From the Jan 15 – Jan 21, 2004 issue

Music

Live Wire

Dance Fever

by Jennifer Maerz

Every cultural scene benefits from a good documentarian. The New York/ Detroit punk factions of the '70s are given new life every time a teenager picks up a copy of Please Kill Me; the Decline of Western Civilization videos, while not too historically vital, shed some humor on the worlds they document. Charles Peterson and Alice Wheeler have photographed Seattle musicians since way back in the day, and San Francisco photographer/video-grapher Virgil Porter covered live shows with his cable access program Burn My Eye! (www.burnmyeye.com) until he (sadly) recently stopped taping.

Now there's a new group of people in Seattle who want to catalog our music scene, and they should be popping up on cable access in the next few weeks. Calling themselves Live Eye TV, the organizers of the half-hour, once-a-month program on SCAN TV (77/29) have already been out videotaping various shows around town.

"[Our] mission involves a documenting/ archiving process of this brief moment in Seattle's rock history," says Live Eye's John Gow. "Something great and fun is going on, and we feel compelled to be a part of it.... The show should feel like being a little kid in 1976, and sneaking downstairs to watch Saturday Night Live with your big sister." Gow says ideally the program will include hiphop and electronic music segments as well as rock, and will also encompass "art, fashion, drugs, sex, and politics." While they plan on having live show footage (Gow taped the recent A Frames and Dipers shows, and says he wants to get film on everyone from the Decemberists, Kinski, and Sun City Girls to the Divorce, S, Xiu Xiu, Akimbo, Silent Lambs Project, and Onry Ozzborn, among others), they'll also have taped interviews and showcases for local film and video artists. Since the show is still in its early stages (despite the goal of airing a pilot at the end of January/beginning of February), the six-member crew is looking to expand, and is actively recruiting volunteers. For more information e-mail liveeyetv@yahoo.com.

This past weekend was not a good one for being on crutches--I missed out on a whole lot of dancing (and I'm not referring to the tryouts for creepy-sounding Cowgirls Inc., the Coyote Ugly-style bar opening in Pioneer Square). I'm talking about the legendary Grandmaster Flash starting a scene at Chop Suey. The turntable legend/ father of hiphop is pals with comedian Chris Rock, who was in town for a few shows at the Paramount and who swung by Flash's show afterward. Rock got up on stage and the performers gave each other props for being so massively talented. Chop Suey booker Steven Severin tells me that Rock and his entourage then got down and danced with the common folk, and that the comedian was very patient about getting mobbed by fans. From what I hear, Oldominion's JFK was particularly, um, excited about the surprise appearance, rubbing up on the whole Rock crew and getting laughs from the funny man himself for going so crazy.

In clubland news, Graceland's reopening party--at which they'll show off an expanded lounge--is January 17, the very same week that booker Jason Lajuenesse and assistant booker Melissa Quayle head over to work at Neumo's. And Chop Suey is replacing the void left by Neumo's swiping Yo, Son! by adding a new Sunday-night dance party. Starting February 1, their weekend will end with Shake, a weekly DJ event dedicated to old-school funk, soul, and R&B, kicked off with the Sharpshooters' DJ Sureshot.

The Fitness are kicking off a New York tour, hopefully earning national buzz for their perfectly snotty, distorted electro-punk. I saw them perform recently and they've grown leaps and bounds as a live act. The crowd was frantically dancing and singing along to their radio hits on an unusually crowded Monday night. The Fitness also got a recent boost from indie music site Pitchforkmedia.com, where, in reviewing their single "Chauffeur," Josef Kaplan wrote: "I want another 'White Light/White Heat,' another song that's been up for three days snorting coke, defecating in the bathtub, and having sloppy sex with a bedspread. Nowadays drugs are so clean. Where's the perversion? Where's the lunacy? Enter The Fitness, armed with a single so hypnotically decadent, so calculatingly derivative, it immediately answers both questions by overdriving ten synthesizers and giving your kids its illegal prescriptions." Sounds like prescribed perversion has a high street value these days.

jennifer@thestranger.com

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