Mostly, I want to know if any band has more on-screen cameos than Yo La Tengo. The Brooklyn indie-rock trio have been amongst my most-beloved bands for 30 years. They’ve made a slew of fantastic records and have almost too many great songs to count — though I will cap this column with a playlist of my favourites.
Yo La Tengo are one of those bands that seem to really enjoy being a band. They make studio albums, collab albums and albums under aliases. They frequently contribute to covers and tribute albums, have two albums of covers themselves, have done enough impromptu charity stump-the-band all-request appearances on WFMU radio to warrant a compilation album called Yo La Tengo Is Murdering The Classics… and have even have scored six films (there’s a compilation of four of these, brilliantly titled They Shoot, We Score).
But Yo La Tengo not only provide soundtrack music, they have appeared on-screen at least three times that I’m aware of. The earliest example I found was in 1996 when they portrayed The Velvet Underground in the film I Shot Andy Warhol, about Valerie Solanas.
The band also briefly appeared as a Salvation Army band in The Book of Life (1998). And, for you discography completists, it was enough to get them on the soundtrack album, as well.
But best of all — the band appeared on Parks and Recreation in the final episode of Season 6 in 2014 as Night Ranger cover band Bobby Knight Ranger, hailing from Indiana.
They also appeared in Season 10 of The Simpsons (more on that series later). Anyway, all this got me thinking about other real-life bands who did cameos in films and TV as either an unnamed band, or as a different act altogether. The first one I thought of was Masters Of Reality. When I was in high school, we loved their self-titled 1989 debut album so much that we all bought tickets to see a film we never would have even rented, had we not heard Masters Of Reality were in it. That film? Marked For Death, starring Steven Seagal. The band appear on stage performing Domino in a club, just before a big fight scene. The song is featured on the film soundtrack.
I believe we also went to see the final instalment in the Dirty Harry series of films, 1988’s The Dead Pool. This time, we were keen to catch a glimpse of Guns ‘N’ Roses. In the film, Jim Carrey portrays Johnny Squares, a rock star whose murder was meant to appear like a heroin overdose. Members of GN’R appear at Squares’ funeral and again during a music video shoot at the docks, where Slash fires a harpoon through a window.
The GN’R appearance is kind of on the line because — like Jack White portraying Elvis in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story — they don’t actually perform. I’m looking for musicians and bands posing as musicians and bands, not simply musicians being actors. There’s loads of those. George Harrison made a few cameos in films, largely because he paid for them. John Lennon was in How I Won The War — that’s where he first started wearing his signature round glasses. Beastie Boys’ Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz did some acting, as did Red Hot Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis and bandmate Flea. Lady Gaga has done both musical and non-musical roles. Ditto Madonna. Snoop Dogg was in Starsky & Hutch and Half Baked. Tom Waits has made a bunch of films. Phil Collins was a child actor, but also was in Buster and Hook. I’m not interested in musicians who act. I want musicians performing as themselves or other musicians.
Here’s another artist who worked both sides of the line: David Bowie. The Thin White Duke did a few proper acting roles, but he also performed songs as Jareth the Goblin King in the 1986 Jim Henson film Labyrinth. It counts.
A great and hilarious example is Alice Cooper’s appearance in the Johnny Depp movie Dark Shadows. Cooper portrays himself, hired to perform at a ball at the Collinwood estate. Barnabas Collins mistakes him for a woman: “The ugliest woman I’ve ever seen.” Alice mimes to No More Mr. Nice Guy.
The Coop also appears in a memorable scene in Wayne’s World. Wayne and Garth have backstage VIP passes which get them into Alice’s post-concert dressing room. Nervous, the pair make awkward conversation and ask Alice if he’d ever been to Milwaukee before, only to discover he knows everything there is to know about the place. But he doesn’t perform. For a performance, we turn to Wayne’s World 2 and Aerosmith, who actually close the film with a version of Shut Up and Dance. The band also made a cameo with Wayne and Garth on an episode of Saturday Night Live, featuring Tom Hanks as a roadie.
ZZ Top showed up in the final installment of the Back To The Future series, portraying a trio of musicians in the Old West. They do an fiddle-and-all unplugged hoedown version of their track Doubleneck from Recycler.
Tom Jones portrays a comedic version of himself as a Las Vegas alien invasion survivor in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! Funnier is Billy Idol’s portrayal of himself in The Wedding Singer, though he doesn’t sing. Bruce Springsteen certainly performs while playing a version of himself, as imagined by John Cusack’s lonely character Rob Gordon.
The Offspring have a big cameo in the 1999 horror-comedy Idle Hands. The movie is about a teenager whose hand becomes possessed and starts killing people. There’s a school dance where The Offspring perform two songs and then get murdered — lead vocalist Dexter Holland has his scalp torn off.
Gwar made an appearance in the 1995 film Empire Records, about a struggling record store. One of the characters eats a pot brownie and hallucinates that he is at a Gwar concert, where he gets eaten by one of the band’s stage props.
Even heavier, frigging Cannibal Corpse appear miming Hammer Smashed Face in a club scene in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994). They have no cameo besides the performance. Star Jim Carrey has often claimed to be a metalhead.
The Deftones were one of the few good things about 1996’s The Crow: City of Angels. Towards the end of the film, the band can be seen and heard performing Teething during a Day of the Dead celebration.
One of my favourite musical guest spots is Tom Waits’ vocal in Tommy The Cat by Primus. So it’s fun to see Primus in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey from 1991 to perform the track during a Battle of the Bands. It’s the first Primus song I ever heard, and it’s still my favourite. It’s also the first time I ever saw someone (in this case Les Claypool) repping a Residents T-shirt.
Finally, among the best Xmas movies ever is Bill Murray’s 1988 film Scrooged. In one scene, Frank Cross — Murray’s Scrooge character — scoffs at a small group of “starving” musicians performing for donations on the street. The musicians performing We Three Kings are Miles Davis, David Sanborn, guitarist Larry Carlton and keyboardist Paul Shaffer.
Now, on to The Simpsons. The legendary, long-running animated series has had a slew of famous musicians appear on the program, voicing characters based on themselves or fictional ones. Among them: Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison, The Ramones, U2, James Brown, The Weeknd, Lenny Kravitz, Tony Bennett, Willie Nelson, Michael Jackson, Elvis Costello, Aerosmith, Sting, Spinal Tap, ‘N Sync, Tom Jones, Linda Ronstandt, David Crosby, Barry White, Cypress Hill, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Tom Petty, Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth, Bette Midler, Red Hot Chili Peppers, David Byrne, Stephen Sondheim, Ludacris, Green Day, James Taylor, Brian Setzer, Robert Goulet, Tito Puente, Linda McCartney, Paul Anka, Peter Frampton, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Jr., Elton John, Dolly Parton, B-52’s, Britney Spears, The Who, R.E.M., Phish, Jackson Browne, Weird Al, Little Richard, Blink-182, 50 Cent, Los Lobos, Metallica, White Stripes, Lionel Richie, The Chicks, Chris Martin, Eartha Kitt, Flight of the Conchords, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Alison Krauss, Tom Waits, Justin Bieber, Sigur Ros, Rob Halford, Sammy Hagar, Pharrell Williams, Johnny Mathis, RZA, Donald Fagen, Snoop Dogg, Ed Sheeran, Dave Matthews, Bob Seger, Weezer and John Legend.
Anyway, here’s that playlist of Yo La Tengo songs I love…
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Area Resident is an Ottawa-based journalist, recording artist, music collector and re-seller. Hear (and buy) his music on Bandcamp, email him HERE, follow him on Instagram and check him out on Discogs.
