Bobzilla

It’s said to be the greatest concert film ever made, but the T.A.M.I Show in its finished form has been elusive almost since it was released. The Teen Age Music International Show was filmed at the Santa Monica Civic over two nights in late 1964 for eventual release as a feature film, a way for all the small town kids that couldn’t make it to concerts see what their favorite acts were like on stage. After its first theatrical run, the Beach Boys insisted that their sequence be cut out...

Roky Erickson’s new album begins and ends with a field recording, made by his mother during a visit to the Rusk State Maximum Security Prison For The Criminally Insane. He’d been sent there after being arrested for possession of one joint in 1969, and served for three years. What happenned to him during those years profoundly altered the rest of his life, as he battled a raging depression and paranoia that left him only partly functional even at the height of his career. As of a decade ago, it was reported that his condition had deteriorated almost beyond hope of recovery, ravaged by dementia and a life-threatening dental abscess. He seemed, from the outside, to have been left for dead.

“Hi folks, I’m Randy - the lead singer of the Residents! Over here is Chuck, and that’s Bob over there on the guitar.” Well what do you know? The world’s most famous anonymous musicians have just outed themselves on stage at the Music Box… kind of...

Watching St. Vitus romp through their twenty-five year old catalog in front of a big crowd of foaming-at-the-mouth headbangers at a warehouse in Downtown LA last week was not just a reminder of days gone past, but a delivery of some kind of justice for a band that forged the genre of Doom Metal without many people even noticing at the time. But during their twenty years of absence, they’ve built up a following. They are truly one of those groups that only sold a few records in their day, but inspired every single person that bought one to start a band. “This is the best LA audience Vitus has EVER played to,” said guitarist Dave Chandler early in the set, and if you were around at the time they invented that stuff, it’s not hard to believe it.

At this point in their career, Sonic Youth present a paradox: they’re radicals that are also reliable entertainers. However far out they might go, they eventually come back to something that sounds vaguely like 1987’s “Schizophrenia”: fast, strummy guitar lines, a hazy vocal track, a driving rhythm section, harmonies twisting like vines, a colossal racket wrapped around a deceptively catchy tune that threatens to explode at any moment. The intent is to expand the number...

It’s a good year for documentary films about sincere and dedicated heavy metal musicians from the frozen north, doggedly dedicated to their craft after decades of toil, despite a lack of commercial success. But unlike the surprise hit Anvil! The Story Of Anvil, the newly released Until The Light Takes Us, directed by Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell, is no heartwarmer. It’s more horror movie than documentary, and the realization that these guys are still following their dreams may prompt some viewers to wonder what can be done to stop them.

After twenty years of missing deadlines on the Warner Bros. release schedule, Neil Young finally issued his long-promised Archives Vol. 1 1963-1972 set earlier this year, a mammoth collection of studio recordings both familiar and previously-unheard, along with four live shows from his early years. Fans have been eagerly awaiting the next live set in the series, which if we’re working in chronological order, should obviously be from one of the tours Young did in 1973, two journeys across America and the UK which found him at his most completely unhinged.

Tomorrow night, the Silent Movie Theater hosts a very special event celebrating the realease of the compelling new book Dear Andy Kaufman, I Hate Your Guts (Process Media), a collection of the mail Kaufman received in response to his televised 1979 challenge to the women of America: beat me in a wrestling match and I will pay you one thousand dollars. As the book reveals, Kaufman’s provocations inspired some pretty severe reactions, evidence that he was succeeding on the most basic level.

Todd Rundgren, the boundary-defying musician, vocalist, composer, producer and original Zen Master of computer technology applied to music, embarks on a very special mini-tour this week, performing his 1973 release A Wizard, A True Star in its entirety in four California cities. This Friday at the Orpheum Theater, Todd and his band will reprise an album so full of music, the pressing required narrowing the grooves so that it could all fit. Covering just about every rock/pop genre even a journeyman fan could imagine...

Forty horrifying years into his career, Alice Cooper is still sacrificing himself to audiences on a nightly basis. Not content to give his life for show business just once, in his current Theater Of Death tour, which stopped at the Nokia Theater, he endures a beheading, a hanging, and a blood-spewing run-through with a dozen swords. If it gets a raised fist and a “woo!”, he will spare himself from nothing.