Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll
CHUCK BERRY
Image Entertainment
Lord knows rock 'n' roll has produced more than its share of characters, but there's perhaps none more mercurial, ornery, controlling, stubborn, charismatic and absolutely charming than Chuck Berry. Director Taylor Hackford set about capturing the Berry mystique in this 1987 film, commemorating the proto-rocker's 60th birthday. Berry lives up to all of the above adjectives and them some in this two-hour odyssey of putting together a concert for the movie. At its core is the struggle between music director Keith Richards and Berry. Talk about a love/hate relationship. These two powerful personalities clash, yell, cajole, hug and make memorable music, all captured by Hackford's ever-watchful cameras.
While often engrossing, the star-studded concert footage — with appearances by Eric Clapton, Linda Ronstadt, Julian Lennon and others — is in some ways the least vital element in Hail! Hail!. Berry's stage act had been on autopilot for decades by then, and he seems incapable of doing much more than scratching the surface despite the momentous occasion. More riveting are segments in the rehearsal room at Berry's St. Louis-area compound, or when he gives a tour of his old haunts, or talks directly, and eloquently, into the camera.
Hail! Hail! comes in two-DVD and four-DVD packages, the latter of which contains a staggering amount of extras, most of which are engrossing interviews with some of the titans of '50s rock 'n' roll: Jerry Lee Lewis (who's surprisingly deferential to the Berry legacy), Bo Diddley, Little Richard (with his flamboyance in full flower), the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison and others. A segment where Robbie Robertson sits with Berry and flips through a scrapbook is especially poignant. A making-of featurette that discusses the star's idiosyncratic behavior is a hoot. Taken as a whole, the film plus extras becomes an estimable music and oral history of early rock 'n' roll. 4.5 stars ES
Live at Shepherd's Bush Empire 2003
BUZZCOCKS
Secret Films/Music Video Distributors
Still-thriving British first-wave punk outfit Buzzcocks is usually referred to as "the godfathers of pop-punk." But original members Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle were art-school boys as well as pop fans, and this looooong, 32-track concert film displays as much angularity and noise as it does clever catchiness.
Covering both the band's legendary singles-heavy pre-breakup salad days ('76-'81) and consistent post-reunion period ('91-present), Live is a straight-up document that serves as both an in-concert experience and career retrospective. While the camera angles are limited and predictable, the sound is better than average, and the band's enjoyment and easy camaraderie are palpable. This one's not just for longtime diehard fans — those new to Buzzcocks or curious about a band they've heard of, but never heard, will enjoy it as well. Extras include a somewhat banal interview with Shelley and Diggle, text bio, and tour/video-shoot footage. (www.secretrecordslimited.com) 3.5 stars SH
Insomniac DVD Vol. 1: Street Credentials
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Insomniac Music
Progressive hip-hop magazine Insomniac's entrée into the video-zine realm is very nearly a slam-dunk — the only thing missing from this informative collage of interviews is more performance footage. Insomniac principal Iz-Real, schizophrenic hip-hop clown prince Kool Keith, unclassifiable street poet/songwriter Saul Williams, backpack favorite Aesop Rock, unmarketable underground firestarter Immortal Technique, freestyle master Poison Pen and others candidly and intelligently discuss everything from rap's decline into clichéd commodity to the pros and cons of being independent artists.
Street Credentials is a hopeful look beyond the tired materialism and anti-heroics of mainstream hip-hop icons, an extended conversation with passionate artists whose love for rap's original pioneer spirit will likely keep them from ever becoming household names, and it rules.
The extras — an extended freestyle by Poison Pen, an interesting public appearance/speech by Iz-Real, and several of what amount to the DVD-magazine equivalent of display ads — are a bit skimpy, as is the main feature's performance-to-discussion ratio, but this isn't to be missed by any fan of underground/independent/imaginative hip-hop. (www.insomniaconline.com) 4.5 stars SH
The Real Thing: In Performance 1964-1981
MARVIN GAYE
Hip-O
Ideally, this single DVD would collect a definitive set of live concert performances from various points in Marvin Gaye's career. Unfortunately, there's only a handful here, the best of which is a mesmerizing 1972 performance of "What's Going On," where Gaye artfully remolds the melody, followed by "What's Happening Brother."
The rest of The Real Thing is made up of mostly TV appearances, from grainy black-and-white turns on American Bandstand to hokey guest shots on Dinah & Friends. There's a lot of lip-synching going on throughout. There's also a lot of kitsch. Gaye's sit-downs with Dinah Shore — where he's joined by the likes of Sally Struthers, Kate Jackson and Don Meredith — are superficial cringe-fests. His 1965 performance of "You're a Wonderful One" on the New Lloyd Thaxton Show finds the reluctant pop star singing on a stool while fresh-scrubbed white teens clap and smile at his feet. Most touching is a promotional clip of Marvin and Tammi Terrell singing "Ain't No Mountain High Enough;" Terrell is adorable and the duet partners display a palpable chemistry. In the end, The Real Thing is more enjoyable as a time-capsule curio than a musical document.
All there is in the way of extras are a few a cappella tracks form the Motown vaults. 3 stars ES
Bastards of Young
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Image Entertainment
Every musical movement worth its salt needs at least one documentary claiming to be the definitive story, and Bastards of Young is the first such film chronicling the rise of punk's youth-centric emo/screamo scene. It does so through an un-narrated series of interviews and performance clips, featuring bands from nu-punk's first wave (Thursday) through its latest breakthrough sensations (Fall Out Boy, Matchbook Romance), as well as shows from the basement to the arena stage and plenty of breathless testimonials by adolescent worshippers.
Depending on your point of view, Bastards can be either an inspiring paean to do-it-yourself-ness, or a tiresome stream of familiar punk-culture clichés, platitudes and trendiness. To its credit, the flick itself doesn't take sides, instead allowing the audience to draw its own conclusions. The movie's far from perfect — true emo innovators like Rites of Spring and Refused warrant passing attention or none at all; New Jersey comes off like the only state that ever hosted a basement show; a scene where an unarguably mediocre young songwriter is offered a record deal seems wholly contrived. And only a delusional fan would claim that the concert footage makes all (or even half) of these bands look like worthwhile live acts. But it's an interesting doc all the same, and, of course, scene followers will love both the film and the accompanying second DVD of performances. (www.bastardsofyoung.com) 3 stars SH
All Dolled Up
NEW YORK DOLLS
Music Video Distributors
In the early '70s, noted rock photographer Bob Gruen obtained one of the first commercially available videotape recorder/cameras. Not long after, he and Nadya Beck were introduced to NYC drag/sleaze-rock pioneers the New York Dolls, and were swept into the band's retinue, traveling and partying with the band and recording as much of it as they could.
All Dolled Up was culled from a reported 40-plus hours of Dolls video, from the group's early New York nightclub residencies through its first trip to Los Angeles to the final spate of hometown shows before its '75 breakup. While there's plenty of live music, and the Dolls story is certainly an interesting one, this DVD's main feature is more interminable home movie than documentary.
There are some fun offstage moments, such as the band shopping for stage wear at the original Fredericks of Hollywood, but the candid footage is largely boring and of questionable audio and video quality. Beyond the live performances compiled separately in the extras (which also include a photo gallery and interview with Gruen), this one is largely for diehard fans. (www.musicvideodistributors.com) 2.5 stars SH
Refused Are Fucking Dead
REFUSED
Burning Heart/Epitaph
One of the most original and influential bands to ever have the term "hardcore" applied to its music, Sweden's Refused ended not with a bang but a whimper in 1998, when Virginia police pulled the plug on the exhausted, conflicted group's final set after two and a half songs. This, the act's video legacy, mimics that powerful build to anticlimax in typically arty fashion, with former Refused members telling their story in their own words over cinematic images of themselves as they are now, intercut with a handful of live performances.
Refused Are Fucking Dead is, above all, something of a disappointment; there's precious little footage of that final basement show, and the band's famously intense live sets are only really represented in the three or four songs dropped into the DVD's main feature. Performances of all the songs from its landmark final album, The Shape of Punk to Come, are included in the bonus materials, but the video quality varies wildly, and the sound quality is uniformly, um, shitty. It's nice to have something more from Refused this long after the fact, but more blast-your-face-off live footage would've raised this release from simply being interesting to the level of a must-have. (www.epitaph.com) 2.5 stars SH
Terror in America: Live 1993
G.G. ALLIN & THE MURDER JUNKIES
Music Video Distributors
This is one of the major drawbacks of inexpensive, ubiquitous digital entertainment technology: Somebody somewhere does something stupid like compiling three badly bootlegged '93 club sets by late, talentless shock-punk provocateur/self-abuser G.G. Allin; they put them out on DVD, and I have to sit through it.
Yes, it's fun to watch Allin (who died of a drug overdose not long after these shows) beat on the douche bag audience members who paid $20 to put their middle fingers in his face — the Austin show is particularly volatile. But that's it. This video is all about the music and the show, and the music sucks, and anybody interested in G.G. Allin has probably already seen much more graphic in-concert video than this.
In addition, the bonus material is obvious and woefully inadequate filler, unless you're into Allin enough to watch him do stuff like get tattooed and frolic around a swimming pool. These days, the only really shocking thing about Allin's cock-bearing, scalp-slashing, crowd-punching shtick is how non-shocking it is in the Internet age — if I want to watch a fat, ugly, doomed guy stick an American flag up his ass, I can do it from my desk at work, and not have to listen to extremely crappy music at the same time. (www.musicvideodistributors.com) 1.5 stars SH
This article appears in May 3-9, 2006.