CLIPS

CLIPS

DEPARTMENTS

This month’s Clips were written by J. Kordosh and Dave DiMartino

TOM PETTY &

THE HEARTBREAKERS Pack Up The Plantation (MCA Music Video)

Tom Petty is boring and this tape is boring. His two best songs remain “American Girl,” of which Roger McGuinn did a better version, and “Breakdown,” which he no longer sings because his audience sings it for him. And he used to be able to sing; nowadays, he brays. He glorifies the Old South and its “rebels” and forgets that when he was growing up in Florida people with Confederate license plates were probably trying to run him off the road when they weren’t calling him a long-haired faggot. In this age of ailing popsters emulating Bruce Springsteen and John Fogerty, and embracing America—you know, all that junk the Long Ryders, Green On Red, Brian Setzer, Mellencamp and even Bob Seger are milking bonedry—you’d think Petty would at least be a little more astute while making his million bucks. As it is, he’s got zilcho charisma, and no matter how high-quality this video production may be, it only documents that fact. What say all of America’s "roots rockers” stop doing “So You Want To Be A Rock And Roll Star,” “Little Bit O’ Soul” and other ’60s smashes and concentrate on writing their own songs, even if they’ll never be anywhere near as good? D.D.

VARIOUS ARTISTS One Night With Blue Note Preserved, Volumes One and Two (Sony Video LPs)

Actually the oddest thing about these videos is that they aren’t videos—they’re films put to video. Therefore the clarity of the Hi-Fi soundtrack combined with the haziness of the resulting visuals is a little off-putting at first. But—where else in the world are you gonna get 12 minutes and 26 seconds of Cecil Taylor playing solo piano on television? And how many other opportunites are you gonna have to put his fingers in the “pause" mode and watch the big blur? As with the first batch of Blue Note LP releases—and the fourrecord set resulting from this ’85 concert—the weak spots are provided by both Charles Lloyd, who takes up 15 minutes of Volume Two here, and Stanley Jordan, who’s actually better served by video than he is on record, where you never ^ really know if the guy’s overdubbing that guitar or not. But the bulk of the two hours of music provided here is topnotch—especially the contributions of Jackie McLean, Johnny Griffin, Joe Henderson and Bennie Wallace, who with James Newton is currently the revived label’s brightest hope. Toss in

Bobby Hutcherson, who makes his own “Little B’s Poem" sound like primo old-style Blue Note (with the classic Hancock/Carter/ Williams rhythm section), and you’ve got a pretty nifty visual document. D.D.

GTR

The Making Of GTR (RCA/Columbia Pictures Video)

I’ve only seen this once, and then not under the best of conditions. I was very drunk, when it would’ve been better had I been unconscious. What happened is I went to New York and then Clive Davis locked me in a room! And I couldn’t get out! And they wouldn’t give me anything to drink until I watched this tape! He’p! And they locked other peo-

pie in there, too! So Clive gave this speech about GTR and why they’re so darned good. During his speech, he even singled me out—from a crowd of hundreds —for some personal chit-chat. I remember I felt pretty good about that...it was kind of neat! Suddenly, there was this video about GTR, who are Steves Howe and Hackett of Yes/Genesis renown, and three other artrockin’ dudes and somebody was playing guitar and a voiceover was talking about technique and I still couldn’t get a drink and to tell you the truth I think the music sucked and I finally escaped and wenUo a bar and got drunker and then I took a plane home and drank on the plane too and Bill drove me home and I felt OK in a couple of days. So, to sum it up, you might like GTR. J.K.

ROD STEWART The Rod Stewart Concert Video (Karl-Lorimar Home Video)

If Rod Stewart tends to get overlooked these days, it’s probably because he hasn’t had a remarkable band behind him since his Jeff Beck days. This videotape features a few (very) brief snatches of that band, a bit with the Faces, and a whole lot of new stuff. While the current Stewart band is as faceless as usual—guitarist Jim Cregan remains the only player with any degree of personal style— Stewart himself sounds better than ever. And the songs he sings here—15 big ones in all— do, too. While I’d kill for a videotape of the Beck group, and much prefer the Faces live, I can’t deny that this concert video is A-1 respectable. D.D.