When You're Strange - A documentary about The Doors, narrated by Johnny Depp.
The movie begins with a car crash, a Morrison look-alike gets out of the wreck and begins hitchhiking along the road. A car stops to pick him up and cuts to the next scene where he's now driving the car, alone, through the desert, and listening to a radio broadcast announcer stating that Morrison died that day in Paris. Are they implying the death was faked? A hoax?
Next we see performance scenes from the band's history, interspersed with album covers, playing as if being rewound from last to first. Stop. Again, our look-alike, reviewing a map of California. We get some brief historical context, and then a famous scene of the band introducing themselves coming off a plane.
What follows is the standard history of how the band came together, narrated over real footage of the band, some performance, some casual. While the other members of the band are discussed, the focus is still predominately on Morrison.
All in all I think the documentary is a good film, and it's much more real and honest compared to the movie Olive Stone did a few years ago, but it feels a bit redundant from a fan's perspective. They offer some footage that isn't as commonly circulated, and that is very nice to see, but it still feels like just another movie about Jim Morrison.
The film closes with a mention that his father finally acknowledged Morrison...10 years after his death....
When contemplating a cd review, this is the first that came to mind, not because I think it's particularly well written or enjoyable (I do think that, but we'll get to that later), but because I feel it was a tipping point in not only in the band's career, but for the overall genre as well.
Taken from the band's wikipedia page:
"Countdown to Extinction is the fifth studio album by American heavy metal band Megadeth, released in 1992. It is the band's best-selling album selling over two million copies and achieving Double platinum status. The album also produced the band's most successful hit singles: "Symphony of Destruction", "Sweating Bullets", "Skin O' My Teeth" and "Foreclosure of a Dream". Videos were made for all singles and also for "High Speed Dirt". Countdown to Extinction was nominated for Best Metal Performance at the 1993 Grammy Awards.
According to "National Album Positioning Charts", Countdown To Extinction sold 2,197,960 albums in United States.
It is the band's first album not to feature their mascot Vic Rattlehead on the album cover."
"It's about what happened to my family under the Reagan administration. The government put my family, who were farmers in Minnesota, out of business." (Ellefson, 1992)
You'll notice that I'm including videos from the album on this post, and while I will make a larger point about them later, I would like to point out that they're not imbedded in the post because I wanted to include the original videos and youtube has them marked as 'embedding disabled by request.'
To offer a point of referrence, I was a freshman in high school when this album was released in 1992. At that time I, along with most of my other friends who enjoy this type of music, felt very betrayed by the release of this album, and with the clarity of hindsight it seems many others did as well. Not because an artist we enjoyed failed to deliver a good piece of work, they did that much, but because they obviously made some changes (read: compromises) to their creative style in an attempt to make more money.
The album that was released prior to this, Rust in Peace, had one very commercial track that became a big single for the band,
This was a double edged sword for the band. On one hand it opened them up to a wider fan base and really attracted the attention of MTV, on the other hand, the pressures and problems that come with that success ultimately came along with it. The real problem for the band though, was that the commercial qualities of that song weren't what most of their fan base wanted, nor was it really what gave them the brief success they enjoyed and caused Countdown to Extinction to debut at #2 on Billboard's chart. The real reason for that success was that Rust in Peace was full of amazing musical intricacy, such as what is displayed in this song:
or this song:
Apparently no one stopped to ask the fans which part they liked more, and as a result this album rode on the coattails of it's predecessor. What is sad, even in the liner notes written by Dave Mustaine for the 2005 re-release, he fails to realize this was the case. I could sit here and talk about it all day, but I'd rather let you hear some of the evidence for yourself. Below you'll find the official studio version that was originally released for two songs, and the original demo versions for those same songs (included on the 2005 reissue) that were offered as a start, before the folks at the label got ahold of them. Ignore the vocals on the demos, they're pretty rough, but if you can listen beyond, you'll hear the musical direction that this album should have taken and would have given the band continued success and longevity.
All in all this was a solid effort from an already accomplished band, but it could have been more and carved a much more direct pathway for the artists that came next.
In June of last year (2009) I witnessed what I consider to be the best musical performance I have ever seen, and ironically it wasn't in the traditional fashion, it was also the first concert I've seen that was 100% streamed live over the internet. The show was Faith No More (www.FNM.com) at the Download festival in the UK. This was the beginning of their renunion tour, and only the second show they had played in over ten years (they stopped touring in 1998).
The show wasn't without it's gliches, actually it's really funny to watch Mike Patton forget the lyrics like he does close to the end of The Real Thing (about 7:28, here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0TuIKVoF4Q&feature=related ), but all in all the show's sound was flawless and the song lineup had something for every fan including a creatively placed Peaches and Herb cover to kick things off; Reunited -
The highlights for me were the inclusion of From Out of Nowhere, Land of Sunshine, Chinese Arithmetic, Evidence, Last Cup of Sorrow, Midlife Crisis, Ashes to Ashes and Stripsearch.
To Learn more about Faith No More, the summary on their Wikipedia page does a fairly nice job of parsing their history down to a sound bite, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_No_More. In my opinion, this is one of the most important bands of my generation, no other has been as been as successful in effectively cross pollenating music genres or has been as influential to so many other artists. You can also find Roddy Bottum's blog here: http://www.roddybottum.com/roddybottum.com/blog/blog.html
Fortunately you can still watch the rest of the show, albeit piecemeal, here:
2 - The Real Thing -
3 - From Out of Nowhere -
4 - Land of Sunshine -
5 - Caffeine -
6 - Evidence -
7 - Poker Face/Chinese Arithmetic -
8 - Surpise! You're Dead! -
9 - Easy -
10 - Last Cup of Sorrow -
11, 12, 13 - Midlife Crisis, Introduce Yourself, Gentle Art of Making Enemies -
