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THE DECL'NE OF WESTERNctvrLrzAfloN lt98o)Directed by Penelope Spheeris. Withthe Alice Bag Band, Black Flag,Cathol ic Discipline, Circle Jerks,Fear, Germs, X. Media cassette.Beta & VHS Hi-Fi stereo. 100 min.$49.95Fl unk rock worked better in theoryF tn"n in practice. Just like thispunk rock documentary.Decline is, regardless, a prettygood trip to the zoo. We may notlearn as much as we could about theturn-of-decade L.A. punk scene itdocuments, but not because directorSpheeris doesn't try to give us agood tour; she speaks with clubowners and club patrons, band man-agers and band members. Unfortu-nately, she's the very flipside of punkitself-all craft and little soul.Decline may be slick, but Spheeris'questions are surprisingly naive. Thedirector does little more than drawout some of the inarticulate rage thatdrives people to a musical subcultureas harsh and as violent as punk, yetwithout stirring any of the reasonsfor it. ln Britain, after all, bleak-futured kids turned to rock'n'roll tochannel their frustrations, and punkhad an easy-to-grasp reason to be.But in relatively affluent LosAngeles, how much of it is simplypunk posing?Spheeris doesn't poke too hard tofind out, although her camera eye isnicely attuned to the day-to-dayrituals of life. We see the Germs'doomed lead singer, Paul Beahma.k.a. Darby Crash, frying eggs. Wesee the $16-a-month closet wherehalf of Black Flag live. We see themost successful of the early L.A.punk bands, X, doing home tattoos.And we get enough songs-20 ofthem, some subtitled-to fill thesoundtrack album that accompaniedthis flick.60 FACES

What we don't see, though, is acontext. Back in late '79 to early '80,the movie's timeframe, this countrywas taking on an increasinglyclosed-minded, intolerant and greedypoint-of-view, ln "respectable"middle-class communities, textbooksstarted being burned, our civil rightsstarted being trampled and abortionclinics started being bombed whilethe government looked the other way.ls all this what made the L.A. punksslam their guitars until their fingersbled? Or were only a few of themthat aware and that pained, and therest merely thrill-seekers?Decline doesn't ask any of thesequestions, and so we're always onthe outside looking in. L.A. punk'ssuccessor, conveniently labeled"hardcore," is nowhere in sight;neither are the parallels between thenihilistic outrage of good punk andthe theatrical outrage of good heavymetal. You wouldn't know it from thisdqcumentary, but "the decline ofwestern civilization" isn't a resultof the punk movement, after all. lt'sthe cause.

KISS: ANIMALIZE LTVEUNCENSOREODirected by Keith "Keef" MacMillan.RCA/Columbia cassette. Beta & YHSHi-Fi.90 min. approx. $29.95I knew a guy in high school whoI was big, mean and tough. Or atleast he was big and he acted meanand tough. He was supposed to have

had an illegitimate kid in a nearbytown. A real hardcase, y'know? I sawthis same guy a few years later, and'.somebody must've given me a newpair of eyes or something becauseall of a sudden I could see that hewas just this lou(o,flabby guy whoshot his mouth off a lot. That's all hewas-hot air, not hot times.It turns out he has a spiritualbrother in KISS lead vocalist PaulStanley. Which is strange. Stanley'smade it big, he looks like he's ingood shape, and he's been in thespotlight for more than 10 years. Notbad. So why does somebody like thatinsist on telling a concert audiencethese stupid, smarmy stories about,oh, wow, Gene Simmons had an ille-gitimate kid but he talked his wayout of it, but that baby had thelongest tongue I ever seen Boy,Paul, that's funny. Unwed motherstories-that's a riot. Hey, you knowany dead baby jokes?That's the kind of thing, regret-tably, that separates this "uncen-sored" version from the hour-longKISS concert that played on MTV.Stanley also tells a tale of arrivingearly to a doctor's appointment andimmediately getting it on with thegorgeous nurse. Sure, man. rnJudging from stories such asthese, KISS must have a pretty lowopinion of its fans. The audience forthis particular show may have gonealong, caught up i.n the heat of themoment, but on video, where you cansit in your living room and thinkabout it, you realize how gullibleKISS thinks its fans are.As a video show, it's too bludgeon-ingly straightforward anyhow.Pioneer rock video director KeithMacMillan and a massive cameracrew do turn in some great footage-sharp as an ice-pick, strategic as achess master-but he's working inan outmoded format. Even the bestlive act can't sustain a 90-minutevideo; that's why so many bands (in-cluding the KISS-influenced TwistedSister, and Led Zeppelin as long agoas 1976) have turned to the hybridconcert/conceptual form. MacMi llanmay have been trying to capitalize onthe spectacle aspect of a KISS con-cert, and he had more than able helpfrom lighting director Jeff Durling,''but the new KISS isn't anywhere asspectacular as the old. Simmonsmay do his fire-spitting routine hereas in the days with Ace Frehley andPeter Criss, but Eric Carr's extended

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rum solo and the Simmons-Stanley-Bruce Kufick guitar jams are justrock concbrt cliches.It's too bad no one had videomuch in mind back in'75 and'77,when KISS released its first two livealbums. This show draws mainlyfrom the band's 1984 Animalize andLick lt Up; except for KISS' first hit,"Rock and Roll All Night", whichcaps this tape, most of the materialis recent-vintage.READY SfiEADY EOT VOL. 2Directed by Robert Fleming, RolloGamble, Daphne Shadwell, MichaelLindsay-Hogg. With the Beach Boys,the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, theFourmost, Freddie & the Dreamers,Marvin Gaye, the lsley Brothers,Jerry Lee Lewis, Martha & theVandellas, Gene Pitney, PJ Proby,Dusty Springlield, the RollingStones, Rulus Thomas and the Who.ThornlEMlcassefte. Bbta & VHS Hi-Fi mono. Black-and-white. 55 min.$29.95E eadv Steady Gol was a sort oflf "eriti"n Bandstano" back when"Cheerio " didn't make you think of acereal. This second collection of the

live and the lip-synched from thatmid-'60s Brit TV show unearths a lotof the same specimens as volumeone (reviewed in FACES, Sept. '84),but the series is still a long way fromlosing its charm. How're you evergonna know where you're going, afterall, if you don't know whereyou've been?Which isn't to say RSG/ Vol. 2 isjust a history lesson. The Beatlesmay be strumming unplugged elec-tric guitars and Dusty Springfieldmay be laughing when she's sup-posed to be moving her lips, but wealso get a crazily spasmodic KeithMoon carrying on as if his drumstool were an electric chair. Jerry LeeLewis gives us one more fireball ren-dition of "Whole Lotta Shakin' GoinOn", and if you've seen it before, seeit again, because this dumpy greaserin a shirt and tie always goesthrough a rock'n'roll redemption thatpaints exactly what the music'sall about.The best of the lip-synched stuff isa scathing conceptual bit: The Roll-ing Stones "singing" Sonny & Cher.Whoever came up with it is amystery, but from the way grand-master Mick gets into his Gher role,

I'd say it wasn't the veddy proper Britproducers. Jagger's hilarious mincing-well before the movie Performance-is cross-sexual stuff as risky asanything else in rock'n'roll; the factthat what is now just innocent in-nuendo would never have played onAmerican TV at the time makes thebit not only great fun, but one moreexample of rock's power to conquerforbidden territory.Most of the rest of the "perfor-mances" have a two-fold value: Weget rare early glimpses of suchlegends as Marvin Gaye and theBrian Jones Stones,.and we get whatmay be our only look at shootingstars the likes of Freddie & theDieamers, PJ Proby and the still-active Gene Pitney. The famous onesyou can always find on film or video.The also-rans are a lot scarcer, buteven more important if you want tokeep a sense of perspective. Yester-day, y'see, it was Freddie & theDreamers. Tomorrow, we'll bereminiscing about Frankie Goes to...uh,Detroit?RALPH VIDEO YOI. 'irected by Graeme Whifler, TheFesidents. with Mx-80 sound,Renaldo & The Loaf, The Residents,Snakef inger, Tu*edomoon. RalphRdcords cassetfe. Mono. 30 min.approx. $29.97G omebody had to tell you some-D O"y; it might as well be me: Thistape is how you lose your rock videovirginity. These clips look likenothing you've ever seen.You may have stumbled acrossone or two of them before, thoughprobably not on MTV, the rock chan-nel run by three-piece suits. Morelikely it was at a rock club, or on"Night Flight" or as a warm-up to amidnight movie. Wherever and if-ever,once you've been exposed to RalphRecords' video pantheon, almostevery other rock video afterward isgoing to look exactly like what it is-a TV commercial for a record.That's not the case with theseshatteringly origfrial, frighteninglyeerie clips. At the core of this 1982tape (recently repriced) are a half-dozen filmed videos by a San Fran-cisco group called the Residents.They work with rock'n'roll the wayPicasso worked with a paintbrush,but they're not what you'd call atraditional rock band: They cloak

their identities, usually behind hugeeyeball masks, and in their few con-certs perform behind a screen. Thatthese eccentricities aren't gimmicksbut real evocations of the band's artis borne out by this collection.As with Devo, the Residents'closest mainstream counterpart, themusic works best when visualized.Here, the Residents'two regular-length videos and four "one-minutemovies"-sort of tone poems put tofilm-carry music that dreams by likeBrian Eno's or Pink Floyd's. Visually,the clips owe almost nothing totelevision; director Whifler, in con-junction with the Residents, echoesGerman Expressionist films like Mand The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, andphoto-montage techniques that looklike a cross between "Saturday NightLive" and the photo wing of theMuseum of Modern Art. The earliestclip, the Residents' self-directed"Third Reich & Roll" (1975), is shot inthe black-and-white, "dirty" style of atribal-ritual documentary. This is notthe kind of stuff you follow up with,"Coming up next-Foreignertour dates "With the exception of MX-8Sound's monotonous "Why Are WeHere" clip, the rest of the videoshave their moments too. TheY don'tmatch the consistently amazing im-agery of the Residents' work, butthey do demand more than super-ficial viewing. As a result, this in-dispensable video volume opens youreyes the way the best rock'n'rollopens your ears. I

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