(IMAGE: FRINGE MEDIA)
RATING: 2.5 of 4
Fringe Media. 2021. Archival documentary. 116 minutes.
More a roll call than a story, director Justin Powers’ punkumentary “Everything is A-Ok” is an important albeit frequently unfocused visual record of a music scene that became all the more vital because it wasn’t New York or L.A..
Punk scenes in those two megalopolises benefitted disproportionately by erupting inside media centers perfectly equipped to amplify and commodify the downstrumming rebels in their midst. Back in the mid 1970s, counterculture Goliaths like the Village Voice and Rolling Stone grabbed at bands like the Ramones and the New York Dolls as life rafts of pop culture relevance. Proto-punk NYC club CBGB became a national name–the rock antithesis to disco’s equally notorious Studio 54, which was located just four miles away.
In Dallas though, the idea of getting a national magazine cover, or being signed by a label with coast to coast distribution, wasn’t even a pipe dream. Bands like cowpunk pioneers the Nervebreakers or drone distortionists Stick Men With Rayguns barely had a viable path to playing locally, let alone getting Todd Rundgren to produce their debut album. Still, by cold calling manager Malcolm McLaren, the Nervebreakers managed to open on the Dallas leg of the Sex Pistols’ brief and shambolic 1977 tour, an event the first wave Dallas punks in “EAOK” still describe like the hand of God tapping Adam’s index finger in that painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Nobody was recording anything but country acts out of Texas in 1978. But punk was an amateur revolution, so it archived itself, as “EAOK” documents in every frame. For Dallas punks, there was no way to do it for anything but love.
“EAOK” shares that love, and it’s obviously been made by scenesters. This is a film that is as much a roster of vanished clubs as it is a requiem for dead bands. Powers and his prod/co mates at Fringe Media have done impressive legwork. Sixty plus interviews were conducted, and reams of amateur video, spanning thirty years of noise, have been excavated and organized by year, in an attempt to create a comprehensive portrait of an entire alt movement, etched in vomit, piss and blood.
That comprehensive impulse is in some ways a downfall though. There are so many people in this movie, saying so many similar things. The clubs sucked, and that made the clubs awesome. The bands were hellbent amateurs on a mission, and seeing them was a religious experience. Everyone has a war story to tell, mostly about getting fucked up or else being inspired by another artist while getting fucked up. Those were crazy times, and you had to be crazy to live through them. Etc. There are acres of xeroxed punk flyers shown in pan and scan montages, which starts out fascinating but blurs together after awhile. The conversations get like that too. For all the access and trust Powers generated, his interviews are often a gloss.
There are moments that shine though, especially when interviewees reflect on what it was like to be a misfit who suddenly found a home. The Nervebreakers reflect on how in 1977 “every punk in Dallas… knew every punk in Dallas…. You banded together to keep from getting beaten up.” Elsewhere, some other punk tenderly calls a club named The Twilite Room “two stories of blood and spit… God’s home away from home.”
There are villains here too. Cops. Anyone who works for the City of Dallas and thinks a bar needs a permit to sell alcohol, or an enforceable age entry requirement.
Sometimes your own bandmates are also your nemesis. Here’s how bassist Trent Kovm describes the break-up of Terminal Disgust after they toured their locally legendary album “America:” “A combination of being in a band and little pesky fucking things that come up when you live with people… By the last tour we were just sick of looking at each other.”
Maybe the most riveting anecdote comes when “EAOK” ditches its staid and budget-driven talking heads format and chronicles a skinhead attempt to infiltrate a club called the Honest Place. Club owner Greg Winslow caught some of that Nazi gang beating up a kid on the sidewalk to steal his Doc Martens. He fired a .22 rifle into their van, thinking it was empty, and put a skinhead girl in the hospital.
Winslow is still rattled by his back-and-forth beef with one of the most notorious racist gangs in Dallas history–his interview is conducted in the street with his back to the camera, like he’s speaking to us from the Witness Protection Program. But you hear pride in his voice when he terminates the interview by barking, “After that [gunshot], no more skinhead problems. CUT!”
Powers has announced on “EAOK’s” Facebook and Fringe Media’s Youtube that the plan is to make “EAOK” an ongoing project by posting interview outtakes and other material online. He should definitely do so, because if there’s one thing “EAOK” is a guitar-smashing success at it’s making a convincing argument for Dallas punk as often unique, and worth preserving.
Describing a now-bulldozed venue called Slipped Disk that was a Dallas punk epicenter in the early ’90s, the late punk graphic artist Mosquito says it “gave a home to people that needed a home… It was a wayward home for people who didn’t have a better place to go.” At its best, “Everything is A-Ok” is that kind of club too.