The other interviews with Elvis Costello, Iggy Pop, and Patti Smith are cool. Here are the diamonds, and this is where it counts. Elvis and Patti give some pretty in-depth images of what they think of themselves, the music that they are making, and how it's affecting the youth of that time frame. Iggy is just a freaking nut, but here you do get to see him before he went below the 110-pound mark before the heroin took over.

The two performances and interviews that standout come from Wendy O. Williams and The Ramones. The music of Wendy O. and the Plasmatics sucked and they couldn't play for shit, but the stage show they put on was a crazy spectacle. You get to see them blow up a Dodge, yes, a car, in an enclosed studio with the audience thirty feet or so away. Nice.

The best is for last. The Ramones, and although the boys were pissed that Snyder wasn't there to take the brunt of their harassment, local NBC news anchor Kelly Lang filled in, and was just as clueless as Snyder. That doesn't matter though, because when the Ramones play, it explains it all. Funny thing about the Ramones, and for that fact all the bands, they never called their music "punk". The newspapers in England coined it.

Shout has the right idea. Its great to see all these artists just as their stars were on the rise, but it would be better if they would cut out all the bullshit because the Tomorrow shows they include aren't that special. The roundtable discussion about punk was fitting, but I don't want to hear some old ladies poems on "how to be in love" and I really don't care about the guy who had the radio show with the psychic who predicted Pres. Regan's shooting — days after it happened — (funny as that one was).

Nor do I need to see the "other Don Rickles," an announcer at NBC, be the first person on TV to play Simon, which my fellow Gen X-ers and older will remember is the memory game where you press a panel after it lit up in increasingly harder combinations. It must have been quite a technological advancement of 1977 because they spend way too much time on it. After the first couple times, we get it. Maybe the famous Don Rickles cancelled. Anyway, they need to put more music on these discs and less filler.

Punk is dead, long live rock n' roll.

Fumo Verde