Music Monday: The Strangest Rockumentary Ever Made
There are many great rockumentaries in the world, and they all focus on at least one of two things: the music and the artists.
It might be the film of Queen’s crowning set at Live Aid.
It could be Gimme Shelter’s documenting the consequences of the stupidest security hiring of all time.
It could be any one of VH1’s Behind the Music episodes.
Hell, it could be This Is Spınal Tap, one of the greatest mockumentaries ever made.
But the strangest rockumentary ever made ignores both. It is the seventeen minute film Heavy Metal Parking Lot.
It’s the final day of May, 1986. You and several hundred of your contemporaries have gathered in the parking lot of the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland to tailgate before attending the evening’s concert, by Judas Priest and Dokken.
If you are male, a shirt is very much optional.
If female, you have quite a bit of hair and there might be a level of product involved which makes your presence at an open flame an inadvisable combination.
Hopefully, you’re not the guy in the Confederate flag printed shirt.
Even more hopefully, you’re not the 20 year old guy there with his thirteen year old girlfriend.
You may be the fellow in the custom “Fuck Off” t-shirt.
You may be the guy in the zebra print ensemble with clear negative feelings about punk music.
You may be the young woman with the scab on her knee who overshares as to how, exactly, she came by such an injury.
You may be the guy who responds to the question of where he’s from with, “On acid, is where I am.”
You may be the girl who wants to “Jump [Judas Priest lead singer Rob Halford’s] bones,” which certainly didn’t end up happening as Halford has since revealed that he is gay.
You definitely love Judas Priest, unless you’re the girl who’s there to see Dokken.
What you certainly are is three sheets to the wind and ready to rock.
Heavy Metal Parking Lot contains no narration, and other than being bookended with some music of Judas Priest, is made up entirely of interactions with tailgating concert goers. As such, it is a fascinating cultural time capsule. Though staffed with bewildered attendants and patrolled by nightstick wielding mustachioed cops, underage smoking and drinking appears to be openly tolerated. Nobody bats an eye at the thirteen year old with the boyfriend seven years her senior. Nobody intervenes when cars navigate the titular parking lot with passengers more out than in them.
In the mid-eighties the sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll ethos was in full flower, and it clearly wasn’t just with the artists. The notion that some have about the past always being a more moral place than the present will find much debauchery as a counter-argument here.
Nowadays, many touring bands see themselves as a partner in a business, meaning that partying so hard that you can’t perform makes you a detriment to the success of the business that is the one thing standing between you as a member of a successful band and you as a working stiff at Guitar Center. Are there still those who over-indulge and go on tours with stories that would make the angels weep? Sure, but the days of the Plaster Casters are long gone.
Heavy Metal Parking Lot, today, drives that point home without ever mentioning the behavior of the bands or their entourages. It’s the same realization I had when I made my kids sit down and watch The Goonies, a PG film that might not even get a PG-13 rating if it were made today. What does it all mean and how much does it all matter and what does this say about American culture? Hash that out in the comments, folks.
It should go without saying but I’ll say it, the language and subject matter in the film below is not safe for work.
20 year old guy with 13 year old girlfriend? Even during the 1980s this was very illegal but their seemed to be a very much a non-enforcement of it for some reason. Most of these people, if still alive, would be in their 50s or even above 60 today. Wonder whether they became suburbanites.Report
Some additional thoughts. Obviously most of the people in the parking lot are very white but there was one African-American young man partying with his friends and that was interesting to see. The young people in the 1980s seem, well to be blunt about it, wilder and a bit dimmer than teens and twenty somethings during the 1990s to the present. I was probably in the last cohort where these sorts of concerts were part of the teen and twentysomething experience and it seemed a bit less ruckus when I attended big concerts at the Nassau Coliseum or Madison Square Garden. The tickets were probably comparitively cheaper in the 1980s though.Report
Having attended High School in the Northeast in the late 80s, there is really nothing strange here. Every suburban high school had a large click of “Bangers” who would usually be found outside the cafeteria between classes sucking down marlboros wearing denim jackets with all the usual band patches.
As for the style, I will take cinema verite over the majority of today’s narrative driven pseudo documentaries that we are constantly bombarded with nowadays.Report
There are race and class elements to this. I doubt that a bunch of Black teenagers would be treated so leniently. Parents of upper middle class teenagers would probably keep their kids on a tighter leash because of their futures. So it was white working class to lower middle class kids that probably had the most freedom to engage in this sort of youthful misadventure. That being said, there does seem to have been a greater tolerance for kids to sow their wild oats from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. It started to change by the time I reached my teens during the mid to late 1990s. Now it’s gone.Report