Fall On Your Sword

Except for the members of the Velvet Underground, the employees of the Dom on St Marks Place and Gerald Malanga, I doubt anyone saw Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable more frequently than I did. I'm pretty certain I went to every show, just bowled over by the music, particularly Heroin, and the way that Warhol projected his songs onto the band. I was just a teenager, a very stoned one, and 1966 is a kind of blur... except for those shows. Since then-- 45 years ago next month-- I've seen lots of bands use film and lights, pretty much all of them basing it on Warhol's vision. Until tonight.

My friend Steve, who I knew from when I worked at Sire and he was the star of a band we had called the Ocean Blue, called me the other day to say he was coming to L.A. with a band he's managing now... well, kind of a band. They're a studio outfit that doesn't make records or do concerts. They're called Fall On Your Sword and they make advertisements and soundtracks. And would I like to come see them play? My excuse for this kind of thing is that I go to sleep at 9 so it's always too late to see anything. It always works. But they played at 6. I guess I could have come up with some other excuse, but am I glad I didn't.

The integration between film and music I saw tonight was the inevitable post-Warhol quantum leap. I felt so lucky to have seen it. Other than half a dozen club shows in hometown NYC, these 2 English multi-media composers (+ a drummer) normally only do museum openings-- although Steve said they have a gig coming up at Madison Square Garden soon. And they win advertising awards-- loads of them, like a Clio for their work on the Nomis Damn Boots campaign and a Cannes Gold Lion Award.

They won me over right away with their zombie scenes from Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, chillingly reminiscent of delegates gathering for a Republican National Convention, and their cover of Bauhaus' spectacular "Bela Lugosi's Dead." But what had me flipping out was the live interaction on stage between the band and the short clip they made for "I'd Do Anything" (below), an achievement Warhol just never got to. I see filmmaker Jason Reitman, who caught them live at Sundance, had the same reaction I did.

"They were performing at the Another Earth party, a movie for which they wrote the original score. I was just about to leave for some much-needed sleep when live from the stage, I heard an (I-shit-you-not) electronic version of “I’d Do Anything” from the musical Oliver. It was accompanied by visuals of Battlestar Galactica robots seemingly singing the song with the band.  It was dark, strange, cool, moving, and absolutely hypnotic... Consider Yourself Awesome. Consider Me A Fan."

Yeah, me too.