The night we watched End of the Century, we did a punk rawk double feature. The Ramones story was all about the talking heads (I'm leaving in that potentially confusing sentence for the amusement of it. Pay attention to the letter case!). The Unheard Music, on the other hand, was about a filmmaker trying to show a band and their influences in a metaphorical way. Because X is hardly direct with their imagery, this was a smart choice, and ultimately a great movie.
It relies on the old standard Ephemera mish-mash technique--mixing in public domain footage with performance and interview shots. Anybody who grew up in the 80s knows exactly what I'm talking about with the ephemera films. Oh god, they were dull. Usually some artsy-avant type doing rapid cuts (read: no more than 24 frames, which pre-digital editing was pretty damn fast), ironically juxtaposing a nuclear explosion with classroom health films, usually set to some slightly disturbing drum machine / synth loop. We were supposed to feel something from these films, but I doubt that something was supposed to be the boredom I inevitably sunk into as yet another film student showed their poorly-made masterpiece.
But here is an example of somebody actually using those techniques to great ends--a difficult challenge, but W.T. Morgan (director) and X the band obviously had a point to make beyond some general ennui about modern culture. It was more of a specific celebration of modern culture through the collage of influences that fed into Los Angeles, punk rock, and especially X themselves. The trick is, this movie doesn't name those influences, but brings them to you experientially so that you might gain understand of the band. It's a perfect show-don't-tell movie.
The movie crafts character for the four band members: Billy Zoom firmly in the clutches of rockabilly car culture, D.J. Bonebrake in a 40's jazz environment, and Exene and John in their bungalow-- with Dia de los Muertos figurines, concert posters and some old-lady lace touches around the fringes--are the representatives of pick-your-own-culture, with equal parts country-western, southern rock, mexican mysticism, and good old American working-man liberalism.
While any of those looks are anachronistic and well-known now, at the time X came around they were brand new and really unexplored. They were truly about originality and seeking your own path, as opposed to simply saying "Oh, I want to play alt-country," and then starting a band called Uncle Soup-o-low, and emoting annoyingly like Ryan Adams (yeah, we get it--you feel deeply).
We see the band writing songs, performing songs, recording songs. We meet Ray Manzarek, showing that X refused to lock themselves into the punk dogma of the day by rejecting anything smacking of hippy. Instead, X made music--a lot of it, and a lot of really good, original and groundbreaking stuff.
Three scenes stuck with me from watching this movie in 1986 when it first came out. The first is Bonebrake in his kitchen showing how he can do polyrhythms with each limb on his body. ("Hey!" said John Doe to Billy Zoom on the phone, "I just saw this drummer who hits his snare drum REAL hard." Billy: "Offer him anything."). Second, the record distributer who didn't pick up X. Has to be seen to be fully enjoyed, but it definitely spells the problem with the music industry, and why it's currently starting a long descent into obsolescence.
Finally, and most movingly is a hypnotic sequence where two flatbed trucks move a house through Los Angeles in the middle of the night, set to the song The Unheard Music. John and Exene, in perfect symmetric unique harmony sing:
Friends warehouse pain
attack their own kind
A thousand kids bury their parents
there's laughing outside
we're locked out of the public eye
Some smooth chords
on the car radio
no hard chords
on the car radio
we set the trash on fire
and watch outside the door
men come up the pavement
under the marquee
there's laughing inside
we're locked out of the public eye