Sunset strips
Rodney Bingenheimer, long-time DJ at Los Angeles’s KROQ, is all confidence and smiles as an “expert witness” in The Ramones: End Of The Century. As the main character of George Hickenlooper’s excellent documentary, Mayor Of The Sunset Strip, an entirely different picture emerges of a lonely man living on the tail end of his time in the sun.
Arriving in Los Angeles in the mid-60s, Bingenheimer somehow wormed his way into the city’s flowering hipster music scene, a constant at every party and a certainty to turn up whenever visiting rock royalty came to town. In the 70s, he became a virtual A&R man without portfolio, opening the first glam club in the US and breaking tons of artists through his popular radio show – everybody from David Bowie to X to No Doubt.
But no hipster can keep his cred forever – especially one whose cred depends on the cred of others, a step removed from the locus of hip – and most of the movie concentrates on Bingenheimer’s long, slow slide from Center Of The Action to Merely Relevant to Eccentric Relic. By the end of the movie, Rodney has only a tenuous hold on his lonely 12am-3am Monday morning time slot and seemingly nothing but regret and loneliness. It’s chilling to see how quickly it can all go and how much worse it can be when one refuses to acknowledge it. Bingenheimer is too savvy an operator to wind up as Norma Desmond, which is all the harder to take since he’s all too aware of his plight.
Don’t let the horrific box fool you at the video store. The box copy screams COLDPLAY!, GWEN STEFANI!, GREEN DAY! and many others. Well, yes, they are all in there, and in typical rip-off fashion, the appearances are fleeting though relevant to the movie’s ‘plot.’ More striking are all the archival photos of 70s rock decadence and interviews with early US punkers like X and Blondie. Nevertheless Mayor Of The Sunset Strip is a riveting portrait of what happens when someone stays on stage too long because he doesn’t have anywhere else to go.
Hickenlooper, whose previous movies include documentaries on Francis Ford Coppola and Dennis Hopper at their scariest, will be mining this area again in his next film, a biography of Edie Sedgwick with Guy Pearce playing Andy Warhol.
[Soundtrack]
Kim Fowley – The Trip.mp3
There are several interview segments with Bingenheimer’s longtime friend, scenester mercenary Kim Fowley, notorious for (among many other things) “discovering” The Runaways. Members of The Runaways are interviewed and make quite clear that they detest the man. Here’s one of Fowley’s earliest cynical moves, a single he recorded in 1966 to cash in on the Psychedelic Music trend. It’s a neat trick to be so condescending towards the audience you’re trying to rip off and still be so damn amusing. Flying dogs and silver cats and emerald rats, indeed!
Trailer for Mayor Of The Sunset Strip
A day with a Debbie Harry picture on your blog is a good day.
