“During the song, everyone smiled, yes indeed. I’ll say f**k, s**t, piss, c**t, f**k, if you want me to. If it’ll make you smile.” – Blag Dahlia.
You know, sonically adventurous San Francisco skunkpunks The Dwarves have been dead for a while now: their 2004 album ‘The Dwarves Must Die’ announced this. And yet, here we are, years later, with yet ANOTHER release dug out of the a*s of the scum-come-combo’s carcass. It’s not the first time the band has perpetrated a death-themed scam, of course. They once pretended their guitarist, the ugly perpetually nude sexhibitionist HeWhoCannotBeNamed, had been killed in a barfight, and even went so far as to provide an address for mourners to send condolences or money or blow or hookers to.
That smooth move got them dropped by their record label. It’s getting so that, when Blag Dahlia, the lead singer, or HeWhoCannotBeClothed REALLY die, they are going to have to have open-top funerals to let people smack them in the napper (or ‘head’ to you Yanks) with an icepick a la Trotsky to let people see these immoral bastirts have genuinely well and truly shuffled off this immortal coil.
Sidestep preamble ramblerant. Here’s a no-brainer question for the guys (or lesbians)(or bisexual women). If you were given the once-in-a-lifetime chance to hang out with ten salacious nude women in their 20s, what would YOU do? Of course. You’d get a video camera, make a 40-minute tape of it, then release it in an elongated form that allowed you to throw in a few other odds and sods you had lying around from your closet to pad out the running time to 109 minutes.
At least, that’s what it seems the band has done here. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing: far from it, in fact. What you get for your money if you buy ‘FEFU’ is a career-long visual and sonic retrospective from this controversial boy band, with material from the mid-1980s to the present, and it’s a pretty damned good time altogether. If you like these sick fucks, you HAVE to buy this DVD, cos it’s everything you’d want from a Dwarves DVD and more or less.
So what does the running time encompass? Well, in ‘The Early Years’ you get the likes of the video for ‘I’m A Living Sickness’ from their pre-‘Blood Guts And P***y’ garage rock daze. This shot-on-video ‘epic’ is hilarious. It reminds me, shamefully it must be said, of the shitty shot-on-video wastes of space I saw drunk during the late 80s like ‘Cannibal Campout’ and ‘555’ or ‘Suffer Little Children.’ It features cheesy chopper-lopping bloodletting, smoke machine-generated ‘misty’ visuals, a guitar being played with a saw, and Blag Dahlia wielding a cross. The latter, coming from a manic man whose wordwork oeuvre (and general insane demeanor) has always reflected his Catholic crucifixation upbringing, is hardly surprising, In this DVD section you also get some classic 1989 playing-to-three-paying-people tiny-club (“Thanks to all you college f**s for coming!”) footage of the f*****g excellent songs ‘Drugstore,’ ‘SFVD’ (with its haunting, hilarious AIDS-paranoia-era refrain: “Everybody gets an antibody!”) and ‘Fuckhead.’
These three songs alone make entry worthwhile, but wait, there’s more! Can your heart stand the excitement? No? Why? Who are you, Sick Prick Dick Cheney or something? The ‘Live Footage’ segment contains outrageous footage from the ‘Blood Guts And P***y’ tour (Dahlia in pantyhose with his c**k out – yeesh! F**k off ya c**t!), ‘Thank Heaven For Little Girls’ tour (thought this was the tour I saw ’em on in 1991 at the Coconut Teaserz in LA, but it musta been the one after cos I don’t recognize any of the stuff in it), ‘The Dwarves Are Young And Good Looking’ tour, ‘The Dwarves Must Die’ tour (they’re all presented chronologically for you here, because I’m so sad I know this s**t without even looking) and some stuff from SXSW 2002.
Dahlia’s agent provocateur agenda in selecting this rage-filled footage (‘footrage’? Sounds like a horror film for foot fetishists) is very simple: he has obviously just picked the stuff where the band fight the audience as much as possible and chaos reigns supreme. This makes watching it absolutely f*****g hilarious cos, well, who wants to see slick production and disco lights and explosions and synchronized dance routines or super-tight playing when you can have people being beaten black and blue and bloody? Voyeur armchair atrocity exhibition voyeur that I am, I certainly got a vicarious kick (and punch and slap and mike or mike stand or guitar to the head) out of it, that’s for sure! Fuckin right ya c**t! Fuckin sooperb!
What else? There’s an ‘Interviews’ section that has, unsurprisingly enough, two interviews in it: a funny, abrasive and abusive one from Dallas in 1992 with some male interviewer with a speech impediment (“I’ve always wondered about rock critics and what a bunch of f**s they were, and you’ve pretty much confirmed my suspicions,” laughs the singer), and a shitty one from Europe in 2005. The second one is conducted by two annoying giggling late-teen pseudo-punk German-sounding girls and is absolutely terrible (“Where did ze hip-hop influence come from?”) but, seeing as how Dahlia has long been obsessively, pathologically fixated on teenage girls, he’s in his element. “We’re inspired by teenage girls, braces, and cocaine,” as he lip-lickingly puts it. Truly stunning Woodward and Bernstein stuff indeed.
The ‘Extras’ section has a trailer for ‘The Scum Also Rises’ (“A tale of blood, coke and sodomy live!”) Dwarves live video from the late 1980s or so, This looks great and I’d love to see it, but understand it was withdrawn from release because the sound was terrible on it. Which, judging by the not-always-amazing live sound on this DVD isn’t saying much (of course, it’s the demented visuals that count first and foremost), but it would still be fun to watch. There’s a couple of songs from Dahlia playing live and solo in 1995 and 2006 (doing a great, hilarious acoustic version of the classic song ‘F**k So Good’ during the most recent performance), and, last and absolutely least, a trailer for some worthless-looking video-lensed crap-metal-scored piece of s**t schlock splatter movie co-starring the singer called ‘Misogynist: The Movie” which lives up to its name with a load of female-slap-and-slashing. Never heard of it and don’t ever care to see it, NEXT!
We’ll finish this anal retentive, far-overlong discussion of the DVD’s cuntents by talking about the actual song the thing is a vehicle for, ‘FEFU.’ This title stands for ‘F**k, Eat And F**k You Up’ (a life-triumvirate that Dahlia believes encapsulates all human existence, and he’s not far wrong – all he has to add is ‘reading’ and ‘auto-erotic suicide’ and he’d have it totally correct) and this industrial-cum-60s-British-pop song is absolutely excellent, one of the two best songs from ‘The Dwarves Must Die’ (with ‘Christ On A Mic’ being my personal other fave). The video is a wild f*****g prospect altogether too, and you’ll never see THIS one on MTV2 or VH1.
Well Graham my good man, you ask, why? Seeing as how you asked so nicely, I’ll tell you. What ‘FEFU’ is, quite simply, is a middle-aged man’s blood-wet dream. Dahlia has assembled ten willing wild women of all shapes and sizes and sanities from the Suicide Girls (whose website our very own head honcho Chris Gore writes for), Velvet Hammer Burlesque, Varla Magazine and more (whatever the f**k that means) and stuck them in a video, gotten them to take their clothes off, then covered them in faux blood and had them punch the s**t out of him, to his obvious masochistic pig-rolling-in-s**t enjoyment.
So if you want to see whoregasmatronic blood-covered birds, bald heads and bald p*****s, bouncing-big-boob beautiful buxom babes, bubbles, band bastards, brutal beatings, meat-hammering, religious imagery, the band’s name spelled out in handpaint-blood-splatsplash while naked h***y women make out, in front of it, and Blag sticking his tongue down the throat of a three-foot woman (the cover star of the band’s few-years-back ‘How To Make Friends And Influence People’ career retrospective album).this is the music video for you, damn right! Personally, the oft-tattooed-and-pierced Suicide Girls aren’t to my own taste (too clichéd-skanky looking ya see, a description they’d probably take, at least in part, as a compliment), but hey, f**k it, whatever ‘bad girls straight from central casting’ vibe floats yer boat, on yersel, get it ben ye! There’s a ‘Clean Version’ of this video but ah, f**k it, give me the perversion version anycrime.
As I said before, the ‘Making of’ section of the DVD just really seems to exist so that Blag Dahlia can boast about having hung out with these bloodsoaked naked women, with this video existing to give him some evidence to back up his wild claim. It’s not particularly technical or interesting and should be more properly be called ‘Making Out of’, but with 40 minutes of naked women posing every which way butt loose.who cares? There’s also a genuinely funny wee film called ‘F**k, Eat & Eat’ that rounds off this DVD segment about a too-fat woman trying to waste away her too-ample waist by exercising so she can star in the ‘FEFU’ video. Ah, rampant juvenile views on women.don’t you just love it?
If you don’t, or are squeamish or prudish (or just don’t like the band), well, this DVD is DEFINITELY not for you. Blag Dahlia exhibits, at around 40 years of age (not quite sure of his exact age, but it’s around there) the intellectual sexual development of a h***y blister-palmed-from-wanking 15-year-old boy. But that’s okay. You wonder idly what his wife makes of it all. I heard, from a friend I work beside, Matt Coppens, that she’s the luscious Tazzie Bushweed, sometime bass player for the band, but can’t be sure of this – Matt comes away with many strange unverifiable punk-scene-themed statements. But you know what you’re getting with the Paul Cafaro (Dahlia’s real name), and probably always will get from him – “I’ll be sleazy until the day I die,” as he once told me in an email.
Fair enough, no pretensions to art or intellect, but a rollicking rocknroll cocknhole time from start to finish. What more do you want or need? Sing along after me one two three.
I WANNA FUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!
OH F**K AYE!!!!
