THE BYRDS UNDER REVIEW
A Chrome Dreams Production
www.chromedreams.co.uk
More than any other US band of the ’60s The Byrds can justly lay claim to the title ‘The American Beatles’. Such is the invention, craftsmanship, originality and scope of their entire body of recorded work they were, like their Scouse counterparts, both musical pioneers and seers whose vision enabled them to break down genre barriers, experiment with sound and open doors thus defining the musical landscapes in which popular music has flourished ever since.
Given the frequent personnel changes and the myriad – almost daily – twists and turns that coloured their existence, the telling of The Byrds’ story and analysis of their achievements is no easy task. Hence the arrival of The Byrds Under Review, a new comprehensive three-hour documentary film is to be welcomed, especially as it does the job so well.
Blessed by a panel of talking heads whose collective knowledge/insight into The Byrds most probably eclipses even that of the actual band members themselves, The Byrds Under Review is able to make good the absence of any direct input or endorsement from chief Byrd, Roger McGuinn. The “experts” comprise acclaimed Byrds biographer Johnny Rogan, ex-Rolling Stone editor Anthony De Curtis, esteemed music historian Richie Unterberger and ace British music journo Nigel Williamson who carefully dissect and interpret the dizzying array of Byrds line-ups, albums, songs, innovations and phases through which the band journeyed. Aided and abetted by fascinating insights and anecdotes from former Byrds Gene Parsons and John York together with eyewitness participants Van Dyke Parks, Vern Gosdin, Jerry Cole and Byron Berline, The Byrds Under Review is a veritable font of knowledge for both committed Byrdmaniax and the uninitiated alike.
At times it threatens to take itself all a little too seriously but thankfully plenty of archival footage of The Byrds in full and pre-flyte laces and graces the talking, which both lightens the mood and heightens the enjoyment. Of course McGuinn’s insights would have been invaluable, as would fresh interviews with David Crosby and so The Byrds Under Review just misses out on being labelled ‘definitive’. But it’s a close call. Until the ‘official’ story is documented, this absorbing film comes highly recommended and it passes the most crucial test of all by prompting an instant desire in the viewer to hear those fabulous Byrds albums once more. Which surely is the ultimate test of any first rate music biography.
Colin Hall
THE FLESHTONES
Live At The Hurrah Club
Cherry Red Films
www.cherryred.co.uk
If you were a music head in the Tidewater area (Virginia Beach/Norfolk) of Virginia in the mid-to-late ‘80s, your radio DJ of choice was Carol Taylor. Carol worked for the main FM rock outlet, but she always stood out from the rest of the brain-dead DJs on the station. She had a “new music” show where she shelved Dire Straits and Phil Collins and played the music she really dug. It was through Carol that I first heard The Lyres, The Replacements, The Del Fuegos, The Dream Syndicate and all the other great Paisley Underground bands. And she was always educating – she’d play you a great track by a cool contemporary college radio band, then she’d spin a Kinks song that likely influenced it.
Carol never championed any contemporary band more than she did The Fleshtones, and when she raved about them, she mostly talked about their legendary live performances. Watching this footage from the band’s heyday in the very early ’80s, it’s not hard to see why someone with the knowledge and taste of a Carol Taylor would so take to the group. Playing their fuzzed-out garage stompers, spy themes, and dance party anthems at a couple of happening NYC venues, they make you want to dance around the room, even when you’re just watching them play on a TV screen.
The band is cracking throughout, but of course the real attraction is singer/harmonica player/showman Peter Zaremba. Whether he’s barking out the rousing refrains of songs like ‘Girl From Baltimore’ and ‘Cold Cold Shoes,’ doing the frug or the monkey during a short instrumental section, fixing his hair as part of his performance, or blowing on his harp, Zaremba is the ringmaster and the force that makes the band go.
This DVD is a reminder of what power authentic rock ’n’ roll can have when it’s played by a tight band in a sweaty nightclub. It’s also a reminder that we’ve always needed people like Carol Taylor to hip us to the best club to be checking out on any given night.
Brian Greene
Go Ride The Music & West Pole
The Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Santana: A Night At The Family Dog
Both Eagle Rock Entertainment
www.eagle-rock.com
The San Francisco scene has been covered at depth in the pages of Shindig! and if the well-known Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Santana have all been suitably served by TV docs past and present it’s a real pleasure to see SD stars Ace Of Cups on the fascinating 1969 TV documentary West Pole. The mentioned West Pole documentary and another show from the same year, Go Ride The Music have been coupled on one DVD. Produced by the pioneering journalist Ralph J Gleason (a veteran music writer who welcomed the hippie bands with open arms, commentated their movement and set things in motion for Rolling Stone), the show’s camera angles, editing and presentation are wholly representative of the era and of major interest for any period freak. If Go Ride The Music’s Airplane and Quicksilver rehearsals and live performances capture both its subjects in decline and offers little in the way of social commentary, West Pole is perhaps the ultimate portrayal of late ’60s San Francisco on film. Gleason, in his scholarly horn rimmed spectacles and handlebar moustachioed glory, presents each wonderful musical montage of performances with intelligent insight and an entirely believable passion for the new breed. Add some incredible footage of the Haight, the parks and the young hippies celebrating life to the full, alongside superb footage of the bands, including three fine clips of Ace Of Cups and you have, almost, the final word on the city and its music.
Ralph Gleason’s last TV music production The Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Santana: A Night At The Family Dog completes the set, focusing, as the title suggests, on a live concert from February ’70 that sees all three bands play on and on. Loose and funky and full of brotherhood (the end jam, in particular) this rambling concert captures the very final throes of the boom and death of psychedelia. Patchy, but the Dead shine on in ‘I See Your Rider’.
Gleason would die soon after, the Airplane would split and the Dead and Santana would evolve way beyond their acid bridled roots.
Jon ‘Mojo’ Mills
A TECHNICOLOR DREAM
Eagle Rock Entertainment
www.eagle-rock.com
One of the few real pleasures gleaned from the mammoth task of organizing the Our Technicolor Dream event at the ICA a couple of years ago was getting to meet the legendary director Peter Whitehead and screening a long-lost piece of film he’d shot at the original Alexandra Palace event that we were celebrating. Flower children cavorted across a silent screen, washed in filtered oils and the shimmer of a light show; elfin girls danced and paisley kids tripped the night fantastic whilst bands of indeterminate origin thrashed away in the background. Rough round the edges from having been left unloved on the shelf for almost four decades, the footage was nevertheless a real shot in the arm for obsessives such as myself who’d always known that there simply must be more footage out there of such a legendary event. Sadly, however, it doesn’t appear on this DVD!
Another abiding memory of the day was finding myself chairing a discussion panel featuring John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, Joe Boyd, Miles, John Dunbar and Mike McInnerney. This odd interlude in my life does make a fleeting appearance here and all of the aforementioned luminaries appear frequently throughout, along with other key players from the era such as Phil May, Kevin Ayers and Pete Jenner, all of whom cast their own kinds of lantern lights on the matters in hand. There’s also plenty of great – if oft-seen – footage from the BBC archives, including the wonderfully bemused Finsbury Park mod boys’ impressions of the evening, which are worth the price of entry on their own!
Whilst strong on back story, with plenty on the Royal Albert Hall poetry event of ’65, the burgeoning underground and Hoppy’s pivotal position in it, the London Free School, UFO and so on, the DVD does end up feeling aimed squarely at Pink Floyd nuts. Rather than explore the full fall-out of that April night so long ago, instead we get the story of Syd’s sad demise - albeit with some very revealing Roger Waters interviews. The Floyd sell is bolstered with some cracking ’67 video extras – which are all fine and fab and groovy – but I still wound up feeling that a trick had perhaps been slightly missed herein.
Hugh Dellar
THE WHO AT KILBURN 1977
Image Entertainment
www.image-entertainment.com
Double DVD set containing The Who’s much-bootlegged 1977 Kilburn show – originally intended to be incorporated into the nascent The Kids Are Alright film project – and, more importantly for most of us, a ’69 show recorded at the London Coliseum.
Footage of a super-charged ‘Young Man Blues’ from the latter eventually made the Kids cut but the entire ’77 set was deemed unusable and the band reconvened at Shepperton the following year for another go. Watching the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world firing on all remaining cylinders in that most turbulent of rock years, it’s hard to believe that this most visceral and vital foursome was already being lumped in with sundry deservingly derided rock dinosaurs by this point. It also makes you wonder why they chose the Shepperton footage for the film. OK, it’s marginally better filmed but the performance is comparatively lacklustre and ramshackle. The less said about the need to overdub the agonisingly sloppy Moon’s drum parts in the studio and the crudely edited insert of Townshend’s stage-wide knee slide over Daltrey’s iconic scream in ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, the better. The Kilburn set positively fizzes by comparison.
Rewind eight years to the Coliseum show and the differences are startling. The boiler suit, fringed jacket, long johns and 120 minute sets are in their infancy – not only in Who terms but in rock terms too. They invented this stuff. They’ve done a 45 minute “warm up” consisting of old hits like ‘Happy Jack’ and ‘I’m A Boy’, the ’66 mini-opera ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’ (complete with a hilarious six-minute introduction featuring Townshend and Moon on top Abbott and Costello form) and a shimmering ‘Tattoo’ before they even start on the business of the day: Tommy. Then there’s another half hour of covers and the obligatory, by now sprawling ‘My Generation’ at the end, played with boundless energy and oozing with visible relief at having made it through an hour of Tommy intact. The picture and sound quality are more than adequate, having mostly been captured on hand-held cameras by managers Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, and it’s undoubtedly the perceived technical limitations that have prevented this DVD from being released as The Who At The Coliseum 1969.
Andy Morten
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THE EDITOR'S DVD ROUND-UP
Banned in France in 1968 due to its coverage of homosexuality and drug abuse, Mondo Hollywood finally gets its official French DVD release through Martyrs Of Pop. The various oddballs and eccentrics covered entertain to an extent, with actors, “trannies”, strippers and rich liberals taking centre stage. But it’s the nihilistic singer Bobby Jameson’s anti-societal monologue, aging hippie dancers and artists Carl Franzoni and Vito that resonate most amongst the subjects. With insights into the Manson murders, some LSD and the upsetting of Christian Conservatives being only mildly controversial, the majority of the characters’ egos soon grate. Not a lot in Tinsel Town has changed.
(www.chaletsfilm.com)
The output of John Peel’s Dandelion label clarified this perennial British talent’s late ’60s musical ethos. Anything goes! Since Cherry Red’s recent boxset has given Dandelion a suitable musical overview with tracks from key artists Bridget St John, Principal Edwards Magic Theatre, Medicine Head, Siren, Stackwaddy and Clifford T Ward, Ozit Morpheus’ John Peel’s Dandelion Records DVD documentary features contemporary interviews with the artists, some new live performances and the label story told through edits of vintage Peel and Selwood interviews, alongside latter day critique. It’s long, rambling and the new performances distract rather than reinforce, but persevere, as the old clips of Gene Vincent milling around in London in the early ’70s and Stackwaddy and Tractor’s recollections are certainly worth enduring.
(www.tractor-ozit.com)
HIQ Entertainment has a lot to learn about packaging and presentation as their cheapo Yardbirds, Animals and Herman’s Hermits DVDs all look as if they have been thrown together in drunken hysteria. To call them shoddy would offer too much praise. The Story Of The Yardbirds is in fact the very same documentary that came out on video in the early ’90s with the addition of the’67 Beat Beat Beat performances in their entirety. Nevertheless, long unavailable in its original format, this is a decent documentary featuring later interviews and vintage clips to tell the story. If any self respecting Yardbirds fan is without this, act now.
Likewise, Eric Burdon: The Animals & Beyond is another documentary from ’91 that features astounding vintage clips and mullet ridden ex-pop stars recalling their finest moments. From Newcastle to War it’s all here and essential viewing.
Herman’s Hermits Live At The Hilton’s DVD menus are a little better than the rest and this time around, instead of a twenty year old career documentary, the DVD features an entire concert. In itself it’s a delightful time capsule, with the chirpy fellows playing their hearts out Down Under to an array of geeky excitable teenage girls. Surprisingly cool performances from the band include mean takes on ‘Jezebel’, ‘Nobody But You’ and the folk rockin’ ‘A Must To Avoid’.
Chuck Berry & Bo Diddley’s Rock ’n’ Roll All Star Jam is rather depressing for a number of reasons. Firstly, Bo, and a number of other stars featured on this ’85 show (Carl Wilson and Ronnie Lane) are no longer with us. Secondly, at nearly twenty-five years old, it’s strange to see the likes of Mick and Keef looking so young. Which is no bad thing, but the sickening ’80s attire that these once “cool cats” wear is… why oh why? Three Dog Night’s Chuck Negron’s mullet and tache combi staggers! With the DVD’s poor print and the concert itself featuring coke-fuelled egos, mooning about playing lame bar rock renditions of the rocker’s classics… it makes for a sorry affair.
(www.visionmusicinc.net/genre/rock/index.php) |
