DVD Review: You Weren’t There

After three straight nights of shows last week, it was nice to spend my Saturday evening doing nothing more than watching DVDs while my wife worked on the laptop for NaNoWriMo. While I quite enjoyed working my way through the complete series of Spaced, as well as The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes, the American Masters portrait of Garrison Keillor, I wasn’t quite as entranced with You Weren’t There: A History of Chicago Punk, 1977-1984.

Regressive Films has made a nice history of the Chicago punk scene, and does a great job of introducing the viewer to bands of which they’ve likely never heard. The big names of Chicago punk obviously get covered: Naked Raygun, Steve Albini, Articles of Faith, and the Effigies all get copious amounts of screen time.

However, the bands that I came away from You Weren’t There with a better understanding and appreciation for were the acts that really never got past the opening stages like Chicago’s “first” punk band, Tutu and the Pirates. They were a band that really pushed the boundaries of music, and played punk like the folks in New York did — as a deconstruction of music, rather than a genre in and of itself.

Despite the fact that the film makes a distinct point of allowing everyone interviewed to make a lot of statements about how inclusive the scene was when it was in its infancy at La Mere Vipere — with gays, rockers, freaks, and punks all together under one roof, dancing to the music — what hurts the film is the point that gets hammered in at the end of early sequence: that when more people started becoming aware of punk, it started to lose its importance.

Where You Weren’t There really and truly fails is that most of its interview subjects are middle-aged men looking back at the scene with nostalgia. It’s right there in the title: You weren’t there. It’s like the other old punk aphorism, “If you’re not now, you never were.”

The end of the film only serves to reinforce that view. The last ten minutes are all these guys from back in the day just slagging the current punk scene, while simultaneously remaining protective of what they once had. Vic Bondi of Articles of Faith sums it up the view fairly well in his response to a kid who wasn’t even born when Minor Threat broke up wearing a Minor Threat t-shirt: “Get your own fucking scene.”

Steve Albini might be a massive prick with some seriously self-important opinions, but of all the people interviewed for the documentary, he seems to be the one with the most open mind regarding punk. It’s a rather backward view — he sees punk as a style, not a genre or a code by which one should live. Straight-ahead hardcore like Articles of Faith aren’t his cup of tea.

As a snapshot of an era, and a presentation of a scene that wasn’t widely known as those on the coasts, You Weren’t There is a wonderful documentary. The live footage presented in the film is of exceptional quality, with far better sound and image than found in most coverage of the era, allowing bands that never properly released anything to get their music presented to a greater public.

As a presentation of people, it seems that everyone in a band comes off as either an opinionated prick or a clinging-to-the-past old man. The promoters and radio DJs are, for once, the people who come off as nicest and most rational, most likely because they weren’t part of the seemingly omnipresent inter-and-intra-band rivalries.