The Open Mouth:

A Bi-Weekly Crash

of All Forms of Music Video

This Week: The Tomorrow Show

With Tom Snyder

ILV's exclusive column from Blake Carlisle of End of An Ear Records, Austin's main source for eccentric, ecstatic, experimental & reckless outsider music & video. This week, Tom Snyder gets to the exposed bottom of punk rock...

The Tomorrow Show With Tom Snyder: The Best Of Punk And New Wave

    Man, there are some great performances and interviews within this double-DVD set. Tom Snyder, for those of you too young to know, used to host a great TV talk show in the 70's called The Tomorrow Show.
     He had all sorts of guests and always provided his audience with a thoughtful and engaging interview no matter who was on the show. Luckily NBC thought it would be cool to have bands play live in front of an audience. And they’re actually live performances, not lip-synched. One that will grab your attention for sure is the Plasmatics. The interview is pretty great. Wendy O. Williams comes off as very intelligent and down to earth, but still has her opinions intact. Everything changes when she performs live though. The Plasmatics for starters, visually, are insane. The guitarist looks like he smoked some angel dust and got dressed in the dark. The bass player looks like he just escaped from New York with Snake Pliskin. And Wendy O. sports a big, white mohawk, naked except for a leather thong and two strips of electrical tape over her nipples. Their music always sounded shitty to me on record, but live they sound pretty good. Wendy destroys a TV set with a sledgehammer and some chainsaws. The studio crowd (of what looks like mostly high school kids) go apeshit. After a commercial break they come back for a second song. This time Wendy's car is on stage. She dances around to the song spray-painting slogans on the car and bashes the shit out of it with a crowbar. Then she gets a bundle of dynamite and lights the fuse, carrying it around the audience putting it in their faces to prove it's real. The audience isn't phased at all, they're jumping around clapping and yelling "Woo-Hoo!". Then at the last moment, she throws the dynamite into the car and blows it up on stage while the band is playing! The blast is so strong that the guitarists fall down and everything goes creepy quiet for a second. Tom Snyder said in an interview years later that employees downstairs in the NBC studio thought they were under terrorist attack when the explosion went off.
    There's a wonderfully uncomfortable episode where legendary show promoter, and owner of the Fillmore East (& West), Bill Graham, has a conversation about punk rock with Kim Fowley, Joan Jett, Paul Weller, and some other dudes. Kim Fowley looks weird and great, but seems slightly uncomfortable in the presence of Graham and doesn't let his usually well-articulated freak flag fly. Joan Jett is young and looks like she could be Ritchie White’s girlfriend in New Granada. People don't really realize how down she was in the underground music world of that time. This footage was probably shot when The Runaways started to disintegrate. She talks a lot and isn't intimidated by all of the weird vibes in the room. She's cool. Paul Weller is 19 years old in this interview and keeps his mouth shut most of the time. He's definitely the English fish out of water in this room full of grizzled veterans of the scene. Tom Snyder seems kind of confused too and doesn't really comprehend the severity of the cast of characters his producers have assembled on the stage.

    Another episode has John Lydon and Keith Levene embarrassing themselves and being pompous assholes during an interview about P.I.L. They're really mean to poor old Tom and he doesn't really deserve it. Don't get me wrong, I love when Johnny Rotten is an asshole, but when you watch this interview it's kind of painful. Keith LeVene seriously tries to say shit like-"We're not a band, we're a corporation, we make soundtrack music occasionally, but it's not our focus."!? Tom Snyder is a thoughtful dude and makes them look like rebels without a cause, and I say that even as P.I.L. are one of my favorite bands. This interview made me laugh the whole way through. Further in, we’ve got The Ramones playing real tight and looking good. Then, Patti Smith is interviewed and seems a bit silly but okay.
    Rounding out this wonderful collection is the Iggy Pop episode. Can you say relapse? 'Cause he was definitely in the middle of one when this was filmed. His weird-ass band that he had in between "New Values" and "Soldier" look and sound like shit. Iggy was in a weird stage at that time. He always performs well and is fun to watch even when his bands suck though. They do a version of TV Eye that's beyond nasty and then Iggy sits down for a fully-tweaked interview. He's definitely coming down off something in the chair, squirming around with a missing front-tooth and bleeding from his upper lip (it brings to mind the time Sly Stone was high out of his mind on the Dick Cavett show and started bleeding during an interview). Tom is baffled by Iggy but you can tell he wants to like him. The Tomorrow show was great. It ended in 1982 to make way for David Letterman. He went on to do ABC radio shows in the mid-80's and had a show on TV again in the 90's but it wasn't very good. He died from Leukemia in 2007.