Video: Love & Rockets, Coachella

Posted Thursday, May 01, 2008 @ 03:42 in Video by Michael Vazquez

Here's three fairly raw clips -- god bless Love and Rockets -- plus some random offstage action in slo-mo...

For me Love and Rockets were always an underrated band. Image-wise, I also always thought that like The Cult, they were cool in a cerebral, even hippy way that still had some of that 70's ease and sleaze. And I thought the fast, slick muscularity of the guitars on their first album were incredible and gave back to "modern rock" some of the rock that it had been missing, much in the same way the debut Faith No More album did, around the same time (albeit in a different rockist direction) And of course, there's their legendary status pre-Love and Rockets...For me this was one of the last quality albums of a short fascinating time in the 80's. 

I bought it on cassette (a rarity for me, a vinyl man) because I knew i would play that shit in my beloved if no-budget, old couch havin', black and white linoleum-floored van, in a style which borrowed from  Love And Rockets' post-Clockwork Orange aesthetic in a video from 1986? 87? I played that shit in my van countless times. 

At the start of the show I spoke to one of the security staff and told him that he'd really better put on earplugs and he showed me that he had one in one ear and that that he kept the other ear open because he had to hear if something was up in the pit. I told him that no, he had to wear the second plug and he explained that he'd lost enough hearing in that ear during his time in Iraq as a US Marine that it didn't matter. His name is James Preston (damn it I may have forgotten his name) and he's 21 and originally from Florida. I thanked him and told him there isn't really anything intelligent nor sensitive I could really say other than "'Sorry."  When I left the pit I chased him down, to give him  a pound.

This show grew and grew and got bigger and bigger -- thankfully it was still goin' after I'd come back and they played through the sunset. They had one of the coolest intros -- the theme from The Good The Bad and The Ugly -- as well as one of the coolest outros --  the bumblebee pillow fight was sublime.

'Gotta give it up to these guys. In this case, talent and security.

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