Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Plasmatics: Down on your Knees and Pledge Allegiance


what is it?

this 3.94 GB dvd is of a videotape edited from collected VHS recordings of television broadcasts and the quality varies depending on generation loss and the limitations of VHS...it was mastered into a stand alone and index markers have been inserted at random..

I searched for this title on the internet and descriptions about what it contains vary wildly...

on my disc, in order, are...

1) tom snyder "a pig is a pig" + interview
2)"butcher baby" live on knon tx
3) "discount store" live for television
4) "butcher baby" live
5) a promo-clip quasi-video for "butcher baby"
6) tom snyder "headbanger" and "masterplan" + interview
7) single camera shot of a poorly lit full plasmatics club show...the audio is terrible and full of noise...impossible viewing
8) wendy t.v. interview footage from unknown tv show...features damned video
9) performance on some john candy show

there is a second volume entitled: The brainwashed do not know they are brainwashed.

I was a little more sober for this...Here we have:

1) Solid Gold: Performance and interview with a marionette (!)
2) 5:24 some tv news interview w/clips from live performance
3) "damned" video and some political rambling by Wendy on a talkshow
4) 19:08 w/ John Candy in some idiotic skit and then performance of metal priestess
5)29:58 a news report from Pasadena prior to a Perkins Palace show
6)32:16 some Japanese TV spot shot at a CBGB with a few questions answered by stotts
7)41:50 interview with sally jesie raphael, talk show is so insipid that this is excrucuatingly painful viewing video for do what i wanna
8)101:40 three numbers played and an automobile destroyed in a tv studio...rough quality of this footage lends it some hallucinatory air
9)115;30 interview on Joan Rivers and two numbers with the WOW band
10) Wendy shoots ping pong balls out of her vagina











how is it?

Obviously, the first thing anyone needs is the MVD Wendy documentary disc, which is worth viewing for the performance footage alone. Anybody who is interested in rock and roll owes real gratitude to the people at MVD who have put out a couple dozen essential disks over the last 10 years. The documentary is fairly well presented, except for the creators trying to edit any mention of Richie Stotts out of the story of the Plasmatics...A ridiculous act of bullshit

The Tom Snyder footage has just come out on the Shout Factory's punk versus tomorrow Shout Factory's punk versus tomorrow and that in itself is kind of worth watching in its entirety...I came away from watching a 50 year old TV show calling itself "tomorrow" and was really struck by how the banal irrelevance of talkshow is the same now as then, forever divorced timelessly from anybody really caring...You can shoot televisions and blow them up with dynamite, but once you become an image on the screen doing this, you're part of the TV problem...Or not. A contradiction alive in the work of the Plasmatics, who definitely pissed off and excited a great many people in their heyday.


How are these collections? The talk show stuff is interesting to see once or twice. There are performance segments on these discs I'd like to cut out and be able to play with the click of a button. There are segments that I'd like to have in better quality. But, then again, there are some of them that benefit from the washed out, hazy, jittery image.



Hopefully there is someone out there meticulously researching every conceivable detail about WOW and is preparing to reveal this all of this to us soon. In the meantime, HERE is some unattended website which gives us some details about the origins of the segments on these discs

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