V V w V V V W w w w mw lqw w w 'W T F E A T U R E S R E L E A S Maing a local video By Dov Cohen TI~wenty years ago every young iong haired punk with dreams of making it big in the music industry took over his family's 2 car garage and tur- ned it into a recording studio. Today things are different. The cars are still out on the street, but the garage has been turned into a television soun- dstage. To make it big in music today, a bane really has to have video backing them up. We're not talking about these MTV style videos with $80,000 budgets (if they had $80,000 what the hell would they be doing making music). We're talking about round-up-the-gang, and- we'll-have-a-good time video made on a Roger Corman shoestring budget. Disband a local 4 man ska group didn't have the equipment to make a MTV style video, so they didn't try to. Con- tent to tell their own story in their own R E C E NT ALBUM S production that's done its black-radio homework. And, as that, it has a cer- tain bubblegum tolerability-the charm of polished inanity. Essentially crass and uninteresting as Make It Big (Christ! spell out the chart-lust man!) is, in its diluted-Motown way, no more deserving of the derision it's going to get than any of the other current U.K. pop idols. D.H. Disband: (From left) Phil Berman, Doug Heller, Kurt Kurtiss, and Fritz Paper way, Disband borrowed a camera from the U-M video department, gathered up a few friends, and on a $35 budget, shot their video for "A Night of Serious Drinking." and throughout it all, they proved one thing: They have a lot of heart. "Nobody rains on our parade," said Disband's new drummer Todd Parol as he watched a leaky roof drizzle all over their set. The rain which covered the floor with Z IiN C -)- -- c t" h..0 w0w W-- 4 0m printed sideways by request of the advertiser a layer of water might have stopped a lot of people, but not Disband, they kept right on filming in the rain. And they still pulled it off. Their video may not be the greatest thing since Twisted Sister's (the video won't be out for a few weks), but they did have one helluva time making it. "Drinking," which Heller says is based on a French novel by Renee Daumal, shows us a '40s or '50s-ish cabaret through the eyes of guitarist Doug Heller. On his way to getting trashed, Heller, a little repulsed, wat- ches as the other characters drink, talk, and do almost everything to excess. "it's not like MTVish characters. They're people..who somehow get together like on Gilligan's island," said dirctor Lisa Knox, a former video major. "It's fun. It's like a party with all your friends...Halloween a little early," said Robin Laurie Silverman, a com- munications major who unwittingly got drafted into the project. "I dropped off one of the members of the band and stopped to watch and Lisa (Knox) handed me a dress. Who am I to argue?" "It's kind of nice to be behind the scenes and get to see what's going on. People have a lot of illusions. There's a lot off camera that you don't see. People don't realize the work that goes behind it,"she said. The session lasted well over 7 hours. It took about 3 hours to set up and prep all the actors, and it took another 4 hours to film. Everytime a different shot was taked, the lights had to be moved, and each scene was rehearsed and rerehearsed before the cameras ever ran. One cast member David Crandall, a 1980 university graduate, was not disillusioned. "This is exactly what I expected. A lot of people waiting around and you get your shot done and you can split... the final project is just the tip of the iceberg," he said. With those words he summed up what the video was all about. When the finished product comes out the viewer won't see how in the middle of a scene, one crew member tried to snake across the stage only to end up with his lower back right in the middle of the camera. The viewer won't see how Tony Hinds, a cast member, stared hypnotized into the camera and then sat back and win- ced realizing what he had done. The viewer also won't see how Direc- tor Know slide on her back across a sopping wet floor in order to get just the right camera angle for the last dance sequence. All these things will end up on the cutting room floor (or on "Foul Ups, Bleeps, and Blunders" if they're lucky.) Camera angles, though, were the least of Knox's problems. Her $35 budget (the average MTV video cost 60 to 80 thousand dollars) was eaten up almost solely by makeup. Her sax player never showed up and the roof leaked for an hour over her main set. "This is the classic kind of thing that drives directors nuts," said Heller. However, the band did the best they could. "Come on it's low budget" said Heller defending the "drinks" he made out of food coloring and water. As for the shortage of actors, Everyone pitched in to help. . Joe Tibone (owner of Joe's Star Lounge) made a cameo appearance and so did one of the makeup women covering for the missing sax player. (Imagine what would have happened if she hadn't been there. It would have been the first video ever without sax or violence.) The pseudo-saxist did a pretty credible job too, except for the time that bassist Kurt Kurtiss had to tell her she had the mouth piece on upside down. The makeup woman turned out to be one of many who shed her camera shyness as the afternoon wore on. "It'll be fun. I was kind of apprehensive about it, "said the band's soundman Tony Hinds. "I don't think I'll be able to stand up in front of that camera. It's just like being on an answering machine, you don't know what to say or do." "Now I know how it feels. I had a video camera and used to walk up and down the halls (of East Quad) and take pictures of people," added Hinds. "I hate being in front of the camera" said Silverman. "My father was a photographer. (But this isn't like that). It'll sort of be like home movies, sitting there and laughing at yourself." And what if the video gets on the MTV Basement Tapes as the band hopes it will. "I'd love it. I think I'd laugh Giorgio Moroder and various ar- tists-Metropolis Soundtrack (Colum- bia) Disco-synth king Moroder took part of the fortune he amassed through his heinous collaborations with Donna Summers and went out and bought the rights to Fritz Lang's classic 1926 film Metropolis, which was fine until he began tampering with it. He added some long lost footage (o.k.) and color tinted the print (questionable), then decided to release it with a new soundtrack, which he of course supervised (horrors). The result, featured on this disc is a cast of "stars" such as Freddie Mercury, Adam Ant, Billy Squire, and Pat Benatar singing songs that are little more than a trite plot synopsis set to some very bad rhymes. Moroder's trademark cascade of dry, unevocative synthesizors swishes and oozes against it all with unvaried repetitiousness. BLB. Wham!-Make It Big (CBS) The Band We Most Wanted to Hate of 1984 (well, maybe of 2nd most, after Frankie Goes to Hollywood) puts out a first domestic LP that isn't quite as embarassing as we would like. There's nothing really good, let alone faintly original, here, but Wham! does accep- table imitations of Stevie Wonder balladry ("Everything She Wants"), of Teddy Pendergrass moist-sheets soul ("Like a Baby"), and of mid-period Donna Summer melodrama ("Careless Whisper"). Less successful is the Springsteen soundalike ("Heartbeat"), and then there's that current snuff-me- or-change-the-station hit single, "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go." The lead singer can change moods and models like a chameleon, but he does his breathy sincerity bits with croony professionalism-he might even be a real white soul boy some day if he stops trying to emulate Boy George, who isn't one. This is roughly equivalent in its in- tent and lasting value to the median Partridge Family album, with the ad- ditions of a more fluid lead singer and a Plan 9:Dealing With the Dead (Mid- night), Excellent psychedelic album from a band which appeared less than a month ago at Joe's and just hinted at this den- sity and imagination of sound. Somewhat indebted to early Grateful Dead and a dozen other, cooler names, Plan 9 psyches-up and out the Standell's garage hardpop to encompass tripouts into the musical psycheworld. By which I mean flippy keyboard solos, terrific re-verbs, clever songs ("I Like Girls," etc.) and excellent production by and of the eight-piece band. Climac- tic think-a-thon is the title cut, a 5-and- a-half minute sustained backwards flip in the direction of instrumental spinout, winding past a good enough basic verse to gradual multi-guitar death; all superbly prefaced by a rumbling intro of dead-serious (crickets, storm soun- ds) blank verse. Plan 9 may not have really gone any further than their sources, but they've perfected the form. D.H. The Replacements-I Will Dare (Twin Tone) Until their album hits the stores, ad- mirers of those gifted young gentlemen from Minneapolis will have to make do with this nifty 12" single. The A side features the "I Will Dare" single from the upcoming LP, a pop concoction featuring Paul Westerberg's charac- teristic contorted vocals counterpoin- ted by his own deft mandolin picking. R.E.M.'s Peter Buck makes a guitar cameo, and the song achieves a bright catchiness while still safely avoiding conventionality. The B side is a fan's bonus of the band indulging in their notorious predeliction for eclectic covering, and is actually more rewar- ding. There's a nice, harshly ham- mered version of T-Rex's '20th Century Boy" and a great reading of Hank William's country classic, "Hey Good Lookin' ". BLB What Is This-Squeezed (MCA Recor- ds) This debut EP from the L.A.-based nuevo-psychedelic band What Is This flaunts rhythmic energy and some adept guitarwork to provide an ultimately mediocre listening ex- perience. For some reason, the band has been getting a lot of attention recently. One of their songs, "Mind My Have Still I," was chosen as part of the soundtrack of that real bomb movie The Wild Life, and the boys, God bless 'em, have a video on M-TV. As their name implies, What Is This seem to think that they're so new, original and imaginative that you just can't hope to categorize them. This is not the case. The guitar sound is most obviously a derivative (it's not nice to say "ripoff") of Jimi Hendrix, and vocalist Alain Johannes borrows stylistically from Jack Bruce of Cream. Their sound is powerful and im- pressive, but not original. "My Head is a Drum" and "Days of Reflection" are particularly good examples of how ef- fectively this quartet can mold rhyth- mic sophistication and intricate guitar- playing, but one can't help thinking he's heard this stuff before (Robin Trower perhaps?). As a crowning blow, the lyrics here are just a bit too artsy-far- tsy (it's not nice to say "stupid") for me. I mean, even Jim Morrison would be embarressed to sing most of these chemically inspired ramblings. D.P. W.A.S. 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