Word: guitars
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...York City punk in high-top Keds and a greasy leather jacket, who has just lost his job and wants to become a musician. Somehow he convinces a bandleader, Keith Burns (Buster Poindexter, a.k.a. David Johansen) to give him his "big break" if he can locate a reclusive acoustic guitar maker, Elmore Silk (Harris Yulin), who has mysteriously disappeared from the New York music scene...
First of all, is the disappearance of an acoustic guitar maker really the best premise for a rock-'n'-roll quest film? Buster Poindexter's band, which gets to play for about 15 seconds, uses an electric guitarist anyway, and you can hardly hear him under all the brass. In addition, Julius himself, who gets a chance at one point to croon a bit of a folk song, proves himself an impossibly bad musician, so a "big break" hardly seems in order for him even if he could find Elmore Silk...
Also ubiquitous were the H Band, featuring the members of Men of Clay (Ben and Tom Hammond on guitar and bass, respectively, and Shankar Ramaswami on drums) and Fred Heiberger on keyboards. They served as the pick-up group for several of the acts and rocked out on their own with "Trim." This was a piece of driving fusion, with throbbing chromatics, and a bit o' Hendrix in Hammond's solo. This otherwise excellent piece fizzled out, however, in banal repetition of a one-measure motif...
...become a virtuoso performer on keyboards as well as on guitar, as "Fragile" was a musical highlight. Even when he even made a mistake in one measure, he built the next sequence of notes around the errant sound...
When the group plays live, its "nucleus" is supplemented by studio musicians from the Berk-lee School of Music. These musicians add the bass guitar, a horn section and keyboards to the Rythym Method's music...