PUNK:attitude- Don Letts' documentary

[schwenko]

from the NY Times July 9 2005:

Look Back in Anger: A Punk History for the Pious
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Punk rock is one thing. Think what you like about it. Go to small shows at clubs in Louisville, Ottawa, VFW halls. Blast the Buzzocks and Suicide. Watch "Sid and Nancy" over and over.

But punk piety is another thing. That's the sermonizing, the endless yammering, the drawing of distinctions. Leave that to the experts. X is new wave and Y is punk, and punk did or did not grow out of Elvis or Chuck Berry or hippie music and did or did not start in New York. Punk was quiet in the 1980's till Nirvana came along. Or, no, punk was thriving in underground clubs but needed Nirvana to break it back into mainstream consciousness.

See, why would you want that kind of talk in your life?

And thus we have Henry Rollins. With just enough credibility not to condemn a project to loserville and just enough literacy to deliver smart-sounding lines, he shows up in documentaries like "PUNK: attitude," which appears tonight on IFC, and explains it all to us. Yes, there's something foolishabout him, the way he thinks he's a wise old man now but is also pumped up and rebellious. Still he tries, at least, not to take himself too seriously.

Mr. Rollins starts the show with an account of how punk is born and reborn in every generation. All you need, he says, is one person to stand up and shout a rejection - Mr. Rollins used strong language here - and people will agree, in Mr. Rollins's words: "Voice of a generation. Thank you. I've been thinking that, but I never had the guts to say it."

This would be an intelligent and self-effacing account of how minimal and adolescent, finally, punk defiance is. Mr. Rollins is arguing that with nothing more than a shout rejecting "this" - where "this" is anything - a person can arouse punk sympathies. But Mr. Rollins doesn't quite have the courage of his statement, and he soon gets into how real the anger of punk was, and how bastardized the California kind was and how much if he were young today he'd be torching the music business rather than pandering to it.

And that's the problem with punk piety: anyone who is into it, including Henry Rollins, still has something to prove.

Others join in here. Jim Jarmusch and Legs McNeil, Chrissie Hynde and Tommy Ramone. They give a fairly straightforward account of punk from the New York Dolls to Green Day, but along the way you get to see the nerds in all of them. One of the show's talking heads rhapsodizes, for instance, about DNA and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks - about how they were like nothing else the world has ever heard. The problem is, the world never heard them. They exist for people like these guys to get nostalgic about.

"PUNK: attitude" gives a serviceable chronology of the music and fashion, but in the end what's best about it is that it showcases the ways punk rockers age. Some have died, of course, like Sid Vicious and Joe Strummer (to whom the film is dedicated). But the ones who live on either went straight or had the biological stamina to pull through. Both varieties of survivor are worth looking at. Their faces and their clothes - like the heavily lined eyes and the safety-pinned cheeks of the punk era - tell the story better than any account of an ideology or aesthetic retroactively grafted onto the whole makeshift scene.

Take David Johansen of the New York Dolls. With polished nails and a daintily held cigarette and deep grooves in his face, he looks as if he never went to rehab, just fortified himself with poison and punk. But his one-time bandmates, Sylvain Sylvain and Arthur Kane, who died in 2004, are another story. Mr. Kane looks like a real estate agent, in his gray sport jacket and pink shirt. And Mr. Sylvain looks like a beloved art teacher in his kooky denim floppy hat.

Just a glance at those three gives a better history of punk than any all the pious pundits can provide.

PUNK: attitude

IFC, tonight at 10, Eastern time; 11, Pacific time.

Directed by Don Letts; Alison Palmer Bourke and Evan Shapiro, executive producers; Susan Heimbinder, supervising producer; Cactus Three, 3DD Entertainment and Fremantle Media, executive producers; produced by Metropolis Group.

[schwenko]

This was a great documentary! Tell me what other film has performances from Polystyrene (Xray Spex), The Pop Group, The Slits, James Chance and the Contortions, Sonic Youth, MC5, NY Dolls and more (in the day). Commentary by Glen Branca (!!!), Jello Biafra, Ari Up, Chrissie Hynde etct etc.
Looks like a DVD release in September:

http://www.dvdempire.com/Exec/v4_item.a ... _id=693453

[Frau_Blucher]

Argh! I can't believe I don't get the Independent Film Channel. I read about yesterday in the Courant but to no avail. Sept release sounds really interesting. Unbelievable performance listing Schwenko. Did they show whole or large parts of songs or brief clips?

Thanks for the FYI...as always!!!

[schwenko]

[quote][i]Originally posted by Blir[/i]
<br>Argh! I can't believe I don't get the Independent Film Channel. I read about yesterday in the Courant but to no avail. Sept release sounds really interesting. Unbelievable performance listing Schwenko. Did they show whole or large parts of songs or brief clips?

Thanks for the FYI...as always!!!
[/quote]

Unfortunately just brief clips [:(]
But what clips!! The Slits in their topless, mud-encrusted glory, the Sex Pistols curse out a bloated, nauseating TV host on live television ("Fuck off!!"), also The Buzzcocks,Magazine, Clash,Sex Pistols, Bad Brains, Black Flag etc etc.
Don Letts was the DJ at The Roxy, supposedly London's first punk-dedicated club. He would spin reggae records because there were so few punk records available (early 1977), hence the huge reggae influence on the London scene. Someone gave him a snall movie camera as a gift; I would assume this is where a lot of the clips are coming from. The film rolls were only 3 minutes long; luckily most of the songs were played in about 90 seconds!

[marie3]

Urgh~! I missed it. I didn't know it was on last night! I was channel surfing until midnight. I would have loved to check it out.

[WolverineSyr]

IFC is replaying it on Thursday 7/14 at 9:30 PM (EST). It will be followed by The Filth and the Fury at 11 pm - it's a documentary on the Sex Pistols. At 1 am SLC Punk is on.

If that doesn't work for you:
Sunday, July 24 10:00 PM
Monday, July 25 3:45 AM

Check out IFC's site www.ifctv.com they have clips from the doc.

[Ollie Stench]

A friend taped this for me, I have yet to watch it.

I have quite a collection of early punk documentaries and I have very little faith in this one. From the description is sounds like there will be about 15 minutes of "new" footage and the rest just re-hashed from footage that's been seen a million times. Don Letts, whom I have the utmost respect for, seems to be making a career aout of producing punk docs. I believe this is #4 in his cannon now. Granted, the guy was one of the few people filming the scene as it was exploding and then imploding, but how many different ways can the story be told?

Anyway, I will give a report after I view it. I'm hoping that I will be pleasantlysurprised with the film and have to eat my words.

[schwenko]

[quote][i]Originally posted by Ollie Stench[/i]
<br>A friend taped this for me, I have yet to watch it.

I have quite a collection of early punk documentaries and I have very little faith in this one. From the description is sounds like there will be about 15 minutes of "new" footage and the rest just re-hashed from footage that's been seen a million times. Don Letts, whom I have the utmost respect for, seems to be making a career aout of producing punk docs. I believe this is #4 in his cannon now. Granted, the guy was one of the few people filming the scene as it was exploding and then imploding, but how many different ways can the story be told?

Anyway, I will give a report after I view it. I'm hoping that I will be pleasantlysurprised with the film and have to eat my words.
[/quote]

Well of course there is a lot of commentary, but it is by people that were there; David Johannsen, Chrissie Hynde, Howard DeVoto, Glen Branca, Thurston Moore, Henry Rollins etc etc.
Have you seen The Punk Rock Movie? Is it any good, available?

[Ollie Stench]

The Punk Rock Movie is great as a "fly on the wall" documentary goes. It was shot at the time and just kind of thrown together with no real storyline. Great early footage of The Sex Pistols The Clash Generation X and The Slits (no mention of The Damned).

Probably the best punk doc I've seen is from Much Music in the mid 90's called Punk 76-79. They focus on the British and US scenes but also have a part on Canadian punk with The Viletones, The Dishrags, The Diodes etc.

[schwenko]

The DVD has been released, with the following listing of extras from the Amazon.com website:

Two-disc DVD features over 17 extras including a 30 minute LA punk scene featurette produced exclusively for the US DVD. Other extras include, Where are they Now and Punk Family Tree, California Screamin' "Behind the Masque" article, Henry Rollins interview, Dave Goodman feature, Fanzines, Fashion, Women in Punk, Record Companies, The Attitude/Spirit of Punk, The Influences/Origins of Punk, Punk on Culture and the Arts, UK versus US, Punk Evolution, The Gigs/Performance and The Punk Sound.

[WolverineSyr]

The extras sound better than the Doc. itself!

[Ollie Stench]

Henry Rollins, the worlds biggest media whore. I hated the guy when I met him in 1984, I still hate the guy.

[guyinsf]

I feel the same way about Henry Rollins, just can't stand the self-absorbed "expert" a-hole on everything. The way he badmouths everyone and everything, you'd think he's bigger than Michael Jackson.

[Dave]

Couldn't sleep last night so, tucked in amongst 200 channels of "paid programming" crap, I stumbled across Punk: Attitude on IFC. What a great film! It covers quite a bit of info I already knew... but tons of stuff I was completely unaware of.

FWIW, here are my thoughts, presented in the form of the "Punk: Attitude" awards:
* The Keith Richards' memorial "My, he's aged poorly" award goes to David Johansen (FYI, runner-up is Mick Jones)... more sleep guys, please
* The Aimee Mann "My, she's aged well" award goes to Poly Styrene... grrrr [:p]
* The Best "White Rasta Chick Who Sounds Like She's Talking With Marbles In Her Mouth" award goes to Ari Up in a runaway
* The "Coolest Chick from the Punk Scene" goes to Chrissy Hynde in another runaway
* The "Uncoolest Chick from the Punk Scene" goes to Nancy Spungeon for bringing on the demise of punk (the smack did it). Runner-up is that incredibly annoying "Hole" chick for bringing down Punk part deux, even though she wasn't mentioned specifically (they did say something about Nirvana's "hangers on").
* The "Huh?" award goes to the editor who tried to draw a direct connection between punk and hip hop. All of a sudden I'm seeing a clip of Public Enemy's Fight The Power, something about Rick Rubin, then the Beastie Boys??? Personally, I think there are more than six degrees of separation there, but ok... it's just the "Huh?" award
* The "Huh?" runner-up again goes to the editor for the relative dismissal of New Wave as skinny tie, whipped-into-submission music... ok, so it's true.
* The second runner-up in the "Huh?" category goes to Paul Simonon for his failed attempt to explain that White Riot is not a racist song. Fumble!
* The "Wish He Broke Out Into Verse" award goes to Johnny Cooper Clarke... the accent hasn't changed at all [:)]

Kidding aside, it was a very entertaining film with, as Schwenko says, some great live clips (but then again it was 4am [|)]).

[Frau_Blucher]

Just picked this up, already in the used bin at the main Newbury Comics in Boston. The best $14.99 I ever spent. 2 DVDs and 270 hours of material and GREAT bonus footage. I can't recommend it enough. Puts a ton of great pre-punk and post-punk in perspective.

[i]"A must see!"[/i] - Blir


...um, [i]minutes[/i], 270 minutes not hours of material.