Fascinating to me--but then, I get that feeling of discovering a band that is so cool that you can't help but share it. At times in my life, I've prided myself on my in-depth music knowledge. Such pride is always knocked flat by some other asshole who actually does know more than me, and usually in one way or another they are like Rodney Bingenheimer. Except, of course, Rodney has street cred like no one I know. He trumps us all.
My earliest musical influences, apart from 70's pop radio, were forged in the schoolyard. There was this guy, Christian, who was wiry and tough. He had a gang, although a pretty pathetic group by today's high-shooting standards. Then it was an excuse for some dudes to hang out and act tough. I was an honorary member of the gang--on the outside because I wasn't considered tough enough, but on the inside because all of the guys in Christian's gang liked me. One of the tenets of the gang was that you had to like Kiss. I liked Kiss. Kiss rocked. When I was all of 9 or so, listening to KISS ALIVE! and Paul Stanley is crying to the crowd--asking them if they like "al-key-haul?" I thought they were talking about rubbing alcohol, and couldn't quite figure out why the hell people would scream about it. But I would play my tennis racket like a guitar, and sing along.
So, Kiss it was for a number of years. My first album bought with my own money was Meet the Knack, pretty standard fare for a kid growing up in the 70s. And here's where it could have gone terribly wrong. What if I had never been exposed to new stuff? I mean, I had honed my appreciation for great 70s rock (and I even had a discriminating palette at that age), but what if I had never branched out?
Well, I did. Thanks to my sisters--especially my eldest one who had friends with their ears to the ground. When I was 12 we moved from Los Angeles to Bellingham, Washington, and two things were my saviors: Elvis Costello's Armed Forces, and the Surf Punks My Beach (you can guess which one I still listen to today). It opened my eyes to music that was very different than anything I'd ever heard--angry, obnoxious, direct.
Within a few years of moving to Bellingham I had sold my comics collection and started spending all my money on LPs. I would hang out in Cellophane Square--the local used record store--and cherry pick cool disks. You could listen to them before you bought, so I would approach the stand with 10 or so in hand, and spin a few tracks. For five bucks, you could walk home with two or three interesting, but slightly beat up, used records if you were careful. They'd wrap them in old newspaper, seal them with tape and away you'd go with your package of instant street-cred.
I met friends with similar tastes, listened to anything I could get my hands on--punk, rock, some wavey stuff, although I have a guitar-based heart. I got a radio show at KUGS, pulling the 2-4 am slot on Friday nights--my parents weren't happy, but since I was under 18 the station had to protect themselves from litigation if I did anything nasty. I would run the warning that profane comment might happen in the next half hour every half hour on the half hour just to cover myself, and then put on a mix of raw punk from MMR comps, Television and NY City shit, local weirdness, and experimental stuff I'd pull from the library like Tupelo Chain Sex and Throbbing Gristle. The goal was always pure eclecticism and knowledge. I hated--I mean hated--it when somebody asked me about a band and I didn't at least know what they were about--have some sort of sense of them.
Of course, there were plenty of mix tapes for friends, the idea I got from my friends Rob & Carl, whose older sisters were even more cool and extreme then my sister. One of them made a great tape I still have to this day. The mix tape became an artform that had to do as much with the segues between the songs as the songs themselves. Songs would collide with songs, interrupt weird comedy bits, radio squawking and any other sonic textures I could find. I had this perfect tape deck that would pause on a dime. I could splice tape right there without a blade, making insane mixes of micro-seconds of noise mixed into a legible mood.
So--anyway--parts of Rodney I totally relate to. That love of the music and wanting to spread it--although were different in that I never really wanted to meet my idols. I didn't mind loving the music and leaving it at that. I have to concede, of course, that when it comes to knowledge, I'm a rank amateur next to him. That's okay--it used to be that you'd discover music through trusted sources and pockets. Now, with the internet, it's much different. Less mystical, more programmed and easier. When I listened to, say, Joy Division, I felt like I was the only guy in the world who got them--even though this is a ridiculous feeling, it made me relate to the music in a much more personal way. Now, you type in your band name du jour in Google, and you have 20 fan sites waiting to tell you their latest move. You no longer have to buy small edition privately published short-run biographies, now you have blogs trading trackbacks.
But fuck it--I'm not so stuck in my ways that I'm going to say that it's worse now, just different. Some things are better--hopping on the newsgroups with thousands of MP3s, listening to a few that I like--downloading them if I really like them, buying the album if I listen to it more than once or twice. This is a great way to get music, and as soon as the record companies get taken down somehow, the future has the potential to be great. I remember being on Napster, trading music I hadn't seen in 15 years--the rarest of the rare--all those tracks I remember from the KUGS library, or seeing the vinyl at Cellophane Square and never having the money to pop for them. A lot of them are out of print--and even worse, in the case of the band Slow from Vancouver, stolen from me. But, there they were--music that nobody can control any more. Music that won't make anybody much money anymore, but music that could be freely traded amongst those that love it, if only our copyright law were more geared to consumers.
With this film, it was strongest when it capitalized on people who love the music, and the musicians who love them. More than one person commented on this odd relationship. The film was weakest when the director imposed his questions about fame on the famous. He may have been getting at something about Rodney--famous for just being known--but he didn't wrap it up well. Wish him love, long life, a new bigger-than-life band to come and tear this shit apart.
Where we saw it: DVD | We deign to rate it: 80 outta 100