The title is a little strange largely for the fact that it is a
Jonathan Richman song which Galaxie 500 covered but did not pen
themselves. I would even be hesitant to say that they popularized the
tune, but perhaps the title was just too perfect for Plexifilm to
ignore (messy details of authorship be damned). Nonetheless, it makes
me want to collect a bunch of White Lion bootlegs and make a DVD
entitled Radar Love, or maybe a bunch of Great White TV appearances and
call it Once Bitten, Twice Shy.
Plexifilm
The first offering on disc one is a collection of art-damaged music
videos by Sergio Huidor. He gives the MTV-treatment to “Tugboat,”
“When Will You Come Home,” “Blue Thunder,” and “Fourth of July.”
To give you an idea, the video for “Tugboat” is a frenetic cyanotype of
soft-focus images captured with a dusty 16mm camera. Ostensibly,
the images involve the band (walking, playing), though they are largely
indiscernible until the very end when you can see Naomi Yang’s iconic
spiral earrings. Somewhere in the middle of it all and coinciding
with the song’s crescendoing jam session, Huidor has spliced in found
images from some action show/film with lots of looped explosions and
excitement. The rest of the videos proceed clumsily but
enjoyably, featuring some formal video elements which might have seemed
avant-garde at the time (negative images, synchronized audio tracks,
saran-wrap backdrops) but now look slightly dated. I am pretty
certain that Huidor used his stipend from the VES department at Harvard
to fund the videos with enough left over for two months of money for
groceries.
The majority of disc one features five live performances taped by
audience members. Two shows from Cambridge/Boston which evidence
a nascent stage of Galaxie 500 (before the bass drum had a fancy
“Galaxie 500” paint job), and three from California, all spanning from
1988-1990. Plexifilm must have engaged in an exhaustive search
over the Internet and through various alleys and byways of fans to
acquire all of this footage. The result is estimable, if a little
amateurish. These are great documentations without being great
documents.
In one of the more poetic moments of the show at the
Middles East upstairs in Cambridge, a jean-jacketed young lady steps
obliviously in front of the camera taping the band just as they break
into the song "Oblivious." The timing couldn't be more perfect or
orchestrated. True to the song's title, the woman stands her
ground, impeding the camera's line of sight, infinitely unaware of her
problematic placement. She even calls over some friends to her
superior stage vantage point with an overzealous hand gesture. At
no point does she realize that she is ruining some poor chap’s taping
of the show (and, years later, our own viewing of the show).
Anyone who has ever been to a show knows the camera’s and cameraman’s
plight. Do you ask her nicely to move, or do you wait patiently
for her nomadic drive to kick in and relocate on her own?
Fortunately, the documenter moves to a better vantage for the rest of
the show. The Middle East show also features a wispy cover of
fellow Cambridge-dweller and DVD-title bestower Jonathan Richman’s
“Back in Your Life” to go along with the band’s other various tributes
to the man. It is a nice homage and, unlike some of Galaxie 500’s
other covers, unreleased.
Moving to the west coast shows, the
lighting at both Kennel Club shows in San Francisco is frustratingly
obscure, whereas the footage at Club Lingerie in Hollywood is produced
by Video Bob (213.477.1116), whose titles preface the performance and
display this wonderful red and Atari-like “Galaxie 500” title on top of
a blue screen. I almost reached for the nearest joystick when I
saw it. Apparently, Video Bob also has some facility with
multiple camera angles and dissolves because this show looks nearly
professional compared to some of the others. Plexifilm does a
good job of choosing a smattering of songs from each show without much
redundancy.
The gem on this collection is a UK studio taping
of the band. It is also the most haunting. The band plays
percussionless on a dark floor and in front of dimly lit Lynchian red
curtains. It looks like an after-hours performance at the Black
Lodge. Shadows stain Dean Wareham’s pallid face as he wears his
own band’s shirt. Dropping his sticks, Damon Krukowski picks up
an acoustic guitar in an eerie premonition of the band he would form
with Naomi Yang in a couple of years following this performance.
As the band runs through “Tell Me,” “Strange,” and the Velvet
Underground’s “Here She Comes Now,” the music itself is slow,
melancholy, and vaporous. The whole effect of the images combined
with the music is other-worldly and unfamiliar but also
beautiful. The second disc is less robust, presenting two full
shows, the first from Atlanta in 1990 and the other from London later
in 1990. Both shows have decent sound but troubling visual
quality. Atlanta is shaky and disorienting, while London is
grainy and distant. More than anything, the shows remain as
testaments to the ironic triumph of VHS for archiving sound with great
fidelity rather than image.
Contemplating the assortment of
Galaxie 500 nuggets collected on these DVDs, I am reminded that the
band presented a similar equation: not a lot of pretense about
image or performance, but a most deliberate and concentrated effort on
the elegance of their craft and its legacy.
Galaxie 500, "Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste"
- Written by: Joshua David Mann
- Parent Category: Reviews
- Category: Home Theater
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