This flyer announces a screening of the film D.U.I. A buried treasure of the period, D.U.I. featured a number of closely related underground and sub-underground acts in their element. The film’s conceit was that a local musician (a member of Severed Head in a Bag) had been charged with a D.U.I., providing the impetus for a single benefit concert to support her cause. Parts of this might have been true, but the performances were taken from a number of different dates and venues mostly, perhaps exclusively, in 1983). The film was, if memory serves, made with consumer-level video cameras.

Several performances in the film documented brilliant and hopelessly twisted phenomena, such as the aforementioned Severed Head in a Bag, who routinely punished audiences with relentless noise; Three Day Stubble, whose version of “nerd-rock” made Half Japanese seem straight-laced; and Jon Wayne, whose demented brand of honkytonk amounted to conceptual art.

Until recently, this film, which though it played at least one festival was never released theatrically or on VHS or DVD, had almost no Web presence at all (note the barebones IMdb entry). Fortunately a few clips recently appeared in a YouTube user’s collection; links are provided below:

• Debt of Nature
• John Trubee
• Jon Wayne
• Severed Head in a Bag
• Thrash Dumbos
• Three Day Stubble
• Whitehouse