THE DECL'NE OF WESTERN

What we don't see, though, is a context. Back in late '79 to early '80, the movie's timeframe, this country was taking on an increasingly closed-minded, intolerant and greedy point-of-view, ln "respectable" middle-class communities, textbooks started being burned, our civil rights started being trampled and abortion clinics started being bombed while the government looked the other way. ls all this what made the L.A. punks slam their guitars until their fingers bled? Or were only a few of them

ctvrLrzAfloN lt98o)
Directed by Penelope Spheeris. With the Alice Bag Band, Black Flag, Cathol ic Discipline, Circle Jerks, Fear, Germs, X. Media cassette. Beta & VHS Hi-Fi stereo. 100 min.
$49.95

that aware and that pained, and the

rest merely thrill-seekers? Decline doesn't ask any of these questions, and so we're always on the outside looking in. L.A. punk's successor, conveniently labeled "hardcore," is nowhere in sight; neither are the parallels between the nihilistic outrage of good punk and the theatrical outrage of good heavy metal. You wouldn't know it from this dqcumentary, but "the decline of western civilization" isn't a result of the punk movement, after all. lt's the cause.

Fl unk rock worked better in theory F tn"n in practice. Just like this
punk rock documentary. Decline is, regardless, a pretty good trip to the zoo. We may not learn as much as we could about the turn-of-decade L.A. punk scene it documents, but not because director Spheeris doesn't try to give us a good tour; she speaks with club owners and club patrons, band managers and band members. Unfortunately, she's the very flipside of punk

had an illegitimate kid in a nearby town. A real hardcase, y'know? I saw this same guy a few years later, and'. somebody must've given me a new pair of eyes or something because all of a sudden I could see that he was just this lou(o,flabby guy who shot his mouth off a lot. That's all he was-hot air, not hot times. It turns out he has a spiritual brother in KISS lead vocalist Paul Stanley. Which is strange. Stanley's made it big, he looks like he's in good shape, and he's been in the spotlight for more than 10 years. Not bad. So why does somebody like that insist on telling a concert audience these stupid, smarmy stories about, oh, wow, Gene Simmons had an illegitimate kid but he talked his way out of it, but that baby had the longest tongue I ever seen! Boy, Paul, that's funny. Unwed mother stories-that's a riot. Hey, you know any dead baby jokes?

itself-all craft

and little soul.

Decline may be slick, but Spheeris' questions are surprisingly naive. The director does little more than draw out some of the inarticulate rage that drives people to a musical subculture as harsh and as violent as punk, yet

without stirring any of the reasons for it. ln Britain, after all, bleakfutured kids turned to rock'n'roll to channel their frustrations, and punk
had an easy-to-grasp reason to be.

But in relatively affluent Los

Angeles, how much of it is simply punk posing? Spheeris doesn't poke too hard to find out, although her camera eye is nicely attuned to the day-to-day rituals of life. We see the Germs' doomed lead singer, Paul Beahm a.k.a. Darby Crash, frying eggs. We see the $16-a-month closet where half of Black Flag live. We see the

KISS: ANIMALIZE

LTVE

most successful of the early L.A. punk bands, X, doing home tattoos. And we get enough songs-20 of them, some subtitled-to fill the soundtrack album that accompanied this flick.
60 FACES

UNCENSOREO Directed by Keith "Keef" MacMillan. RCA/Columbia cassette. Beta & YHS Hi-Fi.90 min. approx. $29.95
knew a guy in high school who was big, mean and tough. Or at least he was big and he acted mean and tough. He was supposed to have

I I

That's the kind of thing, regrettably, that separates this "uncensored" version from the hour-long KISS concert that played on MTV. Stanley also tells a tale of arriving early to a doctor's appointment and immediately getting it on with the rn gorgeous nurse. Sure, man. Judging from stories such as these, KISS must have a pretty low opinion of its fans. The audience for this particular show may have gone along, caught up i.n the heat of the moment, but on video, where you can sit in your living room and think about it, you realize how gullible KISS thinks its fans are. As a video show, it's too bludgeoningly straightforward anyhow. Pioneer rock video director Keith MacMillan and a massive camera crew do turn in some great footagesharp as an ice-pick, strategic as a chess master-but he's working in an outmoded format. Even the best live act can't sustain a 90-minute video; that's why so many bands (including the KISS-influenced Twisted Sister, and Led Zeppelin as long ago as 1976) have turned to the hybrid concert/conceptual form. MacMi llan may have been trying to capitalize on the spectacle aspect of a KISS concert, and he had more than able help from lighting director Jeff Durling, ''but the new KISS isn't anywhere as spectacular as the old. Simmons may do his fire-spitting routine here as in the days with Ace Frehley and Peter Criss, but Eric Carr's extended

drum solo and the Simmons-StanleyBruce Kufick guitar jams are just rock concbrt cliches. It's too bad no one had video much in mind back in'75 and'77, when KISS released its first two live albums. This show draws mainly from the band's 1984 Animalize and Lick lt Up; except for KISS' first hit, "Rock and Roll All Night", which caps this tape, most of the material

I'd say it wasn't the veddy proper Brit producers. Jagger's hilarious mincing before the movie Performance -well cross-sexual stuff as risky as anything else in rock'n'roll; the fact that what is now just innocent innuendo would never have played on American TV at the time makes the bit not only great fun, but one more example of rock's power to conquer forbidden territory. Most of the rest of the "performances" have a two-fold value: We get rare early glimpses of such legends as Marvin Gaye and the Brian Jones Stones,.and we get what may be our only look at shooting stars the likes of Freddie & the Dieamers, PJ Proby and the stillactive Gene Pitney. The famous ones you can always find on film or video. The also-rans are a lot scarcer, but even more important if you want to
keep a sense of perspective. Yesterday, y'see, it was Freddie & the Dreamers. Tomorrow, we'll be reminiscing about Frankie Goes to

-is

is recent-vintage.

READY SfiEADY EOT VOL. 2

Directed by Robert Fleming, Rollo Gamble, Daphne Shadwell, Michael Lindsay-Hogg. With the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, the Fourmost, Freddie & the Dreamers, Marvin Gaye, the lsley Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Martha & the Vandellas, Gene Pitney, PJ Proby, Dusty Springlield, the Rolling Stones, Rulus Thomas and the Who. ThornlEMlcassefte. Bbta & VHS HiFi mono. Black-and-white. 55 min.
$29.95

their identities, usually behind huge eyeball masks, and in their few concerts perform behind a screen. That these eccentricities aren't gimmicks but real evocations of the band's art is borne out by this collection. As with Devo, the Residents' closest mainstream counterpart, the music works best when visualized.
Here, the Residents'two regular-

...uh,Detroit?

eadv Steady Gol was a sort of "eriti"n Bandstano" back when "Cheerio!" didn't make you think of a cereal. This second collection of the live and the lip-synched from that mid-'60s Brit TV show unearths a lot of the same specimens as volume one (reviewed in FACES, Sept. '84), but the series is still a long way from losing its charm. How're you ever gonna know where you're going, after all, if you don't know where

E lf

' The Directed by Graeme Whifler, Fesidents. with Mx-80 sound, Renaldo & The Loaf, The Residents, Snakef inger, Tu*edomoon. Ralph Rdcords cassetfe. Mono. 30 min. approx. $29.97
omebody had to tell you someO"y; it might as well be me: This tape is how you lose your rock video virginity. These clips look like nothing you've ever seen. You may have stumbled across one or two of them before, though probably not on MTV, the rock channel run by three-piece suits. More likely it was at a rock club, or on "Night Flight" or as a warm-up to a midnight movie. Wherever and if-ever, once you've been exposed to Ralph Records' video pantheon, almost every other rock video afterward is going to look exactly like what it is TV commercial for a record. -a That's not the case with these shatteringly origfrial, frighteningly eerie clips. At the core of this 1982 tape (recently repriced) are a halfdozen filmed videos by a San Francisco group called the Residents. They work with rock'n'roll the way Picasso worked with a paintbrush, but they're not what you'd call a traditional rock band: They cloak

RALPH VIDEO

YOI.

G D

you've been? Which isn't to say RSG/ Vol. 2 is just a history lesson. The Beatles may be strumming unplugged electric guitars and Dusty Springfield may be laughing when she's supposed to be moving her lips, but we also get a crazily spasmodic Keith Moon carrying on as if his drum stool were an electric chair. Jerry Lee Lewis gives us one more fireball rendition of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin On", and if you've seen it before, see it again, because this dumpy greaser in a shirt and tie always goes through a rock'n'roll redemption that paints exactly what the music's

length videos and four "one-minute movies"-sort of tone poems put to film-carry music that dreams by like Brian Eno's or Pink Floyd's. Visually, the clips owe almost nothing to television; director Whifler, in conjunction with the Residents, echoes German Expressionist films like M and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and photo-montage techniques that look like a cross between "Saturday Night Live" and the photo wing of the Museum of Modern Art. The earliest clip, the Residents' self-directed "Third Reich & Roll" (1975), is shot in the black-and-white, "dirty" style of a tribal-ritual documentary. This is not the kind of stuff you follow up with, "Coming up next-Foreigner

tour dates!"
With the exception of MX-8! Sound's monotonous "Why Are We Here" clip, the rest of the videos have their moments too. TheY don't match the consistently amazing imagery of the Residents' work, but they do demand more than superficial viewing. As a result, this indispensable video volume opens your eyes the way the best rock'n'roll opens your ears. I
FACES 61

all about.
The best of the lip-synched stuff is a scathing conceptual bit: The Rolling Stones "singing" Sonny & Cher. Whoever came up with it is a mystery, but from the way grandmaster Mick gets into his Gher role,