The Meatmen – The Devil’s in the Details DVD
MVD Visual
When I was in high school, I was over at Jamie Munroe’s house and borrowed some of his records and one of them was We’re The Meatmen and You Suck. I loved that record so much that he didn’t get that record back for nearly a year until I bought my own copy. I put that album on a cassette that went with me to all my skate spots and I played it for everyone. On top of the great hardcore The Meatmen played on that record, it was fucking hilarious as well. I found it so funny in fact that I played it for my dad in the car once. Most parents would probably ban their kid from listening to such a thing, but my dad had a fine appreciation for toilet humor and found it nearly as funny as I did. As the years progressed, The Meatmen went in more of a rock direction but never lost that sense of humor, which was the brainchild of one Tesco Vee, and every record had at least a few good songs on it.
Tesco Vee has to be considered one of the grandfathers of hardcore punk. His contributions led to the formation of Touch and Go fanzine and also the record label. It was about time that someone recognized and documented the legend of Tesco Vee and the Meatmen and it only took the Dutch Hercules himself to spearhead such a project and put it together, but then again the man does have a history of doing it himself so it is only natural that he did it again.
This DVD is a marathon session of all things Meatmen and Tesco Vee. You have live footage, interviews, skits (including some with Tesco’s kids!), and a ton more. Each chapter is a different segment, most of them being live footage spanning the entire career of The Meatmen and some of Tesco Vee’s Hate Police. There is some really really early footage here that was so cool to see the band in their hardcore infancy.
On top of all that, there is an episode of a TV show that Tesco put together and a really great documentary on The Meatmen that is made to spoof the VH1 “Behind the Music” show. One thing I didn’t know about Tesco was that he’s some big time toy collector and there is footage from a couple of appearances on TV shows where he is showing off parts of his collection.
The footage varies in quality depending on where and when it was shot but most of it is very good to excellent quality. The sound was also quite good on almost all the footage too with only the really early stuff sounding kind of rough. The running time is right around three hours which was quite a marathon for one sitting but the segments are broken up into chapters accessible from the main menu, though they are in the form of squirts of Meatspoo that weren’t labeled so you have to guess which is which. Though it was a long period of time to camp out in front of the TV, I was in no way bored during the three hours and in fact was entertained from start to finish.
I highly recommend this DVD not only to Meatmen fans, but to anyone who might be curious what the band was like as it does a good job giving the viewer a sampling of the entire Meatmen history, not to mention anyone with a sense of humor will find the skits even more entertaining. Thumbs way up!
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