DVD REVIEWS - Miscellaneous - http://maxpages.com/aeazine2/ISSUE_12_DVD

Another State Of Mind
Time Bomb Entertainment, 1980/2004
Punk was a different world in 1982 than it is in 2005. Music television was in its infancy, and outside the Sex Pistols' 1978 American tour and the exposure the early Manhattan bands were getting, most punk bands didn't have the means to promote themselves new artists take for granted now. Neil Peart of Rush once said only two options are available to bands who expect to survive in the music business: "One is a quick capitalization on a manufactured or accidental 'hit,' the other is a slow steady climb accomplished by long hard touring." The bands we meet in "Another State of Mind" chose the second option simply because there was no other open. In the 1983 film, re-released on DVD last year, you'll learn how they managed to tour America and Canada without label backing, advertising or additional funds to support.
In the early 80s, a band called Youth Brigade emerged from the world of California hardcore punk, where Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, Social Distortion, T.S.O.L. and Suicidal Tendencies emerged from. Their frontman Shawn Stern started the Better Youth Organization, a promotion and management association dedicated to following the "do it yourself" punk ethic, managing an independent record label and encouraging punks of every nationality and ethnicity to become more socially conscious and politically aware (remember this is when the Reagan era was starting to gain momentum). Stern believed many problems America faced in the 60s weren't completely solved; in some cases they became worse; and he wanted punks to transcend outside perception and continue traveling the road to change that unfolded in the 60s.
Next to Don Letts' "The Punk Rock Movie," Lech Kowalski's "D.O.A." and Penelope Spheeris' "The Decline of Western Civilization," "Another State of Mind" was one of the first films to acquaint you with a depiction of the punk lifestyle from the punks' point of view, and possibly the first to show punks as people with the same concerns as people had back in the 60s. Today we have Eric Bogosian's "SubUrbia," James Merendino's "SLC Punk!" and Julien Temple's "The Filth and the Fury" to establish a cultural portrait of this lifestyle without the burden of stereotype. When the early directors were breaking the mold in representing the punk lifestyle, it was difficult for punks to dispute preconceived ideas about their world. That a means to do so was completed with a minimal film crew and minimal budget is no small accomplishment.
Youth Brigade and Social Distortion went on a five week tour, playing thirty cities throughout the States and Canada and traveling from date to date in a dilapidated old school bus they purchased for transportation. We accompany them on the bus, meeting the fans on a one-to-one basis and hearing their stories firsthand, discover the punk and hardcore scenes in American and Canadian and get an idea of what attending punk shows were like before being punk became socially acceptable. As any Manhattanite will affirm, it wasn't the pretty picture you get from your average emo band.
In the years following their first American tour for "Another State of Mind," Youth Brigade and Social Distortion went on to become legends in the punk underground. Between disbanding and reforming, Youth Brigade released a string of independent albums and toured America, France, Spain, Holland, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland and Poland among other countries. Social Distortion experienced a revolving door of lineup changes, eventually breaking into major label status in the 90s and remaining active to this day, releasing their first live DVD "Live in Orange County" in 2004.
Adam Small and Peter Stuart followed the tour across San Francisco, Seattle, Calgary, Winnipeg, Montreal, Chicago, Detroit, New York City Washington D.C. and Baltimore. Tagging along with the bus in a video truck or filming the activity inside the bus gives the film a first-person perspective placing you in a seat near the band members and road crew as if you're accompanying them across the country. This familiarizes you with everyone; band, crew and scenesters that come out to see the shows on each stop of the tour; even more intimately than the single frame interview spots do.
Mapping the dates out with Youth Brigade, Social Distortion and a road crew of four, Stern emphasized the tour was not about making money; its purpose was to show punks by example they could handle the responsibilities of releasing albums, promoting and touring independently. The vibes of the opening date in San Francisco were assured as the kids who attended the show picked up on the by-the-fans-for-the-fans attitude that accompanied the performances. Money played a role insofar as having enough to make it to the next date, and the admission charge told the kids who attended they weren't being ripped off. According to one fan, the cover of three dollars was a welcome relief from bigger bands whose higher admission charges and choice of venues ended up alienating a significant percentage of their fans.
This is not to say the tour was hunky-dory from beginning to end. Some ironic foreshadowing of things going wrong came in San Francisco when the club owners rather disrespectfully humored the bands' anti-profit standpoint after the show. Besides this, the bands oppose the status quo by divergent means. Youth Brigade's rebellion is socioeconomic; Stern insists the family value system that existed from the 50s is no longer viable since it disaffected a great number of people. Mike Ness and Social Distortion's opposition is strictly aesthetic, although it's not as superficial as many would expect and more intelligent than it would be given credit for. This is reflected in many of the "fan interviews" seen in the course of the movie, establishing diversity in the early 80s' punk scene as much as drawing a line between the bands.
From what we see of the performances in the film, the tour prospered all around with synergic return from the fans. On the other hand, being shortchanged in Frisco seemed a bad omen that led to increasing division between the bands sharing the bus. Finances dwindled, egos clashed, transportation problems mounted and people bailed on the tour until Ness' backup band returned to California, leaving him to consider continuing Social Distortion with a new lineup and the tour concluded with one band on the bill after Ness reluctantly parted company with Youth Brigade and returned home. This may hint the tour failed, but Stern still considered it successful for establishing togetherness with people halfway across the country and across the border into another nation whom he had never even met before the tour began.
While staying in Washington, D.C. Youth Brigade spent time in the Discord House with Ian MacKaye and Minor Threat who are credited with starting the "straight edge" ethos of abstaining from alcohol, drugs and excessive sex, which is a popular movement in punk and hardcore to this day. Ian MacKaye, Minor Threat's frontman who would front the post-punk band Fugazi later in the 80s and beyond, explains how and why the straight edge movement came to exist, telling us a little about the punk scene in D.C. (from where another influential punk band known as the Bad Brains originated) and Baltimore. After this we get to see a rare performance clip where Minor Threat kept playing without a PA system.
At first presented to us as just another fan waiting to get into the D.C. performance, Valerie is one of the people we come to know a bit more about during the movie. Valerie got involved in the punk scene to express herself through the music and her then-unique fashion. "Sculpting" herself to appear as Death and modeling the result in photography, she was Goth before there was such a thing as we know it today, and exhibited the courage to reveal the beauty in being Goth at a point in time when the only acceptable conception of beauty was looking like Cheryl Tiegs or Farrah Fawcett. Disarmingly candid, Valerie shares her experiences in growing up, adding she plans to have grandchildren one day.
A three minute demonstration on slamdancing (moshing) and stagediving, taken from a live clip from Chicago and set to Youth Brigade's "Violence" is worth shelling out fifteen to twenty bucks for the DVD alone. The antics you see here are held over from a time when people dove at their own risk and you had to be careful not to injure yourself or risk an angered concertgoer not taking kindly to having you kick his face on your way down. Other moments worth mentioning are an introduction to young punk kids living on the streets of Winnipeg, Canada and an interview with a member of the road crew of Youth Brigade who explains the way society looked at African-American punk rockers in the early 80s.
On the DVD "Another State Of Mind," Youth Brigade, Social Distortion and the directors reminisce over the good old days, looking back at the tour with fondness despite the problems they ran into when it was actually happening. If you are interested in what these bands are doing today, you can look up Youth Brigade and the Better Youth Organization at www.byorecords.com and Social Distortion at www.socialdistortion.com. - DW

End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones
Rhino Entertainment, 2004
If you read the above review of "Another State of Mind," you'll remember getting a taste of how much different the punk lifestyle was in 1982 compared to today. Then there are the formative years of American punk that came to exist from 1974 to 1977. Would the bands who consider themselves punks today have been able to stick it out back then? If one of the few places to play had a floor covered in sawdust and dog waste, as Joey Ramone described what CBGB was like in those days, would they be too discouraged to go onstage or would the sight of it bolster their resolve? The roots of punk were no more a pretty picture than the seething history of the Ramones, and theirs is a success story in more meaningful terms than commercializing and selling a million records, which they attempted and ultimately rejected.
"End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones" tells the story of Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, Tommy and everyone else who was part of the band with such brutal honesty that many of their tunes will be viewed in a new, ironic light. The Jim Fields-Michael Gramaglia-directed documentary paints a picture of the band as anything but a happy family; if you thought the Osbournes were dysfunctional, wait 'til you hear the war stories told about these guys. Even so, there is a unanimous if unspoken concord between them that can only be forged when you've played in a band for more than a decade. No matter how often they quarreled, and how little success their efforts to break through to the mainstream met with in their time, their determination to push on ultimately became a bond powerful enough to surpass death.
In many ways, they were America's answer to the Sex Pistols. As Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock were writing their first songs as a band, unwittingly contributing to the start of a musical movement that would sweep across the United Kingdom, spread across the Atlantic and eventually circulate across the world, four poverty-stricken kids from Forest Hills, Queens were pitching in to a movement that established an unbreakable hold on popular music to this day. Like the Pistols, they were obnoxious, unfriendly and apparently untalented, at least compared to the progressive rock of Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. And in like manner, they took the social estrangement of a post-World War II generation and brought it to the stage with them, commanding an entire country to shut up and listen.
Collectively assuming the same surname to illustrate a concept of oneness, Jeffery Hyman (nee Joey Ramone), John Cummings (nee Johnny Ramone), Douglas Colvin (nee Dee Dee Ramone) and Thomas Erdelyi (nee Tommy Ramone) got away with doing the unthinkable in a world where saccharine sweet family entertainment was fast becoming the norm and swallowing the rebellious spirit of rock and roll. Where Donny and Marie Osmond avowed it takes two and the Bay City Rollers sang praises to Saturday night, the Ramones became punk's first dysfunctional family, expressing a desire to beat on some brat with a baseball bat, saying they want to sniff some glue, requesting shock treatment, breaking the news that they're teenage lobotomies and declaring Judy and Sheena punks instead of cheerleaders or prom queens.
2002 saw them grudgingly inaugurated into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame alongside the Talking Heads, Isaac Hayes and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, after spending almost three decades redefining popular music and influencing as many generations of budding musicians. From Metallica's Kirk Hammett to Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder to Rob Zombie, they sent shockwaves through every genre outside the norm which continue to ripple and spread outward to this day. Their enduring influence has by far transcended the aboveground acceptance that eluded them in the 70's and the 80's, and this is not even counting the impact they had had in South America, but we will get to that shortly enough. Without ever achieving mainstream status, the Ramones have indelibly etched themselves into the annals of American rock music.
This is not to say that the band's long-awaited recognition wasn't accompanied by loss even deeper to the fans they amassed from the 70's to now. The year before the Ramones' induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, Joey lost a long battle with lymphatic cancer. A year later, Dee Dee fatally overdosed. Johnny passed away of prostate cancer in 2004, leaving Tommy the only surviving member of the original lineup. Marky Ramone, C.J. Ramone and Ritchie Ramone, members who would enter the picture when the dysfunction grew too intolerable for some founding members, are also left to carry on Joey, Dee Dee and Johnny's legacy, as they all contributed to the band's tumultuous family history. And who wouldn't want to continue for a band who openly paraded their dysfunction in songs like "We're A Happy Family"?
"Finally, a band for us," said Lars Fredriksen of Rancid when discussing the impact discovering the Ramones had on him in the beginning. Indeed they were among the first American bands to give voice to the children of the "me decade" who saw nothing available to them in the immediate future, much less in the long term. Followed by other seminal artists who began in the late '70s such as the Bad Brains, the Dead Kennedys and G.G. Allin, the Ramones placed east coast punk on the map, particularly where it coalesced in the famed New York nightclubs CBGB and A7, giving a disaffected body of youth a sense of individuality they wouldn't find anywhere else. This was something they could call their own.
The members of the Ramones in turn came from one of the many sections of the world the American Dream seemed to fly over without looking back. Growing up in Forest Hills tenement neighborhoods, the four components that made up the disorderly whole known as the Ramones sought release for the malaise of their surroundings when they were still Jeffery, John, Douglas and Thomas. Like the Pistols, they found their calling in Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop and the Stooges and the New York Dolls, preferring the outrageous stage presence and bare bones musical direction of those artists to the tedious, endlessly tiresome mediocrity of pop radio and the faux-erudite pretentiousness of progressive art-rock.
Since "End of the Century" is one of those documentaries that assumes you already know about the members of the band and the artists who inspired them makes it a conclusive account of the part they played in helping create the first real punk rock scene in New York, along with the tremors they caused during their appearances in the United Kingdom. Interviews with Deborah Harry, Chris Stein and Clem Burke of Blondie and the late Clash front man Joe Strummer (who died of a heart attack in 2002) see them recalling what it was like to watch them perform at CBGB and have them in the same room with the Clash and the Pistols (Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten once suspected the band might beat him up).
Everything that ultimately fueled the energy the Ramones projected playing live is laid bare via intimate chats with the founding members and the latecomers into the Ramones family. Joey declined an interview for personal reasons which arose from persistent conflicts with Johnny (his interviews are taken from older footage). Vintage performance clips between the band's first gigs in '77 and the last show they played in the 90's are just a few trips to take down memory lane. Other moments making this worth seeing are the crowning of 2nd Street in Manhattan as 'Joey Ramone Place' and one scene describing an interest Dee Dee had in hip-hop which led to an experimental rap album and promotional video.
The most significant impression the Ramones made in the annals of rock was like their journey to Brazil, where they were, according to report, "as big as the Beatles." The sociopolitical situation in Brazil in the mid-80's was compared to that of England around 1976, especially where the youth was concerned. There was a strong feeling of despondency prevalent in the young; a sense of not having much to look forward to in the years ahead. The Ramones were seen by the kids as a means of reaching catharsis, which was evident by watching their limo being chased through the streets by hordes of fans and watching them playing sports stadiums filled to capacity with thousands of fans singing along.
If "End of the Century" wasn't enough for diehard fans, another Ramones documentary recaptures the more popular side of their heyday. Rewarding the band with long overdue recognition, 2004's "Ramones Raw" recently achieved the first gold status DVD ever released under the Ramones name and the second gold-certified release of their career (the first was the "Ramonesmania" compilation in 1988). A rare in-store signing for "Ramones Raw" was at Tower Records in Paramus, New Jersey with Marky Ramone and producer-director John Cafiero last December 10. The DVD itself is a thorough retrospective of the Ramones' live experience dating all the way back to their earliest show dates. With home video footage and appearances by Eddie Vedder and Debbie Harry, it's more than worthwhile to remember them by. - DW

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