MVD Visual: The Secret Lives of Bill Bartell (2025) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of MVD Visual

In 2013, one of the central recurring figures of the 1980s Californian punk scene, White Flag founder and frontman Bill Bartell aka Pat Fear, passed away at the young age of 52 following a checkered and wild true-life story that encompassed everything from roadie to singer, influencer, police officer and later cowboy.  A Punk Rock Zelig and mythic figure shrouded in mystery who advocated for bands like Brazil’s Os Mutantes and Japan’s Shonen Knife, Bill Bartell appeared in The Decline of Western Civilization and befriended as well as toured with such acts as the Germs, Yoko Ono, KISS and even Kurt Cobain who is featured in the forthcoming new documentary film The Secret Lives of Bill Bartell.  

A mystery of personality reinvention, a deep almost superhuman entrenchment in all things music related, this new documentary film by recurring Sonic Youth music video director David Markey is the perfect marriage between outsider subject and renegade filmmaker.  More than anything, it paints a portrait of how a closeted gay suburban roadie somehow or another snuck all the way into the upper tiered annals of rock and roll icons.

 
Including but not limited to starting his own record company Gasatanka Records, a goof on Casablanca Records, Bill Bartell was for awhile there an unstoppable force of nature within the music world.  Somehow cozying up to Punk Rock idols and later Heavy Metal touring, Bill involved himself with everyone from Sean Lennon to Iron Maiden, Drew Barrymore, Brian Wilson and Quentin Tarantino.  Behind the scenes though, Bill was helping to foster budding careers such as introducing Billy Idol to KISS’ manager which helped usher in a solo career for the performer.  

Influencing the name of the Iron Maiden album Maiden Japan, Bill’s friendship with Yoko Ono prompted an infamously hilarious bit of trolling at a Beatles festival where he and White Flag recreated a Yoko Ono performance of screeching into the microphone.  Then came Bill Bartell’s own identity crises, getting fixated on the homoerotic aspects of the police uniform and warming up to cops before becoming a cops himself for a little while, even pulling some strings for a few musical performers here and there.  After tiring of that, then came the cowboy life and rodeo riding, something which resulted in a debilitating lifelong back injury that would later affect the quality of his life and accelerate his death.

 
Over the course of the film The Secret Lives of Bill Bartell, we get through a series of interviews including former White Flag bandmates, filmmaker Allison Anders, taped interviews with Kurt Cobain, newly filmed interviews with Buzz Osborne and Tony Brandenburg the cumulative impact of Bill’s life on so many people while always operating selflessly and under the radar.  Though a flamboyant hard-to-read figure himself, the sheer amount of dots he connected to several musical acts and ability to bring acts you’d never think of from other countries spoke volumes to just how far ahead of the curve this strange guy who neither drunk nor did drugs but was higher on life than most addicts.  

An enigma of a man who seemed to live more than one life out in public but rarely ever expressed his own true self to others, even his closest friends and relatives, Bill Bartell was that annoying dork that drove everyone crazy but somehow or another got the ball rolling for many people in the music industry.  That he seemed to just appear everywhere at all times gave him a superhuman quality though eventually his foray into rodeo bull riding would bring the human Energizer Bunny’s antics to a swift and tragic end.

 
Made in 2025 and being released through MVD Visual and We Got Power Films, The Secret Lives of Bill Bartell is almost like a companion piece of sorts to such personal documentaries as Grizzly Man and The Sparks Brothers, highlighting eccentric but interesting figures whose overarching impact on modern media and/or musical acts we know and love is subtle but omnipresent.  Featuring over forty minutes of additional interviews and deleted scenes, a q&a with the 2025 Slamdance Festival and an original trailer, The Secret Lives of Bill Bartell comes together in a hefty comprehensive Blu-ray package.  

With his brand of seriousness or farce from White Flag to his still unusual forays into police force and rodeo riding, never letting you know when he was onstage or in person what he was really up to, the mystery of Bill Bartell who got himself burrowed into the heart of the Punk Rock and later the Heavy Metal music scene is charming, humbling and more than a little tragic with how swiftly his saga closed up shop.  As someone who never heard of this man or just how far reaching his efforts as an influencer and musical performer were, The Secret Lives of Bill Bartell was a wonderful little new documentary surprise pointing to one of the industry’s most clandestine movers and shakers.

--Andrew Kotwicki