“Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains” is a lost classic that finally got its proper DVD release, via the venerable Rhino entertainment complex, this past Tuesday. The 1981 cult classic stars a ridiculously young, ridiculously made up Diane Lane as our heroine Corrine Burns and Laura Dern at her side as fellow Stain and cousin Jessica McNeil. In the audio commentary below the ladies talk about the music from ‘The Fabulous Stains’, managing to name check famous cable show Night Flight, The Delta 5 and admit during the filming they were listening to The B-52’s “Rock Lobster” like crazy.
The movie centers on the antics of a know-nothing girl band who start out wanting to get out of their nowheresville small town. They get asked to join a tour with a washed up band of glam rockers called The Metal Corpses and their punk rock opening band called The Looters — who are made up of Sex Pistols Steve Jones and Paul Cook, the most handsome man in punk Paul Simonon of The Clash, and Ray Winstone (previously seen in The Who’s “Quadrophenia”) as their singer.
In the movie The Stains inspire a legion of girls to follow them, ultimately propelling them to their own distruction in approximately the same amount of time it takes for music bloggers today to love, endorse and rabidly turn on bands. In real life this film was almost lost and still managed to inspire several musicians – you can see from the costuming exactly what parts Courtney Love adopted for her own persona. There’s also a widely-held rumor that The White Stripes picked up their name from Ray Winstone’s line, “You’re just two white stripes,” to describe Lane’s punk rock hair as well as their red, black and white only clothing aesthetic (also a Stains trademark).
We here at The Playlist are happy to say we’ve got 3 copies of the DVD plus some “Fabulous Stains” pins (which includes a bright red “I don’t put out” pin!) to give away. First three commenters to this post who tell us their favorite all-girl band and a compelling reason why (that means we don’t care if you think they had great boobs) are the winners. Make sure to include an email address where we can reach you.
UPDATE: We have our winners, but feel free to keep posting because you are inspiring our iTunes playlist for today.