Eyes As Hard As a Million Tombstones (Part One)

I opened up my mailbox the other day and saw a package from Canada.  My first thought was "Canada?  Where the heck is that?"  Just kidding- my thought was "oh, that's right, Christian said he was going to send me a spare copy of the old Eyes as Hard a Million Tombstones video."  So naturally, I was excited as I've never seen it before, and I was even more excited to see that he had enclosed a DVD copy as well.  My poor, neglected, seldom-if-ever used VHS player was not so excited, but what are you going to do?

Moving on, the video is really interesting.  I'm going to just kind of throw out some random thoughts on it and hope it all pulls together into some kind of coherent narrative, but I'm not particularly hopeful on that.  The video opens up with about a 15-minute segment that kind of introduces the group one by one.  In a way, it almost felt like watching an old introductory episode of MTV's The Real World to me.  Just the style of introducing the various band members without staging it as just a series of sitdown interviews gave me that vibe and I thought it was a good touch.  In particular, there's some stuff with a conversation between some of the female group members lamenting the way woman are portrayed in rap videos that really just gave me that Real World vibe- I also recall that time period being a bit removed from the oncoming "video ho" era (for lack of a better phrase).  It's sad, but this time period was probably the peak of woman being portrayed positively in rap videos- it just shows that even then, there was work to be done and it's only gotten worse. 

Most or all of this material was also shot at the same area where the album cover for Three Years... as well, which was kind of cool.  And we even saw a shot of Headliner cutting hair, which I got a kick out of as that line about Headliner cutting hair as a way to survive always sticks out to me on "Give a Man a Fish."

From here, we move on to a couple of videos- "Tennessee" and "Mr. Wendal."  Most AD fans are presumably familiar with those.  We then go into an eclectic segment of the tape that includes Speech getting choked up- with good reason- while talking about some of the real life experiences that went into the lyrics of "Tennessee."  He also does a little song while drumming on a keyboard about his relationship with God that was really good.  It would've been kind of cool to see that one fleshed out to a full song.  That may have been my favorite portion of the video.  There's also a great segment where Speech talks about buying a house, but not having any time to spend in it so it's not yet a home.  With all of the references to "home" in the highly personal "Tennessee", that comment takes on a deeper meaning I think.  

Throughout the video, many of the "skits" from 3 Years are mixed in as the audio while various images of the group are displayed, which does create kind of a funny moment- on "Blues Happy" where Speech talks about Eshe always smiling, they cut to a shot of Eshe that naturally shows her.....frowning.  A curious editing choice, but not quite into "Greedo shot first" territory (for you Star Wars fans out there).  You also get stuff of the group clowning- some of it funny, and some of it I think you had to be there for.

There's also a segment of the video where "Fishin 4 Religion" plays in the background and we get shots of AD performing the song live as well as shots of people fishing and a Bible ending up in a bait bucket (I think that's the best way to describe it- I'm not much of a fisherman!).  I thought that shot was brilliant.  Basically, it seems to me that the material was there to make a quick video for that song, but for whatever reason I guess it never materialized.

From there, you get some concert footage from various shows, including a show from Speech's hometown of Milwaukee that Speech portrays as being particularly stressful yet rewarding.  The group seems a bit overwhelmed at times during some of the backstage stuff, which I can imagine- they were on a bit of a whirlwind.  AD was enormously popular at this time, and it seemed to have happened very fast.  They were Rolling Stone's Band of the Year in 1993, just as an example of how big they were.  And this is running quite a bit longer than I thought it would, so I will stop here and will continue with part two of my review down the road.  So far, I am really enjoying this tape though.

Also, thanks to Christian for sending this my way!