Plasmatics - Dream Lover (Calderone Theatre, NY May 17, 1980)

This video is one of the remaining handful of videos remaining from the Plasmatics early 1980 show at the Calderone Theater in Hempstead, Long Island. The song, Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover”, one of the very few cover songs the Plasmatics ever did was one of the first songs they ever recorded on Vice Squad Records before signing with Stiff UK to release New Hope for the Wretched. One of the things we see in this video, although, here edited way down in length is the Plasmatics radical, and in those days famous, “noise jam”. The noise jam first appeared on the Vice Squad release “Meet the Plasmatics” () although there coupled with the song “Want You Baby”. Rod Swenson, who produced the record, had an interest in “random generated sounds or noise” as music and so in the recording of Want You Baby during the instrumental portion he turned off the headphones of the band members so none of them could hear what each other was playing. This ended in the birth of the noise jam which was then brought into early Plasmatics stage shows in the form that is seen here, where band members played without paying any attention to each other. In the re-discovered version of this performance here this jam was cut down to only a few minutes, but the original (which has not been found) would have had this going on for another 5 or 6 minutes (Want You Baby with the noise jam times in at over 11 minutes), or in any case long enough for Wendy to do a costume change which she did about halfway through her sets during her whole career (later with more conventional band jams) In the video here, we see another notable point about the staging of the shows, which was to put everything on stage, including roadies. Here the band needs to be cued to know that Wendy is done with her change and that they need to go back from the noise jam and into the main verse of the song. So Rod had one of the roadies/techies costumed in NYC police uniform and come out center stage and signal. Notable people in the audience included press from the UK that Stiff had flown over to see the band and generate press for the upcoming release of New Hope for the Wretched. “Sounds” Magazine put the band on its cover the following week with a story about the show and a picture of Wendy shot during the show. Credits: Video Produced and Directed: Rod Swenson Subscribe to the channel: --- © Plasmatics Media, LLC Facebook: --- #Plasmatics #WendyOWilliams #punk #CBGB #70s #newyorkmusic #punkmusic #punkstyle #consumerism #Anti-Capitalist