From my house to Bauhaus

Today I found out that Goth legends the Bauhaus are putting out their first album in 25 years: Go Away White. And how did I find out about this? National Public Radio.

I never thought I’d hear about the Bauhaus on NPR. Then again I never thought I’d go to a BEA book party dj’d by the Misshapes either. Such is life.

This interview/review/report is inadvertently hilarious; it’s worth listening to if you like to (lovingly) poke fun at NPR or Goth, both of which I do frequently. Aired on LA’s Day to Day, British journalist/musician Christian Boudeaux reports that despite some poppy tunes, “me thinks the goth cap fits pretty well” on the new album.

New album, not so great. The original stuff, though, made from 1979-1983 is not just classic goth rock, it’s pretty fucking great post punk. Not in line with their Vampire tongue-in-cheek posing, a great deal of the Bauhaus’ music was actually very indicative of the name they took from the design movement: stark, cold, and angular. And despite being arbiteurs of horror kitsch, their sound was  quite an original take on glam (Ziggy as silent film monster crossed with Artaud?). They were heavily indebted to Eno, Bowie, and T-Rex, artists the band acknowledge with several covers.

Daniel Ash’s sharp guitars and David J’s seductive bass are what always do it for me. While Peter Murphy was writhing on stage, Ash, David J, and Kevin Haskins infused heavy doses of dub-reggae and Kraut-style prog rock. What came out of only four albums (none palpably great full albums, but the compilations of singles and b-sides do them justice) is extremely idiosyncratic for such a short-lived project. 

  

 Leigh Lezark and Christian (Project Runway winner) both indebted to Bauhaus’ style?

Lead singer Peter Murphy went on to do folk-y pop albums and also converted to Muslim (making him a kind of post punk Cat Stevens); Daniel Ash made some astonishingly good music with Tones on Tail and a whole lotta hits with fellow ex-Bauhaus Kevin Haskins and David J in Love and Rockets.  

Here’s to the Bauhaus and their many offshoots.

 (all songs are Bauhaus unless indicated)

Kick in the Eye (Nice downtown NYC No Wave-era saxophone )

No New Tale to Tell—Love and Rockets

Dark Enteries

Third Uncle (Bauhaus covering Eno, very well, I might add)

Go!–Tones on Tail (A major club hit…later to become Starburst commercial background music….and a GREAT song. Very happy)

Slice of Life 

Killer Couple Kill Colonel (Ash took the lyrics straight from a newspaper…one of my favorites. Sort of like a musical version of Hanake’s Funny Games) 

HE WAS THERE: D.A. Pennebaker

Accompanied by my friend Gina, last Monday I had the pleasure to view D.A. Pennebaker’s brilliant documentary Don’t Look Back which chronicles Bob Dylan’s tour through England in 1965. And thanks to the wonderful program direction of the Film Forum, we not only viewed a beautiful restored copy on the big screen, but we also got to listen to Mr. Pennebaker speak about the film in person. 

Don’t Look Back is unarguably monumental. It’s not merely one of the first rock n’ roll documentaries, but it one of the first American films to showcase the Cinéma Vérité technique, defined as “a television-style technique of recording life and people as they really are, using hand-held cameras, natural sound and the minimum of rehearsal and editing.”Or as Pennebaker so bluntly stated: “Well, it’s like your first date; you make it up as you go along.” You can listen to his refreshingly unpretentious perspective here in the audio of the Q&A from last Monday evening.

Furthermore, it’s not just an important documentary in film history, but it is an unparallelled document of what I’d argue as the most artistically important era of Dylan’s career. It’s also the most intimate view of the genius that exists–even with the advent of the Scorsese documentary, a far more traditional example of the documentary medium. The great irony of this work is that although it is so intimate in scope, the subject never lets the audience get remotely close to his inner being. Unlike another great backstage documentary Meeting People is Easy, where we see Radiohead’s Thom Yorke unraveled on tour, Pennebaker’s portrait of Dylan showcases him as an aloof waif, a unwavering persona who reacts to fame with alternating moments of disdain and absurd humor.

Throughout his jaunt in England, Dylan is, I can only assume, stoned out of his mind. He chainsmokes. He insults journalist after journalist (often with hilarious results). He wastes a lot of time backstage and in hotel rooms with his entourage of foppish hanger-ons and beautiful mod women. Drunk, high, and gleefully sophomoric, Dylan and his pack also only vaguely tolerate a very annoying and much older Joan Baez (who disappears midway through film, for the good of all of us). Donovan, the subject of both jealousy and derision, is their most constant butt of jokes. Check out this clip of  a very drunk Alan Price (from the seminal Brit Invation band The Animals) and Dylan discussing Donovan’s merits.

  

Even though the majority of footage shows Dylan as a hipper-than-hell jokester (whose jokes are often edged with genuine cruelty), the actual concert footage is breathtaking. Looking back now on so many Dylan eras (check out, if you have not already, Todd’s Haynes’ I’m Not There, still at Film Forum, for an avant-garde exploration of them, not to mention Cate Blanchett’s dead-on impersonation), it is refreshing to watch one single era. There is no, quite simply, no better way to understand Dylan’s importance than to see the brash genius up on stage alone, haunting and historic, armed only with lyrics, his harmonica and a guitar.

D.A. Pennebaker also directed another one of my favorite music docs, the concert video Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: The Motion Picture (1973), which documents the last concert of the Ziggy era, where David Bowie and his backing group The Spiders from Mars perform at the Hammersmith Odeon. This is the famous “Rock n’ Roll Suicide” show when Ziggy proclaimed it to be their final concert (leaving a perplexed and forlorn audience). Ziggy is the last time the world would see Mark Bolan and David Bowie do that dirty oh so dirty! guitar fellating thing and the last time Bowie would don feathers in such a glorious and beyond-human fashion.

 

Unless, of course, you watched Jonathan Reys Meyers as the Bowie/sorta Eno/sorta Lou Reed avatar in Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine…hmm, do you think Mr. Haynes might have a bit of a Pennebaker fetish?