The Comedians of Comedy: Intelligent Nerds as Psuedo Rock Stars

Any good documentary effort should possess some sort of narrative arch. Whether it’s preconceived or arises out of the footage organically, the arc functions as a way to maintain the audience’s attention and hopefully interest.

That being said, performance films don’t generally adhere to that format, instead (and obviously) focusing on a series of live footage focused on revealing interesting moments of one’s craft whether it’s a good solo, a funny joke or just some audience member being assaulted by police after causing a disturbance.

For the Comedians of Comedy, a film detailing a tour undertaken by Patton Oswalt, Brian Posehn, Zack Galifianakis and Maria Bamford, the latter approach of cobbling together shows is utilized. I mean, what kind of plot could emerge from that set up?

Probably none. But the film works.

Oswalt begins the film by lamenting the fact that trailblazers don’t generally find mass appreciation. It’s the subsequent generation, imbuing these originator’s ideas that finally make some sort of impact on the broad, general culture. Of course he’s right and somehow doesn’t come off as a jaded old man. But for a guy whose appeared on big and small screens alike, it seems a bit out of step.

Regardless of Oswalt’s notoriety (or Posehn’s which is brought up a few times throughout the film), the clutch of comedians that head out on the road for the tour figured that performing in dingy bars, most accustomed to hosting music events, would be beneficial for their general fan base – a fan base, perhaps not well heeled enough to shell out thirty bucks to hang out at some comedy club. It’s not quite a gimmick, Neil Hamburger does basically the same thing with less attention focused on him. But the basis to all of this seems to point out that stand up comedy has as much bullshit inherent in it as any other portion of the entertainment industry.

Of course, stand up comics are getting a few million to perform one set a night, but there is a sterilized version of comedy that gets passed off on the American populace, turned into lame television shows, spin off movies and Dane Cook cds. Bummer.

Oswalt and company don’t really outline how or why a shift towards their sensibilities is going to occur – or even if that’s a good thing. But there’re enough odd and surprising punch lines throughout The Comedians of Comedy to keep just about anyone’s attention.

Chi-Pig: "Waves of Disgust" (Video)

There weren't too many women engaged with the Northeastern Ohio music scene during the seventies and eighties. Chi-Pig, though, featured two of the most talented players on the scene - and they were chicks. The entirety of Miami, the band's only album, is as good if not better than this track...seriously.

the Music Specialists: B-Side (Video)

Never heard of the Music Specialists? Me neither, but the b-side to one of the group's singles sits it well within skinner's listening habits. Get an earful and see if you can hunt down a copy without selling children into slave labor.

The Frogs: Priests with Yeast Infections

In wondering about the good various Seattle bands did during the nineties, the Frogs present themselves as proof that even millionaires maintain personal tastes and fan-boy attitudes.

There’s a list that’s been circulating since before I can remember detailing what Kurt Cobain thought to be the most important rock albums of all time. Topping that list is the Stooges’ Raw Power – ‘natch. And while there’re a number of albums included herein that can’t have too much cultural cache in a general sense, coming in at number fifteen was an album by Wisconsinites the Frogs.

Released in 1989, It’s Only Right and Natural wasn’t a proper album so much as Homestead Records culling fourteen tracks from hours of material recorded by Jimmy and Dennis Flemion at home. The brothers had already issued a full length, 1988’s self titled effort. But it didn’t have the persistence of vision that It’s Only possessed.

What’s the album’s general lyrical bent, you ask?

Well, it’s about being gay. All of it. The entire album is about catching a load, loving dudes, hermaphrodites, priests with yeast infections and whatever else the brothers were able to come up with to amuse themselves. With all of the discussion regarding the album’s lyrical content, I’ve not seen any discussion of the Flemions’ sexuality. The both may well be gay, but that seems like a statistical anomaly. Either way, have thirty minutes of material focused on sex acts that a huge portion of the American populace would find offensive relegated the band to a succession of problems.

The only thing was that pretty much any then popular group coming into contact with the Frogs wound up being fans. It got to the point that one of the Flemion’s sat in with the Smashing Pumpkins for the entirety of a tour, Eddie Vedder performed live with the Frogs and Nirvana (beyond just Kurt’s notebooks) were avowed followers.

The Frogs need to be congratulated for maintaining such a skewed sense of humor – despite either brother’s sexuality. But again, mainstream ethics and hang ups is bound to get in the way of folks operating in this manner. And when the Flemions worked up an album of songs detailing various perspectives on race, sung from the vantage point of both white and black folks, they had a difficult time finding a label to release it. The album, Racially Yours, eventually came out. But that’s not the point. The Frogs not being able to overcome the crushing control exerted by even independent labels and having to wait the better part of a decade to release an album is. Bummer.

The Desperate Bicycles and Disseminating DIY Culture

The folks behind SST Records and Dischord could easily be figured as the first proponents of DIY ethics being applied to underground music in the United States. Of course, each nation has its own history of such things. And in the United Kingdom instead of Greg Ginn and Ian MacKaye, the people behind Rough Trade records and a band called Desperate Bicycles were responsible for the concept of self made, produced and distributed music.

Rough Trade might count as one of the most important labels of the last forty years as it released or distributed work from bands as diverse as the Specials and Pere Ubu, Scritti Politti and Augustus Pablo. As a part of this unwieldy aural compendium, the Bicycles showed up with a disc that not only represented a step through punk on towards what would eventually become the eighties’ underground, but also a demanding charge for other bands to record and release their own music.

The Bicycles first few albums included not just encouragement to record independently, but also prices and contact information for business that bands would need to deal with in order to work free of the proper label system.

Beyond the political and social implications that polemics like these represent were the songs the Bicycles were able to record. The music lands somewhere between the Television Personalities and early Scritti Politti, if not a bit toned down.

The band’s earliest singles, more than just a few were issued before the ensemble’s full length, all trucked in the shortest blasts of rock stuff possible. If the tracks were too much shorter, there well may have been an outcry on the part of the consumer – “Handlebars” clocks in at under a minute.

For Remorse Code, released in 1979, the Bicycles cleaned up its sound, but only moderately. Present from the beginning of the disc, though, were vocal melodies absent from earlier work. “I am Nine” should rightly have been a hit. But by 1979, anything remotely associated with punk, aurally or politically, was going to be discounted to a certain extent. Even tossing in the harmonica didn’t work to the band’s advantage.

Whatever the case, “Acting” and some other tracks a bit on aped as much attitude as the Clash and even sported a hint of psychedelia to it all. For whatever reason, though, after releasing so much vital music over the span of just a few years, the Bicycles called it day. Not making it too deep into the eighties wasn’t a crime, but probably accounts for the group’s lack of renown today.

Was Seattle Bigger than Hype?

In crafting a documentary dealing with the rise and subsequent falling away of the Seattle thing, it would have been pretty easy for Doug Pray, the film’s director, to come off like an exploitative Hollywood type. And for that reason, it’s surprising to see some really candid interviews with Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil. But in wading through some of the live footage captured for inclusion in Hype!, it makes sense that some of the scene’s biggest names were all calm and thoughtful when having the camera turned on them.

Seattle, like any major city, by the nineties already counted three decades of rock and roll history. So, folks engaged with the local scene already figured the media blitz as a mindless rush towards what was new. No journalist then currently working on stories related to the music sought out the Wailers or the Sonics, each group easily figuring as the earliest proponents of what would occur some decade’s earlier.

What Pray and the film’s producer, Steven Helvey, did well was to at least work back towards the tail end of the seventies and include some of the punkier groups then strutting around town. There’s a decent amount of screen time given over to the Fastbacks – a pop punk band before the term really existed – on stage as well as on the ole interview couch.

Also included was the Mono Men, a more garage oriented band than anything national press ever included in the Seattle debacle. But the inclusion of such an ensemble points to Hype!’s intent to document stuff that was still in town and people who positively contributed to the culture shift all this music resulted in.

There’s a bit of tongue and cheek stuff included from Sub Pop’s two founders – Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt. And while that was a forgone conclusion, there’s no real discussion of the record the Sub Pop dudes were associated with for a time. But in talking about marketing, both Poneman and Pavitt talked about conceiving a local sound, picking bands that already fit into that and exploiting the semi-bucolic surroundings (Tad explains he wasn’t actually adept at using a chainsaw).

Yeah, it was all a business in the end – well, even in the beginning. What helps most while watching Hype! aren’t the grand platitudes Veder spits out, but the genuine affection producer Jack Endino expressed over and over again for the bands he worked with. And that’s what making anything with your friends is supposed to be about.

SEXton Ming: An Out of Tune (Beat) Blues

The clutch of artists the first comprised the Medway Poets and eventually the Stuckists (an obtuse art movement that some find surprisingly endearing), endeavored projects in just about any medium imaginable. Obviously, writing was a tremendously important part of the collective, loose as it was. However, the associated people eventually figured that music was a decent way by which to dispense its prose and poetry. That might not have been the impetus for Billy Childish, the scene’s most visible, popular and enduring figure, but in the case of Sexton Ming, there’s a greater focus on lyrics than music.

Seeing as Ming was the man responsible for founding the Medway Poets, his inclination for storytelling at the risk of rendering the accompanying music as secondary shouldn’t be the most surprising aspect of his career – musical or otherwise. He’s quite performing, but that doesn’t make his albums from the eighties any less engaging, even if it’s only as a curio.

Hearing Ming growl at the beginning of “Many Years Ago,” from the 1987 Old Horse of the Nation, should summon the image of Captain Beefheart, who can’t be said to be central to the general aesthetic put forth by Medway musicians. Oddly, enough, though, Ming’s wife is named Ella Guru (it was changed from something a bit more normal sounding, ‘natch), which is a Beefheart song. Odd confluence, true. Even with that odd connection, though, Ming’s sound doesn’t stray too far from some of the most minimal (least maximum?) work from the unwieldy Childish discography.

With the blues as a firm enough base to work from, Ming attempts to stretch out a bit, even in these sparse settings that usually count just an acoustic guitar, some percussion and a vocal. As the black sheep, “Duff You” sports some shoddy electric guitar with Ming caterwauling about his baby. There’re more musical portions of the disc to discover, but nothing gets close to melodic – but that should be assumed purposeful.

With his disassociation with Childish and the Medway folks, Ming has remained active in other spheres of the art world. That is perhaps due to his wife’s painterly pursuits. But it might just be that Ming figured there wasn’t a need to record forty or fifty albums of music that basically sound the same. That’s not a knock on Childish, Golightly or Melchior (ok, maybe it is), but Ming found different avenues of expression and different things to say over time. The only thing is, you might not want to listen.

The Runaways: The Man Behind the Girls

Making biopics or even rendering history in documentary terms necessitates a filmmaker to leave at least some of the story out.

And in The Runaways, it seems as if the story’s been much condensed to fit into the traditional hour and some change length. Certainly, the group played more than a few gigs before heading of to Japan. In the movie it takes maybe fifteen minutes to get there. Time’s a tricky thing, it’s deceptive and can’t be real if displayed on film. Enough nitpicking, though, ‘cause the story here is pretty compelling.

After being rejected by any sort of dude based rock group – or at least not being pleased with the results – an unconnected group of five teenage girls wound up forming the Runaways in 1975. Of course, it was all kind of a fluke. But meeting through Kim Fowley, here played by Michael Shannon, who does like a bit Frankenstein-sh, was probably the luckiest moment for any of the girls involved.

The fluke, portrayed in the film in much simplified terms, occurred out side of a prominent LA. Deejay’s club one evening. And while the random happenstance of all these girls being around at the same time – and damned good musicians – is startling, working with Fowley should be understood in the same way.

The man worked with a veritable who’s who of the sixties SoCal rock thing and even helped write and produce work by Cat Stevens that doesn’t stink. For that alone, Fowley deserves to be enshrined in the RnR Hall of Fame.

Anyway, the Runaways, as conceived of by this producer extraordinaire, was basically exploitative. Find some girls, dress ‘em up to please a male audience, while pandering to feminists and saying it’s all empowering and have the group play simple, glammed up hard rock.

Granted the timing for all of this was auspicious with punk right around the corner and all. Unfortunately, for the girls (and for the film) Cherie Currie as played by Dakota Fanning falls into drugs while reaching towards perpetual fame. In real life, the slippery slope eventually broke up the original line up. In the film, it just counts as a boring twenty minutes or so of Fanning passing out in hotels, yelling at people in the grocery story and generally acting like a fool.

It almost doesn’t matter whether or not viewers are fans of the Runaways, because up until the point that the wheels come off, the quickly paced effort should be able to hold just about anyone’s attention. Good soundtrack too, ‘natch.

Assault on Precinct 13: John Carpenter's Early Exploitation

With just his second full length feature project, John Carpenter, who two years on would found the Halloween franchise, turned in Assault on Precinct 13, a work he wrote, directed, produced and acted in. Well, act might be too strong a word as Carpenter functioned as one of the gang members in the film, all of which had not speaking lines. Either way, Carpenter put in a great deal of work on this one.

After watching the thirty four year old movie, though, it half surprising that it was recently remade as a vehicle for Ethan Hawke. Imagining Hawke or really any of the Hollywood whose-who sitting down and taking in an hour and a half of the original film isn’t something easily summoned in one’s mind. That being said, the original Carpenter film is really well paced, sports decent dialogue and while the locations are meager at best, they work within the world created by the film.

Exploiting the then recent mounting fear related to street gangs and violence spreading out from the city into more suburban environs, Carpenter begins the film with a clutch of multi-racial gang members driving around some ghetto in the greater Los Angeles area. Within the first ten minutes of the film, the tuffs are taking aim at various folks walking down the street or sitting around drinking out of a paper bag.

By chance an ordinary suburbanite and his young daughter are heading down to grandma’s house, which happens to be located in the middle of the declining urban sector. Unfortunately, the pair gets lost, stops at a pay phone (remember those?) and gets shot at, leaving the girl dead. Outraged, the man chases down the car and shots one of the gang members. Too bad he runs out of bullets and runs to the nearest police station. Another stroke of bad luck – the station’s basically closed and has been relocated leaving a meager staff on duty over night.

And that’s all in the first thirty minutes or so.

There’s a dash of social justice tossed in the mix for good measure and only the slightest hint of a love-story sub plot. But what Assault on Precinct 13 does well is to use its scant few sets to good effect. It doesn’t all come off as a stage production, but could easily be rendered as such. That being said, this obviously wasn’t the film that sent Carpenter to stardom. Still worth a gander, though.

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