Looking for Johnny, The Legend of Johnny Thunders, DVD Documentary

Who was Johnny Thunders? He was the legendary guitarist, singer, songwriter with the New York Dolls, the Heartbreakers, and as a solo artist who died in 1991 at the tender age of 36. The Danny Garcia docu-biography film Looking for Johnny is out on DVD (MVD Visual 6544D) and I watched it the other night with interest.

Johnny was in some ways a Keith Richards of the later generation of rockers. He wrote effective songs, played guitar in straightforward ways, and lived an image of the rocker-on-the-edge that was all too real. The film follows his life with extensive interview footage, including some of Johnny himself, concert/club video excerpts and a chronological narrative.

It tells the story of how he fit in with the New York Dolls and their emphasis on raw hard rock and a visual wallop, then follows him into the Heartbreaker days when the music continued in the raw and hard vein that was in the end intertwined with punk though in the musical sense it had a kinship but not an absolutely identical quality. And it goes on to his solo and on again, off again band offshoots.

It is a story of the tragedy of rock excess. By this period the image of the rock star and legitimation by self-destruction had carried over from the earlier jazz-Bird ethos and entered the electric music scene. Johnny got heavily into hard drugs and ultimately it contributed to his early death but also in part hindered any significant major success. He was and many in his band were so obviously strung out that they gained a reputation for unreliability which seems quite warranted. Beisides, a dangerous image was one thing but the rock world needed artists to produce on demand and Johnny was not always ready to put together a cohesive musical presentation when it was most needed.

His solo career is covered in some depth and on the musical side it revealed Johnny as a more versatile songwriter with a prolific ability to come up with some good tunes.

But mostly this is a story of a talent that gradually slid down the slope of self-destruction into an early oblivion. In that way he was the prototypical rocker of the era, a person who would rather destroy himself than grow old. The film describes that slide in detail, harrowingly I suppose you could say. The testimony of friends and associates, band members and rock industry magnates associated with his career, all of it contributes to a vivid picture of someone who simply could not stop, who was inside a fragile creature not really suited to the emotional and lifestyle extremes of the rock scene of the day.

It's very sad in the end. And pretty riveting throughout. Certainly a good and engrossing documentation of the New York scene and the burgeoning raw-rock revival. It explains his success, and it goes into the labyrinthian variables that the music business embodied in his day, how his dangerous image was both a way to sell him and also what kept him off the mainstream money-wagon for the most part. Fascinating.

Lou Reed, Tribute, The DVD Collection

Lou Reed has left us. There is a lack. The summing up begins. Part of that you can experience in a three-DVD set, Tribute, The DVD Collection (Chrome Dreams 3IS042). It is a collection of three interrelated programs, running to a total of 279 minutes. The three disks are The Velvet Underground Under Review; Punk Revolution NYC, Part One 1966-1974, The Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls and the CBGB Set; and The Sacred Triangle: Bowie, Iggy & Lou 1971-73.

Watching all three together gives you a quite reasonable look at Lou and the Velvets and the early days of Reed's career, the context and impact of it all. The first DVD follows the Velvets formation, their rather erratic career and the way that what they offered differed from the psychedelic rock scene on the West Coast. The second DVD situates the Velvets in the New York punk revolution. And the third DVD focuses on the interrelationships of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed, with Bowie as both catalyst to the other two creatively and in some ways too as parasitic upon and capitalizing on aspects of the other's visions.

There is so much in the three programs to digest that I will not attempt to cover it all. Several important themes emerge and the detailed discussions about it seem relevant. One of course would be how Andy Warhol's influence worked to allow and encourage the Velvets to present their music in uncompromised ways, in the raw. New York's gritty realism, its world of early gay liberation, hard drugs, dystopian variations of poverty, its emphasis on pushing lifestyle frontiers to both creative and destructive extremes, the never-steady balance between creation and self-destruction that underground New York was in part about helped in turn create Lou and the Velvet's ambiguous vision of rock-as-art.

The way the Velvets set the scene for NY's later punk underground gets plenty of attention on the second disk, and it gives you a look at some of the known AND lesser-known artists and bands in on the ground floor at the very first stages.

Volume three covers the time period after the Velvets split up, when David Bowie stepped in to help direct Lou's energy into a saleable mainstream as Bowie simultaneously benefitted himself from Reed's personal presentation and persona--and how that two-way situation was also present in the Bowie-Iggy nexus, though at least initially it did not help the Iggy-Stooges commercially as it did Reed.

There is a good deal of attention given to the success factor. The first Velvets album initially sold something like 6,000 copies. The Stooges fared similarly in the beginning. What was an underlying constant in the rock underground for a long while was the idea that the scene thrived on commercial quasi-failure. If the Velvets had created a pop smash in those first years they may have been less of a legend for it. How that relates to Andy Warhol's high art idea of small quantity production, the entrance of rock into the pop charts, the eventual disengagement with hit-factory mechanics and the rise of a separate FM rock identity could have been dealt with more as it is critical to where the Velvets fit in originally. The way it played out was that it was more conducive to legendary status to keep the following small and in-the-know, at least at first. The Velvets, Fugs, Mothers, Stooges and other bands had longevity by failing to capture the typical listener. Dylan was in part vetted by his initial underground, small local origins.

The aesthetic of rawness so important to the Velvets, the Stooges, punk and such is a theme that gets attention but could be underscored more forcefully in my opinion. That first blast of the Velvets seemed pretty crude at the time, I can remember. And that it was purposefully so was not an immediate revelation to all those seeking an underground local music.

The three DVDs worked together to make you think about the scene more than you would have otherwise. There are good interviews and insights. It's up to others to continue the discussion. This is a good start.