The B-52s with the Wild Crowd! Live In Athens, GA Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

The B-52s with the Wild Crowd! Live In Athens, GA Blu-ray Movie Review

Roam wasn't built in a day.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 10, 2012

The American South is usually associated musically with country and gospel music, but of course that’s a narrow point of view that ignores how diverse the region actually is. Scores of artists from every imaginable genre have called the South their home (or at least their birthplace), and that includes one of the quintessential party bands of the late seventies and eighties, The B-52’s, a band whose genre crossing is itself an object lesson in defying categorization. The B-52’s got their professional start on Valentine’ Day 1977 in Athens, Georgia, where founding members Cindy Wilson, her brother Ricky Wilson, and Keith Strickland had been born and raised and had gotten together to perform for some friends on the romantic holiday. Joined by non-Georgians Kate Pierson and Fred Schneider, the band was a almost a self-parodying act, winking at its own supposed New Wave ethos with gigantic beehive hairdos for the women, kitschy resale shop costumes and a set list that seemed to be perched precariously between some sort of quasi-hallucinogenic take on surf music and straight ahead rock and pop motifs. The B-52’s. like most bands, took a while to gain a national foothold, though even with their first small label release they attracted enough attention to land gigs in New York City and London, and leading to a major deal with Warner Brothers Records. Hit singles and appearances on young skewing shows and networks like Saturday Night Live and the early days of MTV helped the band cement its reputation as a no hold barred, just plain fun amalgamation of guys and gals who had a refreshing lack of pretension and weren’t out there to make any statement other than a simple and heartfelt “have fun”.

Everything hasn’t always been sweetness and light for the B-52’s, as fans of the band well know. Cindy’s brother Ricky succumbed to HIV/AIDS in 1985, when knowledge of the immune deficiency disorder was just starting to be massively disseminated. The band rose above this personal tragedy by helping to promote AIDS awareness and education. It might seem to be a peculiar “cause” for a band that seemed to eschew anything even approaching a message, but of course it was a personal story and connection with the band members, something they carry with them to this day, as is made evident in the interview with them contained on this Blu-ray.

There may be no beehive hairdos anymore, but the band’s innate ebullience is still well on display in this concert, filmed live in Athens in 2011. The band is obviously excited about coming “home”, and part of the fun of this outing is seeing the outlandishly attired audience whooping it up to their hometown favorites. The B-52’s were known for their image at least as much as for their music in their early career, but what’s kind of funny here is that the band is relatively conservatively attired while many people in the audience look like they’ve wandered in from a drug fueled Halloween extravaganza.

The band is undeniably comic at times, with a lot of the humor coming from the outré proto-rap of Fred Schneider. While Schneider’s spoken verse has been compared to the classical technique of sprechgesang, the truth is it’s more sprech than gesang, and it is in fact much more akin to rapping, albeit in an ultra-WASP, middle aged man kind of way. Schneider is frankly just hilarious here with a deadpan aspect and weird little rhyming commentaries spinning out as breaks in a lot of these songs. It must also be stated that the women sound just a tad ragged at times here, perhaps due either to inadequate monitors, tiredness or even excitement. The band, though, is aces, churning out one propulsive rhythm after another and keeping the energy high from the first moment to the last.

This is a nonstop party concert with pretty much nothing but music. While the band interacts beautifully with the audience, there’s not a lot of chitchat and instead they simply segue from tune to tune, working in all of their major hits. The stage show is also pretty low tech, with a simple spiral motif in the background and a few relatively minimal lighting effects thrown in. This concert is all about having a good time, and it’s patently obvious that both the band and the audience are enjoying themselves immensely.

The band's set list for this live performance includes:

01 – Pump

02 – Private Idaho

03 – Mespotamia

04 – Ultraviolet

05 – Dancing Now

06 – Give Me Back My Man

07 – Funplex

08 – Whammy Kiss

09 – Deadbeat Club

10 – Roam

11 – 52 Girls

12 – Party Out of Bounds

13 – Love in the Year 3000

14 – Cosmic Thing

15 – Hot Corner

16 – Love Shack

17 – Wig

18 – Strobe Light

19 – Planet Claire

20 – Rock Lobster

The B-52s with the Wild Crowd! Live In Athens, GA Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The B-52's With the Wild Crowd! Live in Athens, Ga. is presented by Eagle Vision and Eagle Rock Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in 1.78:1. Note to producers who are preparing to release live concert videos: drowning the stage in ultra blue lighting does not translate well, especially in high definition where colors are so much more deeply saturated. Once again, as with many of the other recent concert videos reviewed here, blue lends two less than desirable elements into the mix, rampant posterizing (which even shows up on Kate Pierson's bright red hair when it's under blue lighting) and extremely noticeable banding. Some of the shots of the audience during these "blue light specials" look like something out of a late sixties film about hallucinogenic drugs. The overall image here is acceptably sharp and well defined, at least in more normal lighting conditions and especially in close ups. There is a lack of shadow detail upstage and toward the wings in the more dimly lit sequences, but generally the band, which is downstage and front and center, can be seen quite clearly for the vast majority of the evening.

The B-52s with the Wild Crowd! Live In Athens, GA Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The B-52's With the Wild Crowd! Live in Athens, Ga. features the three usual audio options that are almost always offered on these Eagle Rock concert videos, lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and LPCM 2.0 mixes, and a standard Dolby Digital 5.1 mix. Both lossless tracks sound fantastic, with the proto-surf ostinati of the electric guitar sounding nicely fuzzed out and bombastic and drums and bass adding significant punch to the mix. I personally would have liked the women mixed just a little further up, but they can be heard quite clearly throughout the concert, which on the flip side points out that occasionally they're not at their vocal best. Schneider's spoken riffs very occasionally get just slightly buried in the busy band accompaniment, but for those who know these tunes, what he's saying is fairly easy to make out. Fidelity is excellent, though dynamic range is not exactly varied as the band hits one sonic level and pretty much stays there for the duration of the evening.

The B-52s with the Wild Crowd! Live In Athens, GA Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Interview with the B-52's (1080i; 33:17). This is a really fun interview with the central quartet, who talk about how they met in Athens and the history of the band. The four are very funny and have some wonderful anecdotes to share about their long association together. What's fascinating about this interview is how virtually accidental the members meeting each other was, and how serendipitously their Top 40 music career happened to them. This was not a band with oversized ambitions out to conquer the world, by any stretch of the imagination. There are some poignant remembrances of Ricky included here.

The B-52s with the Wild Crowd! Live In Athens, GA Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The B-52's epitomize what a party band should be, and they play their parts to the hilt on this concert video celebrating the 34th anniversary of their debut Valentine's Day performance way back in 1977. (Purists will know that the band evidently dropped the apostrophe in their name and now goes by The B-52s, but I'm old fashioned, so apologies to anyone typographically offended.) This is just a flat out fun concert, one that is so enjoyable it's easy to overlook some minor shortcomings like the women not quite being vocally up to the task at hand on a couple of numbers. Schneider is as outré and hilarious as always, and the backing band is just flat out fantastic sounding, full of verve and polish, with an almost unbridled sense of energy. Too many modern pop stars take themselves way too seriously, convinced they're going to change the world with their Art (with a capital A). Thank heavens for bands like The B-52's, who want nothing more than to entertain and give their audience a good time. Mission accomplished. Highly recommended.