CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

LOVE AND X’s

THE UNHEARD MUSIC (Skouras Pictures)

Roy Trakin

Five years in the making, The Unheard Music is better and more coherent than anyone had a right to expect, with an elegaic tone that suggests it might have been called The Last Slamdance. It

starts like the visual version of an in-depth Roiling Stone piece, with fine sound footage of John Doe and Exene plumbing the Hank Williams songbook, Billy Zoom working out on his clarinet and D. J. Bonebrake demonstrating polyrhythms in his kitchen to the beat of percolating coffee. Then, it turns into one of those Spinal Tap rockumentaries, with both orchestrated and live footage of L.A.’s finest post-punk standardbearers running through some of their best stuff— “Los Angeles,” “We’re Desperate,” “White Girl,” “Johnny Hit & Run Paulene” and a great live version of the Doors’ “Soul Kitchen,” with Ray Manzarek howling

along. Finally, director/writer W. T. Morgan, for whom this is most obviously a labor of love, uses industry spokesmen like former MCA exec Al Bergamo, L.A. Times critic Robert Hilburn, radio programmer Tommy Hadges and one-time club impresario Brendan Mullen, to place the band in the context of the early ’80s record biz—in other words, left out.

Aside from that bit of polemicizing—and the steady stream of Eisensteinian montage that accompanies much of the song segments—the movie lets X’s music speak for itself. The Unheard Music opens with the admonition to “Play This Movie Loud,” and it doesn’t let you down on this

sonic level, either. While it is easy to hear why John and Exene’s wavering harmonies never found their rightful place on AOR, it is also hard to fathom how rock fans ignored their propulsive energy and roots-consciousness.

Perhaps it’s the current crossroads at which X finds itself—with the departure of Billy Zoom and the uncertain status of temporary member Dave Alvin, on loan from the Blasters—that lends The Unheard Music its “end-of-anera” feel. All the carping

about the mainstream’s lockout of X’s music—even if it does result in the sidesplitting spectacle of long-gone honcho Al Bergamo singing the praises of a “commercial new wave” band called Point Blank—begins to come across as spoiled whining. The saddest part is to realize that even in trying to polish their sound for the airwaves on the metal-leaning Ain’t Love Grand, released after The Unheard Music was finished, it still didn’t garner X the mass acceptance they seek and certainly deserve.

Which is not to say that The Unheard Music should be viewed as X’s epitaph, but its nostalgic tone and five-year time span effectively summarize a time and place that seems long ago already. The do-it-yourself spirit that X embodied proved to be the springboard for a West Coast-based roots-rock revival whose effects are still being felt today. The Unheard Music is a heartfelt tribute to that time and that band; whether or not it ever reaches a movie-going audience, this valentine to one of our most vital rock bands will make a swell home video for anybody’s collection.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

KEROUAC (Wonder Productions)

Richard Riegel

This is the movie I’ve been waiting to see for years and years, and I thank the starry twilight eternity that producerdirector John Antonelli has finally made it. Jack Kerouac is absolutely the finest writer to work, love, and suffer in our whole post-WWII America. And even if you haven’t picked up many books since Kerouac’s 1969 death, you’ve still been brushed with the beat of his beat soul.

Jack’s sad angel ghost slips shroudy through pop music daily, in directly celebratory songs by everybody from Willie Alexander to King Crimson to Mark Murphy, and in his even huger midnight influence on the verbal styles of Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Lester Bangs and dirty dozens of others. But only us rainwashed worshippers at Jack’s bookstrewn grave connect his name with his daily-papers influence much anymore.

Which is where the film Kerouac slips back into the allnite theater, by furnishing whole new audio-visual vistas of Jack Kerouac the man and the writer—boiling glimpses that oughta set even more of us off into the neon alleys of his books. Antonelli has put together a “docudrama” (Jack would hate the word but he’s always deserved just this) that intersperses rare footage of real-Kerouacian TV appearances with dramatic re-creations of crucial scenes from Kerouac’s fatallyintertwined (auto)biography and his books. Peter Coyote does the voiceover of Jack’s words, while Jack Coulter plays Kerouac in all his dark beauty.

The movie also includes contemporary interview segments with the many influential personalities who touched Jack’s redbrick & poorboy life—among them Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Edie Parker, John Clellon Holmes, Carolyn Cassady, Herbert Huncke, Joyce Johnson, Michael McClure, and Stanley Twardowicz. You’re probably familiar with at least several of those names, even if you’ve never studied Kerouac’s legend.

Yeah, Kerouac the movie trails off into sadness as Jack Coulter the thriving, passionate Jack-shaped writer— mutates into snapshots of the actual 1960s Kerouac, by then mamas-boyed into hopeless alcoholism, but that’s just the way it really happened. Even as Kerouac’s masterpiece, On The Road, prepared us to savor the garden of earthly delights we often made of the 1960s, Jack’s own life was almost nonstop wretchedness from the moment in 1957 that the book was published.

Speaking of bop & voices, even though I’ve studied Kerouac in print for two decades now, I hadn’t had access to his rare TV interviews and recordings until Kerouac the movie, and it’s been more than copacetic to put his workaday voice together with his jazz-laden words at last.

I can hear the rhythms of immigrant Depression midnite kitchens in his voice, and at times his clipped, secretlipped speech almost reminds me of the Bowery Boys. Hey, Jack, you’re even more American than I already dreamed, I thank this amazing Frisco-hotel & neon-Jazz movie for bringing you back to life for me & all of us!