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"A gentle, affectionate portrayal of the witty humor and lo-fi inventiveness of Giant Sand" (Signal To Noise review).

Time capsule documentary by Marianne Dissard on the Tucson band GIANT SAND circa 1994.

With Howe Gelb, Joey Burns and John Convertino, Victoria Williams, Rainer Ptacek, Vic Chestnutt and many more folks from Tucson's downtown scene circa 1994.

Released originally on VHS tape, then on DVD in 2004, these two videos are now available for the first time on a streaming platform.

'Drunken Bees': 27mn. Bonus video 'Giant Prequel': 28mn, featuring a KCRW studio performance. and the 1989 "Searchlight" music video by Chris Wagganer.

ALL regions. English with English subtitles option.

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SIGNAL TO NOISE review of DRUNKEN BEES:

“Drunken Bees, the Marianne Dissard film chronicling Giant Sand circa 1994 is a fascinating glimpse at a “classic” Giant Sand lineup: Howe Gelb, Joey Burns, John Convertino and Bill Elm. The title is taken from a particularly excoriating review of the band’s 1994 album “Glum”, which appeared in Rolling Stone; in one scene, the band dissects the review with grim humor.

Clocking in at one hour, the film supplies a tantalizing glimpse of the band’s creative process and their Tucson stomping grounds. Unlike many rockumentaries, some of the offstage banter is surprisingly entertaining. In a similar vein as much of the band’s music, Dissard’s film pieces together an overall impression from fragmentary bits of materials; she prefers vignettes linked by common themes to overarching narrative. While you might wish for lengthier portions from live performances and studio sessions, Drunken Bees is a gentle, affectionate portrayal of the witty humor and lo-fi inventiveness of Giant Sand”

REVIEW http://thegreenmanreview.com/gmr/film...

"You're way too real/for wide appeal."

That quote from the late Rainer Ptacek's song "Square," as performed by Howe Gelb in one of his many guises (this time as The Band of Blacky Ranchette), pretty much sums up the whole Howe Gelb/Giant Sand experience. Drunken Bees, a half-hour video documentary filmed in 1994, gives a brief and at times chaotic glimpse of the band's approach to making music. Giant Sand is the Tucson, Arizona-based band headed by Gelb, an alt-rock, twisted Americana visionary. French indie film-maker Marianne Dissard, an early fan, decided she wanted to capture Giant Sand on film and wormed her way into the life of the band.

The result is this disjointed document on film, originally released on VHS and now available for the first time on DVD. It features Gelb and his bandmates at the time -- John Convertino on drums and vibes, Joey Burns on acoustic bass and guitar, Ptacek on guitars, Bill Elm on lap steel, and occasionally Paula Jean Brown on electric bass -- as they rehearse in living rooms and studios and do a lot of hanging out. Gelb thrives on a sort of controlled chaos, incorporating an improvisatory jazz sensibility into his loose desert rock, part Neil Young, part Captain Beefheart, and wholly original. Both Brown and another frequent collaborator, singer Victoria Williams, say that Gelb likes "not knowing what's going to happen next," and as Williams observes, "That's sort-of the condition of life, isn't it?".

But Gelb also has a measure of control, as we see in several snippets of rehearsals, including one in which he and Elm carefully work out the call-and-response parts for their guitar and pedal steel. The film veers from setting to setting with seeming randomness, much like Giant Sand's music. When we meet Gelb in the first scene, he's demonstrating a makeshift "swamp cooler" built into his ancient Plymouth Barracuda. Other scenes include pans across a small crowd listening to a rehearsal in a residential Tucson neighborhood; Gelb talking about The Little Prince with a camouflage-clad airman on the local Air Force base; short bursts of rehearsals and performances, including one in which Gelb's toddler daughter draws pictures in the midst of the performers on stage, seemingly oblivious to the raucous music; a dramatic night-time lightning storm; and a non-sequitur laden conversation with a drunken out-of-towner, wandering the residential neighborhood looking for "some action with the ladies."

The film's title comes from a review in Rolling Stone magazine, which we see Burns reading to his band-mates at one rehearsal session."Things buzz and bump and crash as randomly as drunken bees," the reviewer writes. They liked the phrase well enough to blurb it on their next release. Drunken Bees is an entertaining diversion that fans are sure to enjoy.

Better yet is one of the extras, the 28-minute "Giant Prequel," so named because it was in effect Dissard's audition shoot for the band. It's a film of the band's performance at the public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica, Calif., on the popular "Morning Becomes Eclectic" program. It takes a while to figure out what's going on, because the camera lingers on odd artifacts in the studio, inter-cut with shots of a silent TV screen showing the Home Shopping Channel, with static, background talk and the band setting up providing the soundtrack. But once the performance starts up, it's quite interesting and entertaining, particularly as Gelb switches, sometimes from measure to measure, among guitar, piano, vocals and a portable cassette player that he holds up to the microphone to play pre-recorded sounds.

Another extra is a short video for the song "Searchlight," filmed on the Nevada desert in 1989 when the band for a time comprised only Gelb and Convertino. His wildly painted Barracude also features prominently.