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Show ( ar : ----- n J, i ib Jh, A mX V... Park Record ThursJ.y, j ( II ! j i n I v IT T I ! I ! I -L. ,f &t .lteMI0wl pv.MaM VtsM'" ' Mt . 2 . , 1 , Documentary winner "Beruit, the Last Home Movie" ; . : . 1 I- . v. . ' V Bruce Bach sends the signal from Steeps to KPCVV for broadcast. i ' ' . KPCW broadcasts from Steeps By RON GEORG Record staff writer Once aeain there is a reason for fans of contemporary, popular music to switch on KPCW late at night. There was a time when the late-night late-night slot was filled with progressive sounds, but programming, managing, manag-ing, and supervising the station late at night was proving rather taxing. That was combined with complaints by classical music fans that their public radio station was only serving the best interest of part of the public. To solve these problems, KPCW started broadcasting classical music in the evening, and the station c lit if trktim of 11 n m Whilo fhio Cnlii- tion has worked well for the station, it created a void in the late-night airwaves, air-waves, and it left a vast, untapped audience without music. Elsewhere, over at Steeps, there is plenty of good late-night music, but not everyone is old CtlOUgH, rich enough, or perhaps awake enough to go dance, drink, or just listen at Steeps. Who knows what these folks are doing home, awake between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m., but it's certain they weren't listening to local radio. At least, they weren't until Jan. 16, when KPCW began broadcasting live from Steeps with Eddie Rabbit's performance during the Senator's Cup. Wandering out of a late film t A' 1 T m T L. J iesuvai movie Jan. 10, i uirueu uu my car radio, preparing to pop in a tape, since I was expecting KPCW to be off the air. Much to my surprise, I Commander By RON GEORG Record staff writer The night-time fare in Park City is becoming pretty standard, though with bands like the Rhythmights and the Block and Tackle Band I'm not complaining, but it's good to see Steeps at the Base is bringing in some out of town talent to fill out the bill. . This week's list includes the Subdudes, Sub-dudes, Jan. 28, Buffalo Springfield Revisited, Jan. 29 and 30, Little Women, Feb. 1, and Commander Cody, Feb. 3 and 4. Two of those names are suprising to see anywhere. Buffalo Springfield disbanded while I was still banging on the bars of my play-pen, in 1967. Commander Cody was in a near-fatal near-fatal car wreck last year, and his is a welcome return. To start off with, Buffalo Springfield Spr-ingfield Revisited doesn't include Neil Young or Stephen Stills. In fact, the only original member in the band is bassist and Buffalo Springfield Spr-ingfield co-founder Bruce Palmer. The revisited version of the band got its start in 1984 when Palmer assembled a group of musicians . calling themselves the Springfield Band. With Palmer's direction, the group performed some original material and some from Buffalo Springfield, and their act was well received. , Upon seeing their performance, Neil Young granted the band permission per-mission to use the original band's name. With this bit of tribute, the , band should provide a great performance perfor-mance for fans of Buffalo Springfield. Spr-ingfield. , . Fans of Commander Cody, however, need no outside tribute to confirm Cody's persistant success. Having been around since 1967 in heard music. I don't care much for Eddie Rabbit, Rab-bit, but I was going to leave the radio on until something better come along. Then I heard an announcer say it was live from Steeps. Intrigued, I kept listening. The sound quality was clean and sharp, and it had the high-energy quality of a live performance. Despite my dislike of Rabbit's music, I went home to listen some more. Since this experiment worked, KPCW and Steeps plan to bring listeners all of Steeps's performances perfor-mances this season. Each night, after the classical programs pro-grams finish at 11 p.m., Bruce Bach will climb up into the d.j. booth at Steeps to flick the right switches to send the music over the phone lines to the radio station, where a d.j. will flip a couple more switches, check the sound levels, and broadcast the performance to Park City. Coming over the phone lines, people peo-ple expect the music to sound like a ' conversation with Aunt Martha. On the contrary, a special line, called a "dedicated loop," was installed especially for the broadcasts. The line is capable of carrying high-fidelity, high-fidelity, stereo sound. The broadcasts will be fairly regular, as Steeps is trying to bring in acts seven nights a week. With the backing of Anheuser-Busch, which buys a two-hour time slot for each performance, the station has a solid cash flow to sponsor the project. There will be no programs when either Steeps has no entertainment, or KPCW deems the performer too risque for the general public. Cody, Buffalo Springfield to play $ I ill s Little Women will be at Steeps bars and clubs around the country, Cody is the perennial roadhouse musician. In a recent telephone interview, Cody, aka George Frayne, summed up his consistency. Not one to follow social trends, Frayne just wants to make music. "Music isn't supposed to bring social consciousness,'' he said. "Music is for just the opposite of that, it's just for good times. " , The music he makes, with the Commander Cody Band, is the Ultimate good times music. It is country, blues, bluegrass, rockabilly; rockabil-ly; in a word, honkey-tonk. Don't mistake Frayne for some hick, however. His music is simple, but it's always hip. " . V.. .. i Ti : Ron Georg So far, the program is going beautifully. As an experiment, I went to Steeps Jan. 25 to see the Caribbean Allstars, leaving early to catch the last part of the show at home on my stereo. Live, the Allstars were hot. Quite a few reggae bands are loose melodically, relying on the rub-a-dub rhythm to cover weak lines. The band has been together since 1979, but some of the members have been together since as far back as 1974. In that time, they have assembled a collection of original and cover tunes in reggae, calypso, makossa, and even more obscure genres. They speak all these musical languages fluently, having musicians musi-cians from Trinidad, Guyana, Cameroon, Jamaica, and the U.S. The eight-man band performs its melodic magic with a number of instruments, in-struments, including the flute, sax, ; trumpet, bass, guitar, keyboards, various percussion intruments, and the steel drums. That was what I saw live. At home, I could still identify each musician separately, from the depth of the bass to the soprano of the steel drums. Taken directly from the sound board, without the crowd noise, the sound at home was as clear, if not more so, than the live performance. This week, Steeps and KPCW will feature The Subdudes Jan. 28, Buffalo Buf-falo Springfield Revisited Jan. 29 and 30, Little Women Feb. 1 (this show may be subject to cancellation for its content), Commander Cody Feb. 3 and 4. Feb. 1. Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen, the original name of the Commander Cody Band, was part of an enigmatic side of Sixties counterculture which included the New Riders of the Purple Sage and Old and In the Way. j All three bands were a part of the counterculture in late Sixties San Francisco, but they traced their roots to the county's rural South. While much of San Francisco was looking for new ways to use feedback, feed-back, these bands were perfecting their technique on fiddles and steel guitars. "). . Roots like that go deep, so Cody will always have a following. Frayne will be jamming on his keyboards fit 'X by JENNIFER MADGIC Record staff writer Director and producer of Beirut: The Last Home Movie, Jennifer Fox, said she was "nervous" "ner-vous" about taking the award for best documentary in the 1987 U.S. Film Festival. Although the response "nervous" "ner-vous" isn't a typical one for someone so-meone awarded such an honor, Fox explained it saying she hoped it wouldn't change her status as an independent film maker, namely causing others to expect things from her work. "I heard that I was making big mistakes since the beginning," beginn-ing," said Fox. After the screening of "Beirut" in the Egyptian Theatre on Sunday Fox called it, "the nicest theater this film has ever been shown in." The discouragement heard throughout the six years of producing pro-ducing the film was overcome by a group of people "who believed in it and pushed to see it through," said Fox after accepting ac-cepting the award on Saturday night. The believing was ironically characteristic of much of the film, which told the true story of a family living in Beirut amongst the sporatic fighting between the Christians and Moslems. Although wealthy enough to leave, the family chooses to continue to live inside the confines of a family estate located in one of the most heavily heavi-ly bombed areas of Beirut. Known to be one of the richest families in Lebanon due to a family history of extensive lan-downership, lan-downership, the family stays primarily because of the house, which was built in the 1830's by a grandmother. It seems the realization of war is not enough to extinguish the feelings behind the traditionalism of family. Through bombings, water shortages, shor-tages, power outages, the present pre-sent day family perseveres, believing that one day life as it used to be will return to normal. Fox is successful in portraying both sides of situation, the fighting and the family who tries almost pathetically to ignore the fighting. Fox got the idea for the documentary after meeting Gaby, one of three sisters in the family and the main speaker during the film, while Gaby was in the United States studying at . the age of 19. Intrigued with an article which appeared in The Washington Post on Gaby and the recent damage to her home in Beirut, Fox pursued the story and made arrangements to film the situation in the early 80's. with a Jerry Lee Lewis fever, and Steeps will get rocking for Cody's performance. As Frayne says of a Cody show, "It's like a Mardi Gras party. Drink a few beers, spark one up, just dance whatever it is you do, just do it and don't hurt anybody." One band which should bring its own fan club is Little Women, a reggaerock reg-gaerock band which has gained a dedicated following in quite a few towns across the West. This is a band which believes in paying its dues. Traveling around in an equipment-laden van, the band See BANDS B2 She lived with the family for a few months during the shooting, filming many interviews, family discussions and daily happen- i tnTc ornnnH ttiA hnma Tt nae difficult to tell if the family ever worked. Aside from tending their garden or shaking out the rugs, the film never showed any of the family members driving off to a job, which left the audience au-dience somewhat disillusioned as to how the family survived. At the conclusion of the film Fox revealed that certain members of the family did in fact work. 1 : : : .2 , ;U' ..'" ' 1 i VJ 1 v :M'J Ron Georg Jennifer Fox, directorproducer of the first place documentary, "Beruit, the Last Home Movie" accepts a check for $2,500 from a representative of American Express. Ex-press. The presentation was part of the awards ceremony held at the Olympic Hotel Jan. 23. In the dramatic competion, "Heat and Sunlight" by Rob Nilsson took first place. Dramatic winner "Heat and by TERI GOMES Record editor Heat and Sunlight a black and white tour de force by writerdirector actor Rob Nilsson was this year's dramatic film winner at the U.S. Film Festival. Nilsson, on hand for the final showing of the piece Sunday afternoon at the Egyptian Egyp-tian Theatre, told the audience in making the film, " we felt like kids maybe we were." Indeed. Chronicling the final 16 hours of a love affair the film, heavy with symbolism, will proabaly most be remembered for the fruiticide scene near the end but I'm jumping ahead. Nilsson plays a photographer, Mel, whose greatest acheive-ment acheive-ment appears to have been a book he shot 17 years ago on the starving children of Biafra. The haunting images cover the walls of his San Francisco Bay Area apartment. As the movie begins he is returning from another shoot in Biafra. For five days, as he is contemplating the dissolve of his relationship with a modern . dancer, we learn from his good friend he has walked around Africa shooting without any film in his camera. He is obsees-ed obsees-ed with photos he has developed of his lover, Carmen, "my dark-eyed dark-eyed gypsy." The photos are often harsh images of her open mouth and angry face along with various nudes in some unflattering positions. In explaining to his freind why he took the African shots years ago he says "I thought it would help save the children." The not-too-subtle comparision is that by taking pictures of Carmen he Through the years when times got tough however, the family sold partials of land to help stay afloat monetarily. Offers had been given for the house, however, it was not for sale. No price would ever suffiently cover the sentimental value. The movie was interesting. Although long, 123 minutes to be exact, it told a story that has not been witnessed by many in the western world, including myself. I left the theater feeling enlightened, as if I had learned something about another culture i that I never knew existed. -'.-Ai:' . siw i Sunlight" somehow thinks he can save the relationship. Carmen has taken up with another modern dancer named Adam and is not at the airport to greet Mel when he returns from his trip. She leaves him a note and a rose and various messages on his answering machine until finally after plastering his walls and mirrors with wet prints of Carmen and not eating and just drinking Mel's friend convinces him he should call her and go see her. Mel shows up at the apartment apart-ment to find Adam and he proceeds pro-ceeds to pull a banana on the dancer as if it were a gun. Carmen laughs and Mel stuffs his shirt with the contents of the fruit bowl as he lunges with the drawn banana toward Adam. The exploding banana and squished fruit produce only flesh wounds and Carmen sends Adam off into the night. Mel and Carmen talk and fight and spend the next eight minutes of screen time rolling naked on her hardwood hard-wood floors licking cottage cheese off one another. In the end Mel commits the fatal mistake forcing Carmen to choose and she picks.. .Adam. The movie ends as the day becomes Mel's birthday and he celebrates it in a surprise party in an alley with his.eclectic assortment of friends and hangers-on in a dance that fuses with flashbacks to tribal dances in Africa. Ah ha! we say, life is a dance, the dance of life.. Finally Mel returns to his apartment and slowly takes down his huge photo of the starving star-ving child. He replaces it with you guessed it, a photo of Carmen. Really children. |