnoxious. Well, today is the lucky day. I watched two movies tonight and it’s the weekend, so I’ll splurge!
First off was a movie that I’ve been wanting to see for a while and was recently surprised to find available to stream on Netflix: Until the Light Takes Us. I didn’t really know much about it, except for that I thought it was a low-budget doc about the early days of Norwegian Black Metal and, well, that’s just what it is! As someone who is a fan of the Lords of Chaos book, this film was certainly the best document that I’ve seen on those “church burning and death”-filled early days of NBM. The movie is basically just interviews, the majority of which are with Fenriz, though a good deal of Varg is in it too. There is also some lame and weird stuff with Bard. Plus Frost, Hellhammer and those Immortal guys all have some stuff to say.
Frost does some black-metally corpse-painted performance art crap in Italy that was really embarrassing but even worse, while I know that corpse paint out-of-context does seem somewhat silly, I would rather see Abbath and Demonaz in their corpse-paint work-look than see their sunglasses and leather coat wearing, slick-backed hair euro-trash selves (what I like to think of as “the Ulver effect”), which is what we get here. Fenriz of course, looked his cool trve-metal self the whole time.
I’ve always kind of liked Fenriz and it was entertaining to watch his sort of rambling reminiscences and complaints about what happened with Black Metal, it becoming a product and all. Varg (still in prison when this was filmed) comes across as coherent and intent on explaining everything, but he also comes across as an arrogant sociopath. So, while it was worth it to hear his step by step description of his murder of Euronymous, it also makes you doubt his “self-defense” defense.
Most annoyingly is Bard though. I don’t know much about Bard, being primarily familiar with him from reading Lords of Chaos, but here he is presented in shadow with his voice disguised… Maybe he is a mob informer or something… I don’t know, but I couldn’t help but think it was a bit silly, i mean, what? Is Varg going to come calling with his pocket knife again?
Before that though, I watched X-Files: Fight the Future. Over the last 2-3 months I’ve watched the first 5 seasons of X-Files and this movie, coming out after the conclusion of the 5th Season is, in my mind, where the show should have stopped. In case you don’t know, in the 5th season of the show, exactly what the big conspiracy is all about comes to light and we learn a bunch about how it works, then the X-files are shut down. Fight the Future starts out with them being reassigned and working on a domestic terrorism bomb threat. But of course, something is discovered in the aftermath of the bombing that points to a government cover up and off we go! Well, everything about the conspiracy is really brought to light and explained in this one, and even though the ending is set up to lead to a continuance, I really thought that they could easily have just ended the series nicely with this movie.
Well, only two more weeks of this semester and then I will most certainly need to get caught up with this! Of course, the best way to get caught up is to start by not falling further behind, so, with no further adieu, my watching this evening… I started off this afternoon by trying to get into three sci-fi movies Eden Mor (snore), FAQ (I think I only got about a minute into that one) and, yes, Lynch’s Dune. I might have stuck with Dune, but as it seemed about as corny as the last time I tried to watch it back around when it first came out, I was none to upset to shut it off. After that though, I met with greater movie success…
Though I wasn’t sure if I felt up to watching Kurt and Courtney, being more in the mood for the Queen documentary that I came across, I watched it!
Even for those who aren’t particularly interested in the subject (such as myself) Kurt and Courtney is a rather good film. These British filmmakers go to his childhood home, talks to friends and relatives, talk to Kurt’s ex-girlfriend and school teachers and even Courtney Love’s father (who, yes, has conspiracy theory), so it really tries to focus on what kind of guy he was and what his upbringing was. After watching the movie, I don’t want to offer any theories about Kurt’s death either way for fear of Love’s lawyers giving me a call, but let’s just say that the filmmakers don’t shy away from either the conspiracy story or the suicide story, they just let the people explain what they think. Regardless, you do get the sense that knowing Courtney killed him, one way or another… As she does come across as be the lame, shallow and selfish person that everyone (or everyone as far as I can tell) seems to think that she is. It was a bit startling to see so many “northwest” type of people, it really brought me back to the early 90’s…
I then did watch the Queen Doc, Becoming Queen… What it had in common with Kurt and Courtney is that no music from the band appears in the film, no members of the band talk to the filmmakers, and that it focuses on pre-fame days, but that’s about it. In its defense, as befits the title Becoming Queen is a good enough biography of Queen, focusing primarily on the youth of the band member and the originals of the band itself. They do interview a number (a small number) of people who knew them and played with them in the pre-Queen days. But there really isn’t too much to it. More so than the Kurt documentary, this one really did suffer from a lack of Queen’s music being in the film.
I then followed that up with The International. I wasn’t sure about it, but I wanted some kind of suspenseful thing, I was limited to Netflix, it was directed by Tom Tykwer (though I’ve not seen Run, Lola, Run, I am a fan of his Winterschläfer) and it had Clive Owen, so I went for it. And, well, I didn’t have anything against it. A nice big conspiracy with banks and governments, hit men and all of that good stuff It was engrossing enough and entertaining, if nothing particularly special. There was a scene with, yes, a bit too much gunfire (who do they think made it, John Woo?), some small plot failures pop up and it was generally fairly predictable. But it was entertaining enough and had some good characters… And lots of nice scenery as the story popped all around Europe. I could have done without Naomi Watts though as I didn’t really buy her portrayal of her character.
I finally saw Anvil: The Story Of Anvil! What a great film! I knew that it was billed as a true life Spinal Tap about some Canadian metal band, but that was it. I actually hadn’t ever heard of them when the movie came out (even though it is my favorite era/style of music) and now I really can’t understand why. The band is just great! And even after staying somewhere near the bottom for all of these years, they have continued work their day jobs, release albums and fight the good fight, Anvilling whenever they get the chance. Of course, this is not to say that it doesn’t have its Spinal Tap aspects… A long lasting metal band hoping to get a big increase in popularity sets out on an ill fated tour that just falls apart as it progresses during which the two focal members of the band have a tiff and one walks out. all against a background of lots of interviews.
In 1984 Anvil toured Japan with some big names in Metal/Hardrock and in the movie they make a big deal about this “SuperRock Tour” and how the other bands on the tour all got really big… But on hearing about it, the reason that comes to mind for this is that most of those other bands already sucked pop-rock ass (Bon Jovi, Whitesnake), or learned to suck pop-rock ass to get rich (Scorpions, Metallica)… Anvil has stayed Metal (based on the movie and what music I’ve heard) and, um, Trve. In fact, in the scenes they show from SuperRock, they have a decidedly Venom appearance. You can’t get much more metal than that. But, sadly, I seem to have lost the screen caps that I made… They must be around here somewhere…
The movie was actually inspiring and I ended up getting a bunch of their albums after watching this and was not disappointed. I would most recommend Metal On Metal.
Anyway, I highly, highly recommend seeing Anvil: The Story Of Anvil. Even if you don’t like Metal. Hell, even if you hate it! It’s a great movie, and it’s fun and touching and they are actually a pretty damn good band.
Of course, after that I had to follow it up with yet another viewing of Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey. Anthropologist (and Headbanger) Sam Dunn’s story of personal Metal fandom blended with an overview of Metal culture and some exciting interviews (the Trve Kvlt gods in Norway, Dio in L.A. and at Wacken, and the Tattooed Millionaire himself at Hammersmith Odeon). This movie is always a good time! And it is another great documentary that has appeal even for those who could care less about the music. Keep you eyes peeled for the high points (Gaahl’s dramatic voice of support for Satan, Necrobutcher getting upset at Wacken) and just let the low points pass by (Alice Cooper’s tiring “They all copied me, I did it first” monologues and the irritating inclusion of Slipknot).