ON THE NEWLY RELEASED DVD, Dead Boys Live at CBGB 1977 , the owner of that legendary New York new wave club, as well as briefly the band's manager, Hilly Kristal, talks in a new interview that's part of the DVD's bonus material. He recalls the band's arrival in New York and his first impression of it.

“I discovered them or they discovered me,” he says. “Actually, it was Joey Ramone who was astounded by this band, and he said, ‘I gave them your number.' Cleveland had been a city of a million people and at that time, young people were leaving the city. I think a lot of people left Cleveland because there was no future, and the Dead Boys typified what was going on in the UK — [the idea of] no future. There was no place for them.”

He relates how the four band members — in those days, it was vocalist Stiv Bators, guitarists Cheetah Chrome and Jimmy Zero, and drummer Johnny Blitz (bassist Jeff Magnum joined later) — would drive up to play his club and drive back the same night. Then they got to know people whose floors they could sleep on, and soon they had their own crash pad on the New York's Lower East Side and became full-time residents of the city.

The Dead Boys' own future, despite Kristal's raves about their musicianship and energy, was limited in part by their own excesses, the drug and alcohol problems the members freely admit to, none more poignantly than Chrome in another recently filmed interview. “My life in 1977 was sleep 'til one o'clock, have breakfast, take whatever drugs were around,” he says. “We didn't have much of a life in 1977. Either you were playing or you weren't.”

His insightful contemporary deconstruction of the Dead Boys mystique is a contrast with late-'70s interview footage of the band, also found in the bonus section of the CD, in which a stoned Chrome slurs his words and is barely coherent. Here it's the always-lucid Zero and to some degree Bators (although Bators was always playing to the audience or the camera, carefully tailoring his words to the impression he wanted to create) who give the best account of what the band was about.

But the final word on that is the live film footage, taped on a typical night at the funky little club on the Bowery. It catches the band playing a set that included material from its just-released Sire debut Young, Loud and Snotty , a tune that would appear on its 1978 follow-up and final album, We Have Come for Your Children and a cover of “Search and Destroy” by the Stooges, whom several of the band members cite in the interviews as a major influence. That Iggy Pop was a particular influence on the scrawny, nervy, fearless Bators is manifestly apparent in this footage, as Bators rolls around the stage, drooling and spitting and tipping over mics, or launching himself into the crowd, with seeming disregard for his own physical well-being.

The three-camera shoot, rare for the era, brings you right onto the tiny stage, into the midst of all the mayhem (there's even a Johnny Blitz cam, shooting over the drummer's shoulder) where he can almost feel like too is being spit on. The director of the shoot and the person behind the release of the DVD is Rod Swenson, who went on to become the manager of the Plasmatics and its lead singer, the late Wendy O. Williams, and was also Williams' lifelong boyfriend. At the time he was directing videos for many New York new wave bands.

In his own commentary on the DVD, Swenson says, “Some things really are just too good to last. They are in a sense so intense they necessarily burn themselves out. The whole band was phenomenal, but they just couldn't hold together.”

It had to happen. It was inevitable that Cleveland would produce its answer to Mike Jones. With good production, a healthy dose of bass, serviceable rhymes and clever samples, AUG is easy to dismiss at first listen. But eventually he gets to you with sheer force of will. While some might not like the music, it's never boring. “Money” heavily samples the musical score from the $10,000 Pyramid show hosted by Dick Clark — and amazingly, makes it work. This track is one of the best songs on a CD filled with memorable tracks that don't feature great lyricism. Like the sample-happy Mike Jones, AUG kicks the door open and forces the listener to accept his sonic vision of the world. The interlude “Everytime I Go Away,” is a guilty pleasure as AUG shamelessly samples Paul Young's classic ballad and turns it into an ode to marijuana. You can't help but to smile as AUG croaks “Every time I go away, I take a bag of weed with me.”

— Michael Oatman

REMIXX
The Beginning
(self-released)

In this corporate-driven age of music, it seems most artists and groups are created so they can fit into easily definable categories. This allows the commercial behemoths to conveniently package artists like ketchup or light beer. But every now and then there comes a group that doesn't easily squeeze into a category. This describes Remixx, which sounds like one of the R&B super-outfits of the late '80s or early '90s, like Black Street or Guy. The Beginning is a collection of smooth old-school R&B that's well-written and not oversexed like R. Kelly. Listening to this album is like traveling through a time warp to an era in which sexuality was hinted at with metaphor and clever insinuations. This is the type of CD you can put on during a romantic interlude with a significant other and just let it play. As my mother might say, Remixx is grown folks' music.

— Michael Oatman