CLIPS

CLIPS

This month’s Clips were written by Martin Dio and Dave DiMartino

VARIOUS ARTISTS SST Videoclip Compilation #2 (SST)

I’m not sure if this is commercially available, but I’m certain parts of it are. Most notably the live clips by SWA, Saccharine Trust, the Meat Puppets, Minutemen and Husker Du. All are from SST’s The Tour videocassette, which should be available by the time you read this. That tape, 75 minutes of the above bands performing, originates from the Stone in San Francisco, where a night’s worth of music was shot in March ’85. To be blunt: Most of these bands are sloppy as hell. The Minutemen, the best of the bunch, provide the tape’s highlight with “Beacon Sighted Through Fog” and “The Only Minority”—but seeing as this is just a preview of The Tour cassette, that highlight lasts less than two minutes. Given the amateurism of the video and the flat-out weirdness of D. Boon’s performance with the band, and the fact that the poor guy would be dead by the end of the year, it’s a bit too strange to sit through more than a few times. The other great band here, the Meat Puppets, shows superb taste in covering Hendrix’s “Little ^ Wing,” but they pull it off lazily, almost as if their performing it was some sort of joke, which takes the edge off it. I’d rather see them doing their own stuff. Husker Du run through “Diane,” one of their better songs, but a mite lethargic here, and Saccharine Trust’s “Drugstore Logic” is dull, stoopid and lifeless. SWA, featuring former Black Flagboy Chuck Dukowski, are amateurish but OK, and the edited SST “All Star Jam” of “Louie Louie” is bumbling, but it’s supposed to be. Also included is a disturbing clip by Black Flag, “Drinking And Driving,” a “public service message” that’s great in both intent and execution—Henry Rollins be a star— and a Minutemen version of “Ack Ack Ack Ack,” noted by SST as “the legendary San Pedro band’s musical homage to the three Stooges.” Though these latter videos were extremely inexpensive to make, they—like Robyn Hitchcock’s “Man With The Lightbulb Head,” mentioned last monthare infinitely preferable to the crap that bands like Animotion are making at this very moment. My only complaint with this thing is SST’s apparent notion that sloppy realism is preferable to any semblance of professionalism. It’s what’s made their best records consistently less-thanperfect, and it’s the same thing that’s gonna make most of ’em oddities rather than masterpieces in 20 years. Too bad. /The Tour available from: SST, P.O. Box 1, Lawndale, CA 90260]

D.D.

MOTORHEAD Live In Toronto (Passport Music Video)

This sucks! Motorhead may be the world’s greatest HM band, but you wouldn’t know it watching this piece of thud. Sure it’s got Lemmy, Animal and Fast Eddie, and sure they play their greatest songs ever—“Overkill,” “Bomber” and “Iron Fist”—and tack on a pretty funny Canadian TV interview...but the sound is so horribly mixed you’d have to be deaf to enjoy it. Having a HiFi VCR is great, especially for a band like this, but the overall balance here is so off-kilter that the power and the glory and the royal noise that is Motorhead is weak, tinny, bassless, guitarless and almost drumless as well. Everything may look OK, but looks are not this band’s forte, as others have noted. Stick with the Deaf Not Blind video. Incidentally—purely from a space-filling standpoint, you understand—Motorhead sound like this: NGNGNGNGNG.

M.D.