A viewing 30 years in the making, part one.
So in continuing to regularly patronize ‘mecca’ (Scarecrow Video) here in Seattle, one of the coolest things about this place is that they have some of the rarest movies out there you can find. Meaning if you still have a VCR laying around, you’re in biz – that’s me.
Back in the formative years (los ochentas) I liked some punk bands like X, but never got the chance to see the defining punk ‘documentary’ – The Decline of Western Civilization. This is a hard movie to find, and has yet to make it to DVD – but Scarecrow has a well-used copy.
I mainly wanted to see it for the bands X and Fear, but the Black Flag, Germs and Circle Jerks segments were interesting too. The other bands in it – meh, I ff’d past much of them. Between the various stage performances, they talked to most of the bands in person, or at their apartment, or what they called living space (Black Flag was living in a burned-out Baptist church, which also doubled for practice space – the singer said his closet (literally) was $16 a month).
It’s weird to see X so young – we saw them a year or two ago at The Showbox and with the exception of Fishbone shows in the past – I have never seen a tighter band. They pretty much play everything exactly like when I saw them about 25 years ago at Portland’s Starry Night.
Fear’s set (they don’t talk to them directly) begins with Lee Ving taunting the crowd quite intensely – kind of weird given that most punk bands *play* out of control, but didn’t seem to put on the a-hole act like Fear does here. Most of the crowd is either yelling expletives at them or spitting on them – pretty wild. And one woman practially gets beat up as they provoke her so much it takes about 5-6 bouncers to keep her off the stage and from attacking Lee Ving, the main instigator. But then they rip out several signature songs, and the movie’s over.
There are other random short interviews at the start and near the end with random punks (boys and girls – these aren’t men and women yet) whose outlook seems pretty bleak, although self-confident. But that’s the Reagan years in L.A. for you – every man for himself.
I guess this movie isn’t so much a documentary as it is a series of shows and interviews – more a sampling of the L.A. punk scene at the very start of the 80s (because punk, and many of these bands, got going in the late 70s, it had already been around a while by the time of this movie). I liked the show, and the wild abandon of the shows – I remember a few of those mosh pits, although I tried to stay out of them, that’s for sure! And this movie is WAY, way better than the steaming piece of crap known as ‘1991:The Year Punk Broke’ THAT movie is about the steaming piece of crap (band) known as Sonic Youth, even though the poster billed the movie as about Nirvana when I saw it – that’s 2 hours of my life i’ll never get back….blecch!
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