Screen Syndicate - Roberta Stars in The Big Doll House (2022)

A concept album about the career of an obscure B-movie star?  It's not as far-fetched an idea as you might think, especially when the star in question is the late Roberta Collins, a talented actress lauded by Quentin Tarantino for her performances in exploitation movies that were usually screened at drive-ins.  Collins, who starred in cheesy movies about women's prisons and futuristic dystopias with plenty of sex and violence, had always hoped to break through to the Hollywood mainstream, only to do no better than a few guest appearances on TV series and a mainstream flop or two before giving up on acting in 1986.  Her tragic death in 2008 from what was believed to be a narcotics overdose, only a year after her son died, occurred with little if any notice.

Screen Syndicate is the brainchild of southern Illinois indie-rocker Stace England, who set up this group as a sideline to perform songs about the movies in tandem with film clips as a multimedia experience.  Roberta Stars in The Big Doll House is Screen Syndicate's love letter to Collins, presenting her as an actress who was far more than a pretty blonde face and as a symbol of women's empowerment in B-movie mogul Roger Corman's film productions in the 1970s but also lamenting her failure to escape the exploitation-movie treadmill and prove herself as A-list material.

The songs on Roberta Stars in The Big Doll House take their titles from Collins' films, and the lyrics illustrate the plots and present them as metaphors for Collins' performances in films released by Roger Corman and her efforts to define herself as an actress and as a woman.  The music is as underproduced as the movies they describe, and that's a good thing.  Rhythm guitars are ragged and raw, with plenty of grit underlining tasteful leads and solos, with solid bass lines and dry drums carrying pulsating tempos.  "The Big Doll House" and "Women in Cages" set the pace with their sympathies toward oppressed female inmates striking back at their jailers while zeroing in on Collins' dramatic turns, and then things get really interesting.  "Unholy Rollers" has a fast, circular tempo that evokes the roller derbies of the movie it takes its title from, besting Jim Croce's "Roller Derby Queen" with a full-contact thrust, while "Death Race" has a fast techno vibe with a subtle synthesizer drone that betrays the post-apocalyptic world of homicidal road rallies depicted in Death Race 2000 (in which Collins played a neo-Nazi race car driver).  A heavy-metal buzz drives "Caged Heat" while a funky soul groove underpins "Three the Hard Way," all to celebrate Collins at her peak as a bad-ass icon.

Roberta Stars in The Big Doll House fuses the persona with the personal, as England's songwriting looks introspectively at his admiration for Collins and chronicles her efforts to be taken seriously.  "Eaten Alive" is a futile plea to casting directors to recognize her potential for bigger things while urging her not to be ashamed of B-movie parts she nailed.  But as the album progresses, the melodies slow, the music is less brash, and England's frustration over Collins' decline and her bad breaks grows.  "Hardbodies I & II" sadly recounts her fading appeal, while "Vendetta" (named for the movie with her final role) addresses her like a lover, begging her not to go, to the heartbreaking sound of innocent doo-wop backing vocals.

If mainstream albums like Neil Young's After the Gold Rush, the Eagles' Desperado, and Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road are cinematic albums of rock and roll, Screen Syndicate's Roberta Stars in The Big Doll House is a rock and roll album about the cinema. It's a sonic show that works without the movie scenes it's meant to accompany in live performances, because it casts Roberta Collins as a three-dimensional woman and as a secular saint, the matron saint of unrealized ambitions.  The closing song, "Sweet Kill," is England's funeral for a friend, remembering "a life reflected in scenes that never really showed who you are" and expressing sorrow for her fatal downfall.  Not since Leadbelly's memorial song for Jean Harlow - a woman Collins played as a supporting role once, and I'll explore that in a separate post - has anyone simultaneously expressed such nostalgic joy and painful sorrow for a star of the silver screen gone too soon. 

"And now that all your dreams are gone," England and his bandmates sing, "there's no reason to hang on . . . you can fade away . . .."  To know of Roberta Collins is to have loved her and to miss her.  I can't hear "Sweet Kill" without getting upset.  It may be the greatest cinematic finale ever expressed in sound.