TV's Tom Snyder vs. punk's Johnny Rotten

[Fuggle]

TV's Tom Snyder vs. punk's Johnny Rotten

By Steve Slosarek
[e-mail]

Well-meaning fans from Indianapolis helped set off one of rock music's infamous TV moments. The blow-by-blow accounts are now available in all their testy glory with this week's DVD release of "The Tomorrow Show With Tom Snyder: Punk & New Wave."

The DVD "The Tomorrow Show With Tom Snyder: Punk & New Wave" features a testy exchange between Snyder and Johnny Rotten, a member of the Sex Pistols. The two-disc set includes interviews with '70s performers.

During the summer of 1980, late-night TV host Snyder interviewed guests Keith Levene and John Lydon of the punk group Public Image Ltd. Lydon, who went by the name of Johnny Rotten with the Sex Pistols in the 1970s, did not hit it off with Snyder.
Snyder remarked, "Excuse me for talking while you were interrupting," but the verbal spat didn't explode until Snyder asked Lydon whether he could pose him a question sent by a viewer. Lydon remarked that it was bound to be awful, but at Snyder's persistence, Lydon obliged.
The question was about the meaning of the group's new song "The Chant."
"This is signed by some viewers in Indianapolis, Indiana," Snyder said.
Lydon initially wouldn't give an answer, deferring to Levene.
Snyder said: "Well, gang, out there in Indianapolis, there's your answer. You've been going crazy for it now for months, and you got the answer. That's fantastic. What an answer."
Lydon snapped back: "It's a ditty. Simple as that. Hate it or love it."
Snyder replied: "You really don't care what your audience thinks of you, do you?"
He later told the duo that they seem to dislike everything about the world and that "it's unfortunate that we're all out of step except you."
The two-disc set by Shout! Factory includes interviews with other punk rockers in 1977 and '78, plus performances in 1981 by Elvis Costello & the Attractions, Iggy Pop, the Plasmatics, the Jam and the Ramones.
Meanwhile, Rhino Home Video has issued a DVD of the Velvet Underground, the band that framed the prototype for punk and new wave nearly a decade before the style officially surfaced.
"Velvet Redux: Live MCMXCIII" captures the original four members of the band during a reunion tour in 1993.
Lou Reed sizzles while singing "Sweet Jane" and other hits. The bombastic "Hey Mr. Rain" is a long-and-winding treat.

[Fuggle]

The punk side of Tom Snyder

By Terry Lawson
DETROIT FREE PRESS

One of my all time favorite ledes - journalese for the all-important first sentence designed to draw you into a story - was written by TV critic Tom Shales contrasting two television talkers: Tom Brokaw, who had become the top-rated anchor man, and Tom Snyder, who was then, in the late '70s, hosting "The Tomorrow Show," in which he chain-smoked and guffawed as he interviewed any news figure, celebrity or entertainer hungry enough to appear.

"It was the best of Toms, it was the worst of Toms," opined Shales, reflecting the general sentiment that the blow-dried, sideburned Snyder was a jerk.

But more than a few of us were hooked on Snyder, who so obviously wanted to be perceived as hip and who failed so spectacularly, but who was also willing to treat his guests like human beings as opposed to fawning over them and promoting whatever they were selling.

Snyder was often at his smarmy best when encountering the still-foreign phenomenon of punk rock, whose representatives appeared on "Tomorrow" primarily because no other show would book them. Evidence is provided in the two-disc "The Tomorrow Show: Punk and New Wave", which collects Snyder interviews with, and performances by, John (Johnny Rotten) Lydon, the Ramones, the Jam, the Runaways, Elvis Costello and former Detroiters Iggy Pop and Patti Smith.

Most of the time, Snyder strikes a pose of bemusement when guests like Lydon and the Plasmatics - who blow up a car as their finale - are doing what they were supposed to, which is outrage and provoke. Other times he seems genuinely interested in exploring "this new thing," and conversations with Iggy, Paul Weller and Costello are actually enjoyable and even oddly respectful.

"Velvet Redux: Live MCMXCIII" is the only visual record of the original Velvet Underground, which according to rock lore, only sold a few hundred records in its brief lifetime, but everybody who heard it decided to start a band.

For reasons that remain murky and contentious, Lou Reed, John Cale, Moe Tucker and the late Sterling Morrison, who may have been the last band anyone would have ever expected to mount a reunion tour, did it in 1993. The idea was to play a few warm-up gigs in Europe before making a triumphant return to a United States that never appreciated them when they were creating their anti-hippie art-noise in the late 1960s.

The three Paris concerts were recorded and filmed, and while the resulting CD was an anti-climactic disappointment, it takes on added significance in its visual incarnation. The video shows the band at least attempting to connect and recover some semblance of whatever dark magic originally fueled and briefly sustained them. The program is composed of almost exactly what you might expect: "Femme Fatale," "Pale Blue Eyes" and "Heroin," along with a couple of obligations recorded after Cale had departed, including "Rock and Roll," and a solitary new song, "Coyote."

[Fuggle]

Punks, pimps, and preachers

I don’t know how many Current readers know the name Tom Snyder, or ever saw his ‘70s talk show. Those who did may find it odd to think that this square character hosted such rowdies as Iggy Pop, Johnny Rotten, and the Ramones on his program, but those encounters are just what you’ll find on The Tomorrow Show: Punk & New Wave (Shout Factory), the most left-field of the current crop of music-oriented DVD releases.



Lower-profile titles range from two discs on Rhino (one live, one of MTV cuts) from Björk’s old group the Sugarcubes, concert films such as the Velvet Underground reunion show Velvet Redux (also Rhino) and Nick Cave’s twofer The Road to God Knows Where/Live at the Paradiso (Mute) to stranger works like Messiah (Koch Lorber), in which photog William Klein pairs irreverent images with Handel’s sacred composition, and Sonata for Viola (Facets), a tribute to Shostakovich from Russia’s Alexander Sokurov.


In the feature department, some recent titles that depend heavily on their soundtracks (Cameron Crowe’s goodhearted but terribly awkward Elizabethtown from Paramount, Jim Jarmusch’s perfect Broken Flowers from Focus, even Buena Vista’s Robin Williams vehicle Good Morning Vietnam) are joined by proper musicals The Corpse Bride (Warner), Chicago: The Razzle-Dazzle Edition (Miramax), and Kid Galahad (MGM), in which Elvis plays a boxer.


Two studios have dipped into the vaults for a trio of vintage musicals each. Fox offers “Marquee Musicals”: Daddy Long Legs, with the reliable Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron; Betty Grable impersonating a Broadway star in Pin-Up Girl; and Carmen Miranda hosting Week-End in Havana with the Joker himself, Cesar Romero.


From Warner Brothers comes a threesome that, featuring all-black casts, also reminds us this is Black History Month: The strange, gospel-based The Green Pastures is a 1936 Sunday-school story that shows its age. In the substantially more playful Cabin in the Sky, angels and devils play tug-of-war with a man’s soul. Hallelujah, from 1929, was the first all-black title from a big studio.


Seven-plus decades later, music is still one of the main ways for black actors to get in Hollywood’s door. The gifted Terrence Howard, for instance, found the spotlight as an aspiring rapper in Hustle & Flow (Paramount). Unfortunately, his character is also a pimp, and hordes of white critics were far too ready to accept the movie’s ass-backward attitudes. I’m tempted to blame that reaction on misguided race-based nervousness or herd mentality, but maybe they simply recognized a star in the making and took any opportunity to point him out. If Hustle is an awkward updating of Blaxploitation, the real thing arrives with 1972’s Trouble Man (Fox), which would probably be forgotten by now if not for its lush, fantastic soundtrack by Marvin Gaye.


Did I say a black man had to be a musician to get a break in Hollywood? How silly of me. He could also be an athlete, of course. James Earl Jones had a breakthrough in 1970 with The Great White Hope (Fox), in which he plays Jack Johnson, the boxer who received renewed attention just over a year ago in the biography Unforgivable Blackness.


When straying from music and sports (and genre fluff) to serious movies dealing with black issues, it’s funny how often the main characters are white. Occasionally, that’s for obvious reasons, as with Criterion’s lovely new edition of the John Ford film Young Mr. Lincoln, in which Henry Fonda brings humanity to a man destined to be deified. But there’s something a bit screwy — a little Mississippi Burning-ish — about A Dry White Season (MGM, part of a Marlon Brando collection highlighted by The Fugitive Kind), an Apartheid-era drama whose hero is Donald Sutherland. Not to minimize the contributions of righteous white South Africans, but does star power mean these stories must always be told from their POV?


I have to admit that complaint can also be made against one of my favorite films of 2005, The Constant Gardener (Focus). Yes, it’s about a white outsider who comes to his senses and risks everything to do some good for an exploited African community. But in the astoundingly talented hands of director Fernando Meirelles and actors Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, this becomes something much richer than just another political thriller with a social conscience; it’s a love story above all, a mysterious one that only deepens upon the death of one partner.


Finally, from New Yorker Video comes one of the precious few African films available in the States, Black Girl. Directed by Ousmane Sembene, probably the most celebrated director on that continent, the 1965 Senegalese feature follows a maid whose employers take her with them to Europe. Europe, we learn, has as hard a time treating black people as individuals as Hollywood does. •

[Fuggle]

SHOUT! FACTORY REVEALS: TOM SNYDER IS A PUNK ROCKER

New Two-DVD Set Includes "The Tomorrow Show" Episodes With Guests Elvis Costello, John Lydon, Iggy Pop, The Jam, Patti Smith, The Ramones, Joan Jett, The Plasmatics And More, In Stores Now




Shout! Factory announces the DVD debut of The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder: Punk & New Wave, a two-disc collection of episodes from the ground-breaking late-night television show. This double-DVD set includes hours of fascinating interviews and historical performances with some of the key musicians of the punk and new wave era of the late '70s and early '80s. Punk & New Wave includes the 1977 round-table discussion about the emergence of punk rock in the U.S. and rare televised multiple-song sets from the Ramones, the Plasmatics, Iggy Pop, The Jam and Elvis Costello & The Attractions. In addition, the DVD set would not be complete without the infamous on-air outburst from punk's bad boy, John "Johnny Rotten" Lydon. The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder: Punk & New Wave two DVD set is in stores now!

"The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder" began in October 1973 in the late-night time slot following Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" and continued in one form or another until January 1982. As punk and new wave music emerged, "The Tomorrow Show" welcomed many of the genres' earliest figures for interviews as well as live performances. In 1977, Snyder hosted a roundtable forum with musicians Joan Jett, Paul Weller, scene-ster Kim Fowley, concert promoter Bill Graham, and music journalist Robert Hilburn. Snyder went on to interview punk rock poet Patti Smith and outspoken Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon, the latter of which evolved into a now-legendary shouting match between the guest and host. In 1981, "The Tomorrow Show" began airing with live musical performances, including standouts "Watch Your Step" by Elvis Costello & The Attractions, "I Wanna Be Sedated" by the Ramones, "Funeral Pyre" by The Jam, and more.

[Fuggle]

DVD set of Snyder show best for seeing music legends

Thursday, April 13, 2006
- Ed Bumgardner

The Tomorrow Show With Tom Snyder: Punk & New Wave

(out of four)

Shout Factory. Not rated.



Tom Snyder has the distinction of being one of the strangest hosts in the history of the late-late-night talk shows. The Tomorrow Show With Tom Snyder ran from 1973 to 1982 and was distinguished largely by the casual delivery of the garrulous, chain-smoking Snyder. He talked to his cameramen and was so openly ill-prepared for his musical guests that he became fodder for parody by Dan Aykroyd on Saturday Night Live.

Snyder's show wasn't a bastion of great journalism, but it made for great entertainment, as evidenced by The Tomorrow Show With Tom Snyder: Punk & New Wave. This two-DVD collection of interviews with and performances by a now-illustrious array of performers - Patti Smith, The Plasmatics, The Jam, Elvis Costello, John Lydon, Iggy Pop and The Ramones - is often wonderful, occasionally bizarre and always mind-boggling.

Sadly missing is the The Clash's visit to the show - in which the late Joe Strummer tried to mutilate Snyder's calling-card Teddy Bear - but the weirdness of the included interviews and performances (all were broadcast live) still packs a wallop.

Smith curls up in a chair and acts shockingly girlish and shy when talking to Snyder. The Plasmatics blow up a car (and the interview with singer Wendy O. Williams is a twisted delight).

Lydon (the former Johnny Rotten of Sex Pistols infamy) sits down to promote PIL, his new project. He immediately grasps that Snyder is clueless, and he sneers and jabs at a fuming Snyder to openly acrimonious result.

Costello is charming, funny and literate - a total surprise to Snyder, who admits to Costello (who performs two songs with The Attractions) that he was expecting something ... different.

The discs are set up so that you can watch the entire shows - essential if you never saw the series, weird on first go-around, simply because of the juxtaposition of the various guests. Still, once the element of surprise is extracted, the shows tend to be long and stiflingly drab.

More rewarding for most viewers is the ability to view just the musical segments.

This set follows in the wake of Shout Factory's successful series of DVDs taken from The Dick Cavett Show, all of which are entertaining and intellectually spry. No intellect is to be found (at least from Snyder) on Punk & New Wave, but the chance to see then-underground performers now considered legend - and to digest the interaction between Snyder and all acts - makes this set worthwhile to all fans of modern musical history.

[Fuggle]

The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder: Punk and New Wave

approx. 180 minutes
Shout! Factory




Sure, he gave punk and New Wave the time of day when nobody else would touch it, but Tom Snyder is an almost insufferable bore. And when you put a dullard in front of punk rockers who don't suffer fools, what happens is delightful. And although there are interviews and performances with a laundry list of notable punk and New Wave artists (Iggy Pop, the Plasmatics, the Ramones, the Jam, Patti Smith, Joan Jett, Elvis Costello), the best moment is the interview with John Lydon during the nascent years of his post-Sex Pistols band, Public Image, Ltd.

Lydon busts Snyder's balls in a delicious exchange in which Snyder asks stupid questions ("Who came up with the Sex Pistols' name?"), Lydon twice lustily bums a smoke from Snyder even as he insults him, and Lydon bitches about the mainstreaming of rock 'n' roll as he enthuses (in his best bored rocker voice) about a chance to write music for a "soundtrack, to a film, in Hollywood." And to top it all off, Snyder gives Lydon a passive-aggressive parental scolding to end the piece, then comes back and hawks transcripts. Hilarious.

Some other choice moments include the Plasmatics' unbridled performances (in which Wendy O. Williams' blows up a car), Iggy Pop getting a nosebleed and semi-seriously blaming it on the show when Snyder asks, "Why are you bleeding?" and the roundtable discussion of punk featuring Paul Weller, Jett, promoter Bill Graham, producer Kim Fowley and critic Robert Hilburn discuss punk and New Wave (interesting despite Snyder's inability to really grasp what they're talking about).

Notable special features: None.

—Randy Harward
First printed in DVDs, March/April 2006

[Fuggle]

The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder DVD

Silence is a Rhythm, too

Bobby Moore
Issue date: 9/13/06




From 1973 until 1982, Tom Snyder was a fixture in NBC's late night line-up, as "The Tomorrow Show" followed Johnny Carson.

Snyder, known for being a very serious man, was one of the first big-name journalists to stick his neck out and allow punk rock and new wave groups to appear on his television show. Eight episodes featuring those artists are featured on The Tomorrow Show With Tom Snyder: Punk & New Wave DVD.

This two disk set has been out since the winter, but it has barely been promoted. That is a shame, because there is some quality footage on this DVD.

The first episode featured has a roundtable discussion about music's shocking new genre that featured the expert opinions of promoter Bill Graham, journalist Robert Hilburn and Kim Fowley. When I say expert, I am being as sarcastic as possible.

It is clear that no one in this discussion fully understands the concepts behind punk, and Snyder goes as far as to drag in rumors from overseas about the Sex Pistols.

If you can suffer through a few minutes of those three, you will get to see Paul Weller and Joan Jett enter the discussion.

Weller, who was 18 at the time and the lead singer of The Jam, began his part of the discussion by denying that he was in a punk band. He claimed he was new wave, which is less limiting than a media-made label. Today, you would have someone from Green Day or a band like that all up in arms if it was insinuated that they are not punk.

Jett, who looks as great as usual, seems irritated by Snyder's questions, and she seems eager to put over how well The Runaways were doing in Japan.

The most ironic part of this episode is Graham's weary attitude towards booking punk bands at his venues. Three months after this episode aired on October 11, 1977, the Sex Pistols played their last gig for 18 years at Graham's Winterland in San Francisco.

Next, we see an interview with Elvis Costello that aired in 1981.

It is followed by a pair of songs from his fifth album, "Trust". The songs, "New Lace Sleeves" and "Watch Your Step", are not among my favorites, but it is nice to see some footage of Costello with Steve Nieve and the rest of his former backing band, The Attractions.

Nine days after Costello's appearance on the show, Iggy Pop appeared to explain his take on art and also to perform three songs. "Dog Food", "Five Foot One" and "TV Eye" are all classics that are performed flawlessly.

The first disc then ends with possibly the most famous Tom Snyder musical guests other than John Lennon. The Plasmatics open with their song "Head Banger," which is a lot of noise to my ears. Fortunately, it is at least fun to watch, as the late Wendy O' Williams was absolutely insane.

The interview that follows is non-descript, but at least the studio audience were into it. The band closes the show with a performance of "Master Plan" that includes an exploding car. This explosion supposedly made a hole in the roof of an NBC studio.

Disc two begins on a lighter note, as the brilliant singer and poet Patti Smith explains to Snyder that she was turned on by Little Richard and God instead of Santa Claus when she was a child. Smith also puts over how excited she was to see Carson's parking space in front of the studio.

Then we see another famous moment. The insert that comes with the DVD calls it a John Lydon interview, but it is actually Lydon and fellow Public Image, Ltd. member Keith Levene.

As one of the founding members of The Clash and one of the most original guitarists in pop music history, I wonder why Levene's name is left off of the packaging.

In the interview, Lydon does his typical "we're a corporation, not a band" routine, which totally throws Snyder off. Levene chimes in, agreeing that rock and roll is horrible. This amusing exchange ends with Snyder giving up and saying that he wishes that everyone could be right like Lydon and Levene.

This is probably the second most famous P.i.L. television appearance outside of when they purposely messed up their miming on American Bandstand.

Then, Weller returns with The Jam. They are interviewed and they perform a pair of songs from the album Sound Affects-"Pretty Green" and "Funeral Pyre".

Like Levene and Lydon, I am not huge fan of typical rock music, but I do think that The Jam are one of the best bands ever. They play with the same fury and urgency during a television appearance that they showed in their legendary live performances.

The show ends with a guest host (they don't tell her name) interviewing The Ramones.

Much like The Plasmatics, the boys from Queens had a lot of fans in the audience, and they loved it when Johnny Ramone said that mainstream rock music had become awful.

They perform "We Want the Airwaves", "I Wanna Be Sedated" and "The KKK Took My Baby Away" as well.

Along with X and The Avengers, I think that The Ramones are one of the best American punk bands, so it is a treat to have this rarely seen footage on DVD.

Overall, this is a good collection. Snyder at least tries to understand and get along with the artists (with the exception of Lydon).

The only problem with this DVD is what was left off.

The Clash, who are at least the second most famous punk band from the UK, appeared on the program in 1981.

Their interview, which involved bassist Paul Simonon punching Snyder's trademark teddy bear, was classic. They also performed "This is Radio Clash" for the first time in public on Snyder's show.

Other omissions include Adam and the Ants and U2, who made their first American television appearance on "The Tomorrow Show."

I suppose the U2 footage would make the eyes of too many hardcore types roll, but it certainly would have helped sell copies of this poorly promoted DVD. Pick this DVD up if you are a fan of Lydon, The Jam or The Ramones, as they are the highlights of this release.

If only you like the other bands or Snyder, there may not be enough good material here to justify spending over $18.

[Fuggle]

The Tomorrow Show: Tom Snyder’s Electric Kool-Aid Talk Show

Cast: Tom Snyder, Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe, Dr. Timothy Leary, the Grateful Dead


(NBC, 1979-1981)
US release date: 26 September 2006 (Shout! Factory)
by Sean O'Neal






Tom Snyder was an unusual talk show host in that he often booked guests he didn’t like, just for the opportunity to poke fun at them. The previous Tomorrow Show compilation focused on punk and new wave contained some of Snyder’s prickliest moments ever, including his legendarily disastrous interview with Johnny Rotten and a segment where he repeatedly berates punk godfather Kim Fowley for looking “ridiculous”. The irony, of course, is that despite Snyder’s obvious distaste for the material, he ended up introducing these things he abhorred to the nation, giving them a forum they may not have achieved otherwise. Snyder may have had fusty notions about what music is and isn’t, but his show was often hip almost in spite of its host.

No such duality of purpose exists on this compilation of ‘60s counterculture figures, as Snyder clearly has a reverence for the decade. The DVD begins, in fact, with him declaring it “one of the most extraordinary eras of the 1900s.” Pity, then, that this collection of interviews alternates between the standard self-congratulatory tributes to all that the hippie generation achieved and Snyder’s rampant anti-drug agenda. One wonders why, at the dawn of the ‘80s, Snyder wasn’t eager to poke some larger holes in the ‘60s counterculture movement besides chastising them for their drug use. After all, this was when hippies turned to yuppies, and—as guest Tom Wolfe points out—Americans in the post-Watergate world were content to watch political drama unfold on television rather than taking it to the streets. Snyder showed himself to be a man opposed to mythologizing youth culture as it related to the punk movement. Why then couldn’t he apply the same cynicism to the hippies, whose ideals were turning out to be more and more of a sham?

It’s a missed opportunity and one that makes watching the interviews contained within a frustrating experience. Snyder appears to be unaware of his own hypocrisy when he asks aloud of the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia:

“Remember back in the ‘60s, when all the parents were afraid that the kinds of music their children were listening to would somehow corrupt them and make them forevermore not worthy of living in American society? What was going through people’s minds back then?”

In nearly the same breath he commends Garcia and his band for playing acoustically, referencing a performance earlier in the season by The Plasmatics where they exploded a television onstage. The idea is apparently lost on Snyder that the Grateful Dead in the ‘60s was seen as just as potentially harmful then as a band like the Plasmatics would have been in the ‘80s. Lost, too, is any appreciation of the irony of a “counterculture” band like the Grateful Dead becoming a mainstream act, by this point playing to stockbrokers at Radio City Music Hall. The relatively spry Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir that appear here are dressed in polo shirts and jeans, looking every bit the marketing entrepreneurs they were about to become.

Though they still insist they are practicing “misfit power: misfits making music for misfits”, it comes off more like a branding than a slogan — fitting, considering the scads of Dead merchandise they turned out in the next decade and beyond. Garcia touches briefly on the band’s past dalliance with drugs, but remarks that “these days, there is too much responsibility, and we have to fulfill the expectations of the ticket holders and everyone who works for us.” Spoken like a true rebel.

The Dead come off as a thoroughly business-minded bunch, and their performance of four songs from Reckoning lacks any hint of the ‘60s freak flag philosophy that the show is supposedly celebrating. Both Snyder and the Dead, in fact, look back on their drug-fueled beginnings with total bemusement. Author Ken Kesey, by contrast, who sits in with Garcia during the first part of the interview, is set up as the poster child for LSD experimentation, and as such he is there mostly as a target for Snyder’s barbs. When Kesey stammers to answer Snyder’s abrupt, borderline insulting questions about his past drug use, Snyder is quick to wag those famously arched eyebrows and ask, “Are you in full command of yourself?” Despite Kesey’s considerable contributions to literature as the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he is marginalized to the point of ridicule. Snyder is interested only in his past involvement in the “LSD scene”, and even then only as the butt of his jokes.

At one point, Snyder dips his toe in interesting waters by pointing out that the government, who supplied Kesey — and thus, the San Francisco hippie scene — with his first acid, was therefore responsible for introducing LSD culture to America. However, any talk of the MK-ULTRA experiments or the connections between the CIA and LSD is glossed over in favor of Snyder’s condescending chuckling about the drug culture. A later interview with Dr. Timothy Leary is similarly one-sided, with Snyder introducing Leary as a man “who isn’t in jail for the first time in a long time”, and then gleefully remarking, “Oh, I hear a few boos!” after the audience applauds. Leary, like Kesey, is affable, and responds to Snyder’s loaded questions with his typical gentle good humor, but the brief interview is little more than a front for Snyder to once again push his anti-drug agenda. He chastises Leary for “leading people astray and ruining lives”, using painfully out-of-touch hyperbole, at one point saying, “Children might have listened to you when they should have been reading Little Red Riding Hood.”

The DVD is marketed towards anyone who embraces the psychedelic, packaged as it is with a candy colored faux-concert poster cover and promising interviews and performances from some of the heroes of acid culture, but Snyder’s dominance makes for a real buzz-kill. Unlike contemporary talk show hosts, who are there mostly to prop up their guests and make with the funny wherever they see a window, the Tomorrow Show was all about Tom Snyder, and in this collection we once again see his palpable contempt for anything he doesn’t understand. The exception that proves the rule are the two interviews with Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test author Tom Wolfe—though both of his appearances here are well after Wolfe’s involvement with that book and include absolutely no talk of anything relevant to acid culture, which is supposedly the DVD’s theme. Instead, Snyder and Wolfe bemoan the crumbling of America’s morals, discuss the unfortunate slackening of societal dress codes, and trade anecdotes about air travel while Wolfe promotes his books The Right Stuff and In Our Time. The interviews are hardly germane to the topics at hand, and considering they comprise more than half of the DVD’s running time, most of its target audience will be sorely disappointed.

Along with the shortcomings of content, the DVD itself is a lazy effort, compiled with no sense of chronology or context. A programming error has Tom Wolfe’s interviews reversed and mislabeled, with his appearance from ‘80 preceding the one from 1979, despite what the menu says. There are no special features, save a “songs only” option where one can watch all five of the Dead’s performances alone. For the Deadhead completist, this may make the DVD a worthwhile addition to their library. For everyone else, it’s useful only as an example of arrogance run wild.

RATING: 4/10

[Snoogans4Jay]

I think John actually likes to make these TV people that know nothing about music but attempt to "know what they are talking about" look stupid.............of course i guess it isn't too hard......I love him because he doesn't bullshit himself and accepts NONE in return...........