SECRET RECIPE

Buckethead's Secret Recipe is a 2 DVD grab bag of concert footage, home movies, and general weirdness all strung together with sloppy graphics and incomprehensibly unintuitive menus. You will find a plethora of Buckethead biographical material among these disorganized menus. Not to mention Bootsy Collins narrating the menus. What you will not find is any high quality tranfers of either video or audio.

Disc 1 is the nostalgia disc. A huge collection of primarily low quality home video with a smattering of artsy hi-8 b/w film. Lots of it in what appears to be Buckethead's bedroom and backyard at his parent's house. 1 or 2 of these might be entertaining, but after that they become pretty annoying. Various clips from past shows are an interesting retrospect, if you can accept the shaky hand camera quality (still better than The Blair Witch Project). There are also a few previously unreleased songs that include his runner-up and honorable mention entries to Guitar Player Magazine contests submitted during his teenage years, as well as a fairly large library of images, flyers and set-lists. Not to mention nunchuck fighting instructions.

Among the various unlabeled clickies within another area of clickies is a section of music videos of both Buckethead videos and collaborative works; the highlight of which (and probably the highlight of the entire DVD) is a piece called Spokes for the Wheels of Torment. A hard hitting song with video conisting of animated snippets derived from the "Hell" panel of Hieronymus Bosch's 'The Garden of Earthly Delights'. By far the cleanest transfer of the DVD set's material.

The second disc consists of 2 live recordings: New York in 2000 and Boston 2004. Having seen Buckethead's live one- man show, I found it entertaining in person. But it just does not work as a video worthy method. For some reason the Boston show even included an option for a 5.1 mix. But it really didn't seem to sound any different with no sound emitting from the rear channels. and I went through all the amplifier settings to no avail. The concert recordings are also contained on the DVD in mp3 files when the discs are placed in a computer DVD drive...in case you want to extend your punishment beyond the video watching.

For the Buckethead fan this collection is worth having for the biographical material. And there is certainly entertainment gems to be found. But poor transfer/source quality (and I am by no means a fidelity thug) and aggravating navigation makes Secret Recipe a non-starter for everyone else. 2 stars, definitely for fans only.