Trip report: viewing SST: The Tour live 1985 video. Out of print SST Records home video of “The Tour,” live @ The Stone San Francisco, CA May 1st 1985. Released 1986.
Seems a tad out of sync, delayed audio .1 sec with VLC.
First up is SWA. Don’t recall hearing them before, this is pretty terrible. Singer’s blatant Jaggerisms unattractive. Wearing fedora with card tucked into brim, wielding tambourine. Should be beaten severely. Bald attention-whore bassist shaking like Flea. Like Ratt but shittier and more pretentious.
Next up: Saccharine Trust. Significant improvement. Vocals still not very good but far better guitar skronk and far lower douche quotient. Ew, track with intoned faux-poetic spoken lyrics like some Slint post-rock forerunner. Ugh. Still, good guitar, subject worthy of further investigation, always looking for good non-shitty underground non-mainstream oriented rock, especially from this era.
Now to the “name” bands, starting with the only band still active (and with only a drummer change at that), the Meat Puppets. Unrehearsed half-assed version of “Sea of Love” wastes a couple minutes, gets off to a real start with “Up On The Sun”. Fairly solid but plagues by the trademark erratically-pitched vocals that would tend to characterize the band until around the time of their post-Nirvana breakthrough. Hmm, Hendrix’s “Little Wing” another odd cover choice, but one that seems better-practiced–into the Allmans’ “Midnight Rider” done speed-punk style. Cute. A bit too much of the wacky side of the Puppets and not enough of the solid side for me though.
Perhaps the rarest of the footage is that of the Minutemen, oddly enough starting off with what has become their best-known song, “Corona” (though it’s admittedly only “The Jackass Theme” to most people). D. Boon in action is a rare sight, making pretty much every minute of the Minutemen segment fascinating. “Lost” jam finale with Puppet Curt Kirkwood on vocals is fun, but more prime D. Boon would again have been preferable.
Finally, the headliners, Husker Du. I somehow get the feeling Husker Du records are probably primarily bought these days by teenage/college-age Nirvana/Foo Fighters fans working their way backwards through the band’s influences, though I may be wrong of course. The dynamic on display here is hard to ignore as a direct Nirvana precedent, certainly, and anyone looking here for evidence of such will not be disappointed — watch this and tell me Grant Hart here isn’t Dave Grohl before Dave Grohl was Dave Grohl. If anything, it’s striking how much the mainstream subsequently moved toward what’s on display from Husker Du here, and it makes me wonder how much money Husker Du is leaving on the table right now, frankly. A solid performance from front to back and an adequate replication of their trebly cymbal/distortion overtone-heavy album sound with the exception of slightly more audible bass. “Eight Miles High” cover goes on a bit. “Makes No Sense At All” closer hits like “Teen Spirit”.
“All-star”"Louie Louie” finale with pretty much everyone notable from all bands jamming together is kinda fun but let’s face it, the novelty punk cover button has franklybeen pushed too many times already at this point.
Altogether, a worthwhile artifact and a unique snapshot of a bygone moment in time.
