TV Party: Color Show

- 59:27

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synopsis

TV Party's final season was broadcast live in color on Channel J, a public access "commercial station." TV Party tried to pay the extra expense of going to color by selling ads to downtown clubs and underground record companies. "Everything here is for sale," Glenn announces. Desperation is in the air. Glenn is missing a tooth and needs a haircut. The party is spunky but the cast is depleted and possibly drugged. The TV Party theme, music by Walter Steding and rap by Glenn O'Brien opens the show. The show features the TV Party Orchestra, with Lenny Ferrari and guitarist Karen Geniece joined by Charles Rocket on heavy metal accordion, played through a stack of Marshall amps and an array of guitar pedals. Rocket had just been fired from Saturday Night Live for saying "fuck" live on air, and his performance of "Wild Thing" is a triumph of post-modern drollness. He actually gets screaming feedback out of his squeezebox. Jeffrey Lee Pierce of Gun Club shows up with a broken guitar, but borrows one and does a soulful Robert Johnson country blues. The half Japanese New York band Eel Dogs plays. Lothar Manteuffel, one of Germany's top new wavers, ends the show jamming with Rocket on one of the latter's compositions "Why Can't I Get Laid." Who knows what he's singing in German.

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