Notes from the underground: Ramones, Radio Birdman, & Brainiac
Why 'Night Flight Plus' is the best movie streamer for underground music fans, plus more thoughts about the international metadata crisis
I was going to make a quick list of great movies on the Night Flight Plus streaming service, but I ended up writing about three features about underground rock bands that made a huge impact on me (and my career in the business).
A quick history lesson for everyone under 40: Night Flight was a block of late-night music programming on the USA cable network in the ’80s, with a few new episodes and reruns that ran in syndication during the ’90s. The whole enterprise was low-budget and designed as a counter to the more mainstream programming over at MTV.
Somehow founder Stuart Shapiro got rights to all the original programming and used it as the basis for his Night Flight Plus streaming service that launched in 2015. In addition to on-demand Night Flight selections from back in the day, the channel offers a wide variety of music documentaries, blaxploitation, sexploitation, and grindhouse horror movies.
There are dozens of great music films on the site, mixed in with some cheesy “inside story” documentaries made without rights to any music. You’ll have to have a little bit of patience to get the most out of Night Flight Plus, especially if you don’t have a taste for the psychotronic schlock that dominates the non-music content on the site.
I’ll recommend a few more titles at the end and offer some more advice about how to best approach Night Flight Plus, but here are the three movies I watched while I was working on this post.
Rock ‘n’ Roll High School
It’s 1979. If you don’t live in one of the major cities, radio feeds you a steady diet of Boston, Kansas, and Journey. The record store at the mall might have a tiny new wave section, but the main displays are mostly BeeGees and Donna Summer LPs stacked to the rafters. There’s no MTV, Rolling Stone is sneering at punk rock, and independent 45s are mostly just rumors.
And then Rock ‘n’ Roll High School plays for a week at the local multiplex. You go to see it on opening night and there are about 25 people in the theater. You’ve got some Ramones LPs, but you’ve never seen the band except on their album covers and in rare photos that run in the music press.
I can’t really convey just how mind-blowing this movie was for the few kids who saw it out there in the hinterlands. Sure, the jaded scenesters in NYC and LA found plenty of reason to mock a movie that was intentionally silly, but it was a goddamn miracle for those of us stuck out there in mainstream America.
Forty-five years later, anyone can live pretty much anywhere and get access to all the culture they want via the internet and two-day shipping, so it’s hard to explain to how all the underground bands were more rumor than fact back then. Maybe there was a tiny New Wave section at the mall record store, but it was stocked with only the most popular Sire Records titles. We had to drive to Atlanta if we wanted to buy the Dead Boys or the Saints.
That’s what made the opening credits such a rush the first time I saw the movie. When Riff Randell (played by P.J. Soles) and Kate Rambeau (Dey Young) hijack the school’s PA system, the entire school goes wild dancing to “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker.” And….it’s already the greatest movie I’ve ever seen before the action even starts. That beginning still gets me whenever I see the movie. I know what’s going to happen, and it still knocks my breath out every single time.
And let’s take a moment to recognize the incredible run of movies that featured P.J. Soles during the era: Carrie, Halloween, Pvt. Benjamin, Breaking Away, and Stripes. She’d also filmed a great role in No Place Like Home, Perry Henzell’s nearly lost followup to The Harder They Come that finally surfaced on home video in 2019. And let’s not forget the 1976 TV movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, starring John Travolta as a teen when immune deficiencies who lives a germ-free bubble. That movie was a huge cultural phenomenon that’s almost forgotten now, but don’t worry if you haven’t seen it: The Boy in the Plastic Bubble is streaming on Night Flight Plus.
When I see Rock ‘n’ Roll High School now after a few decades of watching Turner Classic Movies, I understand how the writer/director Alan Arkush and his co-writer (and fill-in co-director) Joe Dante are parodying the conventions of Hollywood musicals. Back then, I had no idea and just flipped out that kids were dancing in the halls to the MC5’s “High School.”
There’s an extended Ramones concert sequence filmed at the Roxy, open defiance of authority, smoking in the boys room, an especially sweet conversion van, and exploding white mice. Best of all, it takes place in an alternate universe where the Ramones, Todd Rundgren, Eddie & the Hot Rods, and the Velvet Underground are the sound of young America.
Rock ‘n’ Roll High School changed my life, and I’d argue that it went a long way towards inspiring the underground scenes that sprung up in college towns around the country in the ’80s and ’90s. All of a sudden, people didn’t automatically think they had to move to New York or LA once they started a band. Boomers say that the Beatles appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show inspired their generation to pick up guitars and start a band. For our generation, it was Rock ‘n’ Roll High School.
Descent Into the Maelstrom: The Radio Birdman Story
Deniz Tek was an Ann Arbor, Michigan native who grew up seeing the Stooges and MC5 play live in the late ’60s before moving to Sydney to study medicine. He brought along that fierce Midwestern punk spirit and started a rock revolution in Australia.
This warts-and-all documentary explains how the band came up from the streets before crashing and burning during an ill-fated UK tour. There were problems finding venues that would let them play their ferocious music and constant debates about who contributed to the band’s songwriting. Tek was adamant that he was the only member who could determine when to share his publishing, so there was always a time bomb ticking during every recording session.
The band members went on to play in or produce some of the greatest underground rock records in that country’s history. If you’ve heard of the Hoodoo Gurus, Died Pretty, the Screaming Tribesmen, Eastern Dark, the New Christs, or the Visitors, know that every one of those acts has strong ties to the Birdman.
Tek returned to the USA in the ’80s, joined the Navy as a flight surgeon, and flew with the call sign “Iceman.” And, yeah, everyone in Australia is convinced that the Top Gun screenwriters stole the nickname from Tek and gave it to Tom Kazansky.
I’m not sure I’ve ever watch a documentary that so thoroughly exposes the kind of betrayal and disappointment that tore apart thousands of bands during the rock era. In addition to trashing each other, the band take the time to eviscerate Nick Cave and grudgingly admire the Saints before thinking better of those compliments and then trashing them anyway.
I still love Radio Birdman. Deniz Tek is one of my rock heroes and Rob Younger is one of my favorite lead singers plus he’s a gifted producer of indie rock records. I can’t imagine an American or British band airing out their laundry the way Radio Birdman does during Descent Into the Maelstrom, so this film offers a rare glimpse into the tortured inner workings of a rock band.
If you’re interested in hearing more, all the streaming platforms have The Essential Radio Birdman compilation that Sub Pop released in 2001, and you can find that one on vinyl and CD. Apple Music and Tidal have the two ’70s albums with all the relevant bonus tracks and remixes. Spotify and Qobuz are missing the studio albums. Tidal is the only streamer that has the 2006 reunion album Zeno Beach, but it’s missing one of the two live albums that are available on all the other services. Of course, you can find pretty much whatever you want on YouTube for free (with ads).
Brainiac: Transmissions After Zero
Brainiac (a/k/a 3ra1n1ac) are a top 5 live band for me, and one of the most outrageous acts who found themselves caught up in the wild A&R bidding wars of the ’90s.
After Nirvana hit, there were a lot of senior label industry executives in shock because they didn’t particularly like the music on Nevermind, and they couldn’t really understand the appeal. The solution was to hire a bunch of young kids (like me) and let them pick out the weird bands that the kids seemed to like these days.
And we went wild, chasing bands that wouldn’t have rated a demo deal just a couple of years earlier. I loved Archers of Loaf, a post-punk noise band (with hooks!) from North Carolina who responded to their newfound label attention with “Lowest Part Is Free,” a banger that mocked both A&R people and the bands desperate to get signed.
Archers of Loaf were locked into a deal with indie Alias Records, and it became apparent early that they weren’t going to offer the same reasonable terms that Sub Pop gave Geffen when handing off Nirvana. Elektra eventually paid the ransom and released the band’s third LP.
That’s a long warmup to the Brainiac saga. They might be the least commercial band to get caught up in the A&R bidding wars of the ’90s, but they were also one of the greatest live bands of the era.
The reason that you’ve probably never heard of Brainiac is that lead singer and guitarist Tim Taylor died in a single car accident in 1997 right before the band was set to sign an outrageous recording contract with Interscope Records.
I wasn’t part of that chase because I’d already committed an equally (if not more) outrageous sum of Geffen Records cash to signing Girls Against Boys, a band that was even more good looking and slightly less twisted than Brainiac. GVSB’s Eli Janney (currently on your TV in the house band for Late Night with Seth Meyers) produced Brainiac’s LPs Smack Bunny Baby, Bonsai Superstar, and Hissing Prigs in Static Couture. The bands played a lot of shows together, so I saw Brainiac several times on double bills with GVSB and always imagined a world where they were touring arenas together.
The Brainiac: Transmission After Zero documentary features bassist Juan Monasterio declaring “We could’ve moved to LA, we could’ve moved to New York, but I thought it’s so much cooler to be from parts unknown. I’d rather be the gunslinger who just shows up and you’re like, ‘Where did that guy come from?’” (Please see the final paragraph of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School section above.)
The documentary features interviews with the band members, Eli and Scott McCloud from GVSB, Melissa Auf der Maur from Hole, David Yow from the Jesus Lizard, Cedric Bixler-Zavala from At the Drive-In & the Mars Volta, Matt Berninger from the National, Buzz Osborne from the Melvins, Steve Albini from Big Black, Stuart Braithwaite from Mogwai, Jim O’Rourke from Sonic Youth, Corey Rusk from Touch & Go Records, and Fred Armisen. Stars after stars after stars.
It’s probably easier for me to write about Brainiac label fever because I wasn’t involved in the chase. They were the best band that I didn’t try to sign, so I got to be a fan with none of the pressure and complicated crossover from friendship to business deal that came with signing a band in that hothouse environment.
There was enormous pressure on all of us A&R reps to find the “next Nirvana,” and label heads started keeping score by adding up their success at signing bidding war bands. Those of us who could talk with unsigned bands got promoted well beyond the level of success generated by our signings.
HITS was the hottest trade magazine in the ’90s, and its Wheels and Deals column breathlessly covered all the rumors about who the next big thing might be and which label had the inside track on signing them. I remember A&R reps desperately trying to get each week’s column faxed to them before the HITS runner delivered the printed copies to the offices, just so they could be prepared to either celebrate their in-print success or come up with a valid excuse for why the hated competition had the inside track (at least in the mind of the person writing the column at the moment their copy was due).
With some hindsight, it’s obvious that this was the record industry equivalent of all those college football fans who follow the annual signing of high school players more closely than the actual games on the field. Abstract ratings can’t match results on the win/loss column in sports, and winning the weekly contest in the trades was never more important than actually selling cassettes and CDs.
As the band got closer to finally picking a new label, they decided that they needed a producer upgrade and moved on from Eli Janney, the guy who perhaps best understood their sound. When interviewed in the documentary, Eli claims that he just sat back and twirled the knobs, but I hear a lot of him on the band’s first three albums and wish he could’ve continued with the group.
(Of course, close observers of GVSB might note some irony here because some of us now wonder how different things might have been if long-time producer Ted Nicely had stayed behind the boards for that band’s Geffen debut. Regrets, I got ’em.)
Readers who dismiss post-punk bands as amateurish noise might be shocked to learn that Tim Taylor was the son of an accomplished jazz musician who learned music theory from his parents and played in his dad’s jazz combo before he set off to make his own punk rock jams. Music that at first sounds like random chaos is in fact very formally structured, even if the band was using distortion and weird instruments in their composition.
Could 3ra1niac have survived the caged death match that was life for artists signed to Interscope Records at the end of the century? Would they have been mowed down by Red Hat nü metal and white boy hip hop or found a way to connect with a bigger audience and push back against the tide that wiped out underground rock on major labels?
Tim Taylor was talented enough and smart enough to survive the storm. The band had a lot more to contribute. What sounded like noise to most people in 1997 sounds like pure pop music to me in 2024. Brainiac isn’t an easy first listen, but they’re one of the greatest unknown bands from the era and those records have aged incredibly well.
More value for your entertainment dollar
Here’s a list of other great movies on Night Flight Plus, some of which I should probably get around to writing about.
Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise
Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington, DC (1980-1990)
Kraftwerk & the Electronic Revolution
Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields
X: The Unheard Music
Prince: Sign O’ the Times
Athens, GA: Inside Out
Other Music
Al Green: The Gospel According to Al Green
Brian Eno 1971-1977: The Man Who Fell to Earth
Heavy Metal Parking Lot
American Hardcore: The History of Punk Rock 1980-1986
High Lonesome: The Story of Bluegrass Music
Electro Moskva: The Secret History of Soviet Space-Age Electronic Music
Sex and Broadcasting: A Film About WFMU
Hype!
We Were Famous, You Don’t Remember: The Embarrassment Story
The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee Scratch Perry
Jobriath A.D.
The Decline of Western Civilization (all three chapters)
Pulp: Life, Death & Supermarkets
Night Flight Plus is an indie operation, and they don’t have the same resources as Netflix and HBO Max to throw at their software glitches in their app. I’ve got a couple of Apple TV 4K devices. The one connected to a Denon soundbar plays with no problems, but the Apple TV connected to a Sony home theater system has sync issues. I’ve got to go into Apple TV Settings and switch the video output to 1080p SDR to get the sound to line up correctly, and then remember to switch back to 4K HDR when I’m done with Night Flight Plus.
I also haven’t been able to get my Favorites list to sync between the apps installed on my different devices. Either stick to one install or keep a list of favorites on a piece of paper. Like Netflix, there’s no way to see a list of every single title available on the service, and not all of them show up on the landing page. Pro tip: Put almost any letter of the alphabet in the search box and you’ll get a long list of titles that include many that were previously hidden.
Since Night Flight Plus costs $5.99/month or $49.99/year (the same price as an upgraded paid Stars subscription!), it’s worth putting up with a few tech issues to get access to this unique catalog of movies. Anyone who’s spending enough money for an HBO-quality app isn’t going to get a return on investment by showing movies about Sun Ra and Radio Birdman, so you’ve got to accept a tradeoff if you’re going to get access to the good stuff.
I’m not sure how many of my readers live outside the USA, and I don’t know if Night Flight Plus is available overseas. If it’s not, maybe someone can tell us in the comments if it works with a VPN.
Our Ongoing Metadata Disaster
A few months back, I wrote about The problem with metadata. That’s a chronic not acute condition for the music industry, so we’re back with another example.
“I Gotta Thing for You” in the non-LP B-side of Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ 1970 single “Who’s Gonna Take the Blame,” a Top 10 R&B hit that was the 45 that preceded the worldwide #1 “The Tears of a Clown.”
I’ve owned a lot of Miracles LPs over my life, but didn’t know this song until a friend sent an email with an MP3 of this song. The group had been on a cold streak for a while when this record came out, and I’m going to say that “I’ve Gotta Thing for You” should’ve been the A-side and could have given the Miracles a Top Ten hit going into “Tears.”
Who plays that amazing fuzz guitar? No streaming service is going to help you figure that out, but there aren’t really adequate credits on The 35th Anniversary Collection box set, either.
Norman Whitfield had brought Dennis Coffey in as a session guitarist, and the sound on the record suggests it might be him. Coffey played some trippy guitar on the Temptations’ “Cloud Nine,” “Ball of Confusion,” and “Psychedelic Shack,” plus the outrageous sitar part on Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold.”
The 35th Anniversary Collection liner notes suggest that Smokey tried Dennis out on some sessions but didn’t really connect, so it could be Robert White, Eddie Willis, or Joe Messina. The part definitely doesn’t sound like Marv Tarplin, who played on most of the Miracles’ hit records.
I’m stuck on this particular guitar lick because it’s such an instrumental hook that I’d say that it qualifies as songwriting, i.e. that our unnamed guitarist deserved a piece of the credit and publishing royalties. I’m sure Smokey would not agree with my ruling, but that’s part of a larger debate about what exactly constitutes “songwriting.”
That’s a teaser for a new YouTube video I filmed with my friend Rick Beato. We talked a lot about what constitutes “songwriting” for publishing and royalty purposes. If it turned out and he publishes in the next few days, the discussion should be an interesting one to watch. I usually forget what I said by the time I leave the studio, so I’ll be as surprised as anyone to find out what happens.
Notes after publication
I’m adding this the day after I originally posted this. If I’m going to embed video, I go out of my way to find versions that can play on this page. I woke up this morning and discovered that none of the several versions of “I Gotta Thing for You” will play without going to the YouTube page or app. Universal Music Group drones are hard at work.
The same is true for the Descent Into the Maelstrom trailer. I know that individuals connected to that band have very aggressive views about copyright, and it’s 100% their right to regulate how their work is used. But I haven’t seen anyone else write such nice things about their movie, and I’ve got just about as many subscribers here as they’ve got total views on that video. If you skipped the link above because it wasn’t embedded here, go to YouTube and watch it. I miss having the excellent video thumbnail image as art on my page, but don’t skip watching it because they don’t want you to see it without visiting the Youtube page.
Wow I had never heard "I Gotta Thing for You". So cool
Really enjoyed this one! I loved Archers. I’m relatively reserved at concerts but at their shows I was up front and center losing my mind! Their energy was fierce. “Lowest Part is Free” was on the “vs Greatest of All Time” EP. I remember seeing them at the Club Down Under on FSU campus just a few weeks before that EP came out and they were playing the title track and it got to the “Throw him in the river/Throw the bastard in the river… the underground is overcrowded” part. I was so blown away! When the EP came out I was praying that would be on there, and thankfully it was. I caught their show at the Tabernacle (the first one right before the COVID shutdowns), and they were phenomenal. That was my 7th time seeing them. I vaguely remember a story of how Madonna went backstage at their NYC show to try to get them to sign to Maverick, and how they declined. I first read about them in Magnet Magazine, which was my source for all music in the early 90’s. I’d buy music based off reading about bands and if it sounded like something that I’d like, I’d cross my fingers and buy it. I remember sitting outside Vinyl Fever in Tallahassee and popping “Icky Mettle” into my CD player and hearing those first five snare hits of “Web in Front” for the first time! Superchunk, the “other” Chapel Hill band, was in the running for the “next Nirvana” too, weren’t they? From what I remember though all the big money went to Helmet. As I read down the list of movies you listed I thought for sure the Benjamin Smoke documentary was going to be on there. That’s a really good one too, I still have it on DVD. You and Rick should extend that publishing conversation into how AI will affect the future of music, specifically in cases like “Heart on My Sleeve”. I think Grimes may be on to something with how she’s moving forward with it.