Here’s a fun little film. While it has no narrator, Last Shop Standing most certainly has a narrative. Stringing together interviews of record shop owners from around the UK, the film charts “the rise, fall and rebirth of the independent record shop” (that’s the film’s subtitle, too). Largely avoiding shops in London, Last Shop Standing instead draws from such (relatively) far-flung locales as Cardiff, Swansea and Glasgow.
While the perspective of each shop owner – almost always presented speaking from behind his or her retail counter – differs, the common threads are woven together to tell the story. The free-wheeling days when record companies were awash in money were followed by the forced ending of vinyl. There’s general agreement among these shop owners that this was a major miscalculation on the part of the industry. The manner in which the labels allowed “supermarkets” (the UK term for what we in America call department or big-box stores) to undercut indie shops was, in the minds of these interviewees, another nail in the coffin. They point to the expertise that the man (or woman) behind the counter in the indie shop has, and compare that to the general cluelessness of a chain-store employee who’s also selling toasters and wheelbarrows. As Richard Hawley (one of several musicians who appears in the film along with Paul Weller, Billy Bragg and Johnny Marr) says, “You are never going to discover Captain Beefheart or the 13th Floor Elevators or the Velvet Underground in your local supermarket, ever.”
And that point leads to the film’s third part, the rebirth of the indie store. The popularity of vinyl as an artifact is an important factor, and the Record Store Day phenomenon has given indie shops an enormous boost, especially with over 400 limited releases (in 2012) available only at indie shops, and only on vinyl. So for record enthusiasts, Last Shop Standing paints a much more optimstic picture of the future than you might otherwise expect. True, many shops didn’t make it to this modern promised land: in fact a hundred-year-old shop is seen closing. But through industriousness, tenacity, a love of music and a willingness to adapt and stay attuned to the needs of their market, indie shops are thriving. Yes, as Last Shop Standing tells us, in the 1980s there were more than 2200 independent record shop in the UK, and today there are less than three hundred. But judging by the people in this film, there’s every reason to think that many of these will remain for years to come.
The film itself clocks in at under an hour, but the DVD includes 74 minutes of extras, including longer interviews with several of the principals, including author Graham Jones, the man who wrote the book that gives the film its name.
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Mitch Ryder is a tricky figure to pin down. Though he enjoyed a brief string of hits in the mid 60s (first with the Detroit Wheels and then as an ostensible solo artist), by the end of the 60s, the commercial marketplace had pretty much made its decision: his career was over and done. But nobody told Ryder (born William Levise). Though largely silent (on record, at least) between the release of 1971′s Detroit and his “comeback” around the end of that decade, Ryder has amassed a staggeringly deep catalog; at last count he had no less than two dozen albums of material released under is own name.
“Carpe diem,” quoth the poet Horace. Even in a dead language, wiser words have rarely been written. And while F. Scott Fitzgerald limited his observation to Americans when he claimed “there are no second acts…” occasionally, there are.
If I told you there was a new DVD compiled of a bunch of Ike & Tina Turner‘s home movies, you might well shudder. Thanks to Tina’s biopic What’s Love Got to Do With It, in the minds of a whole generation of potential music fans, Ike Turner is a bad guy, and not much more. Far be it from me to try and dispel that image; by all accounts his relationship with Tina was unhealthy and abusive. But if we can separate the personal from the musical – hell, Michael Jackson fans seem to be able to do so with ease – it’s worth noting just how important a figure in pop music Ike really was.
“Do you wanna boogie? Do you wanna cook with the Hook?” So implores John Lee Hooker on the audio track of the DVD menu on Cook With the Hook: Live in 1974. A medium-sized festival (historical accounts say 6000 fans, but the video suggests more like a thousand) in Massachusetts was the setting for an outdoor concert featuring Hooker and a solid backing band. The event was captured on black-and-white videotape by three cameras. The video quality is pretty poor; it was shot reasonably well, but the ravages of time have not been kind to the tapes. The audio, however, is a very different story: a fine, clear mix that give proper prominence to Hooker’s voice and guitar.
There’s no point in tip-toeing around it: blues guitarist Johnny Winter is old and frail. The cumulative effects of decades of drug and alcohol abuse/addiction (happily, he’s clean now) coupled with the medical problems associated with albinism make the odds unlikely that Winter would even still walk this Earth at age 68. But indeed he does, and in addition to getting clean, he’s also now benefiting from sympathetic management (something he lacked for many years as well), and is getting control of his back catalog back, slowly but surely.
The Move are one of those sixties groups that got lost in the transatlantic shuffle. They arguably had it all: great songwriting, strong vocalists, an a ready-made visual image. A near-perfect mix of super-catchy pop melodicism, heavier-than-heavy riffage, ambitious art-pop leanings and a penchant for controversy, The Move should have been huge in the USA.
