Hook) was on during the taping is up for debate. It's also, in the bargain, a quasi-documentary on the hazards of excessive drug use, although what drugs exactly Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show: Live shows the opposite in merciless, sweaty close-up. Most concert films celebrate bands at the height of their powers, depicting their massive stadium tours, their virtuousic skill, their almost shamanic sway over adoring audiences. Hook and the Medicine Show: Live finds them setting up camp, railing from onstage against their irrelevancy and low estate to a room that is-appropriately-empty, filled only with a mute film crew for the German television show Der Musikladen. It is in these grim lowlands that the generically titled Dr. Hook would in fact declare bankruptcy, lose a founding member, and languish in self-pitying obscurity. Between their two aptly-titled albums Belly Up! and Bankrupt, Dr. The band failed to come up with a successful follow-up single. British radio refused to play "Cover of the Rolling Stone," seeing it as the commercial suck-up that it was. Hook appeared-in demented cartoon caricature-right where they'd hoped to end up. The song became the self-fulfilling prophesy and later that year, Dr. Hook makes unsubstantiated boasts about playing to giant crowds all over the world, cruising in limousines, bedding young groupies who embroider their custom-made clothes, being "loved everywhere we go," and-perhaps most accurately-taking "all kinds of pills that give us all kinds of thrills." But "the thrill we've never known," they qualify, "is the thrill that'll getcha when you get your picture / on the cover of the Rolling Stone." It was a more innocent time I guess, and the trick worked. Hook's early career was "Cover of the Rolling Stone," a rollicking country-rock tune composed by Silverstein, whose mission in writing the song was fairly transparent. Hook as anything other than what they were: a down-and-dirty Jersey bar band whose tunes more often than not crossed the line into novelty rock, an outlet for the pop-lyrical efforts of countercultural humorist and children's author Shel Silverstein, and, later, a banal disco band specializing in workmanlike ballads such as "When You're in Love with a Beautiful Woman." Furthermore, I promise to make no attempt to paint Dr. Hook, which is possibly the most unpretentious rock music ever recorded. A strained case could be made I guess, but to make such a case would involve a kind of pretense that is the direct antithesis to the music of Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show anywhere remotely near its creative center. I want to explain why to you but, before writing another word, I'd like to promise you something: At no point will I make any kind of postmodern bid to revise the 1970s rock canon to place Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show: Live, and that none has so consistently reminded me what playing music onstage should, at its very highest point, feel like. What I am saying, though, is that none of these films has provided me with the same feeling of entertainment verging on sheer life-affirming joy as has Dr. I'm not saying this little live DVD by a largely forgotten band is better than the abovementioned films by the likes of Scorsese, Godard, Pennebaker, and Bogdanovich. Hook and the Medicine Show doing a live-for-German-TV performance sometime in 1974. To varying degrees, I enjoyed all these films, but if you asked me to tell you my very-favorite-ever cinematic document of a rock and roll band, I would have to break down and admit that it's a 10-dollar import DVD of Dr. I have seen David Bowie's cocaine skeleton doing Burroughsian cut-ups on the floor of a luxury hotel in the difficult-to-find TV special Cracked Actor. slowly drinks himself nearly to death in a darkened swimming pool enclosure and Ozzy pours the orange juice all over the counter. I have seen the movie where Chris Holmes from W.A.S.P. I have seen that double-DVD Tom Petty documentary. (It was only okay.) I have seen The Great Rock and Roll Swindle as well as The Filth and the Fury, Julien Temple's two different documentaries about the Sex Pistols. I have seen the Maysles Brothers' documentary about the Rolling Stones, as well as Jean-Luc Godard's semi-documentary about the Rolling Stones and Robert Frank's notoriously unreleased documentary about the Rolling Stones, which legend has it you're only legally allowed to watch in the presence of both Jagger and Richards. I have seen Don't Look Back, Eat the Document, and No Direction Home. I have seen Woodstock and I have seen The Last Waltz.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |