A week from Christmas and I have a riddle for you: what does a Thriller jacket, an empty bottle of wine, a flask and a toy gun have in common?
OK, fine. That’s not really some fancy riddle. But, the answer is: memories. Specifically, memories from the making of my music videos.
I love making music videos. I can’t wait to do more, though, without shows going, it’s a little tough to save up the money to make them. Making a music video is probably my favorite part of the whole creative process when putting out an album. Long since finished are all the tough decisions about parts and tempos and song selection and mixes and track sequencing and album art and publicity companies and t-shirt logos, etc. It’s finally time to do something creative that I don’t have to think about 24 hours a day. And yes, it is 24 hours. I dream and have fucking nightmares about making albums. It’s so stressful. It doesn’t have to be. I know plenty of people who love recording. Some even prefer it to playing live. I don’t understand them, but I do appreciate where they are coming from. No, I make it stressful upon myself. I do that with a lot of things, but especially with recording albums. It’s the legacy I will leave when I’m gone. Yes, people will have memories of me, but my music is the best of me. Yes, it’s still flawed just like I’m flawed, but it’s the purest form of me as a human being. Those songs contain everything I have. So many people compare them to children and I used to think it was dumb. But, I get it now. You do birth them, shape them in your image, give them everything you can, then release them into the world to do whatever it is they are going to do and you have little control over when they do good, bad or whatever. Songs are also meant to be commoditized and generate income for me, so I guess that’s where the analogy falls off. But, the first part works.
But, making music videos is amazing. Someone else is in charge. I just have to show up and do my part; which also doesn’t require learning lines, which I would be terrible at, I think. I just have to show up, look good and sing my own songs, which I presumably know the lines to already. Someone else tells me what to wear, where to stand, where to look, what to do with my hands; you know, everything. So, in honor of that, I want to go chronologically backwards and talk about my favorite memories from the making of each video. This week I’ll do my latest video which was for Let’s Go Out Tonight.
So, the genius behind the video for Let’s Go Out Tonight was my friend and super-talented director Kevin Pietila. If you haven’t seen the video yet:
A) What the fuck?!
B) You’re in for a treat
I think I wrote about my favorite memories from this video shoot once but I couldn’t find it relatively quickly so I gave up and here’s my new list:
Night shoots. Turns out if you want to make a movie that takes place at night, you have to shoot at night. That meant showing up to set (set being an Airbnb in SW Washington state for the house/interior shots, the home of a very generous friend of Kevin’s for the graveyard shots, a movie theater and the music venue Holocene in Portland, OR for the performance shots) around 5:30 or 6pm to start setting up/getting into makeup. Starting to shoot around 8pm and wrapping around 4:30 or 5am. Getting makeup taken off/packing up and leaving around 6:30 or 7am. And that was three nights in a row. It was so much fun though. Especially when you get late into the next morning and people start getting loopy. Things get really funny really easily. I think I did my shitty version of the Thriller dance in the abandoned barn like 25 times in a row. It was like 3am and I’m pretty sure Kevin just needed a laugh to keep his energy going. I’ve never been more exhausted at 7am before this shoot and the only thing that would keep me energized for the drive home was blasting Kanye West’s song Waves (from Life of Pablo) and singing along at full throat. I probably listened to that song 100 times in those three days.
Digging my own grave. Turns out the soil in the Pacific Northwest fucking sucks to dig in. It may be great for growing wine grapes but that clay-filled, rocky bullshit is a royal pain in the ass to try and dig a 4’L x3’D x 3W’ hole into. I just remember how bad the space between my thumb and forefinger hurt afterwards. I’m not joking when I say I’m pretty sure it took Kevin and I about 5-6 hours to do. But, we needed it for the the shot and Kevin’s supremely generous and amazing friend allowed us to dig it on his property and then even helped us with the shoot later that week. I’m sure he had better things to do than to run lights or the smoke machine from 9pm-2am, but I’m extremely grateful to him. I swear I’ve never tasted a better Coors than the one I had after those 5-6 hours of picking and digging up that clay.
Being stuck in my own grave. Of course, once I dropped down into the grave, crouched into position, the plastic was draped over the top of the grave, the dirt piled on top of that…that’s the exact moment when the generator died. No generator means no lights, no smoke, no nothing. So, I was stuck in there. It was only gonna be few minutes to get it back online so I figured it was a waste to re-dig me back out, rip out the plastic roof, etc. only for me to go right back in. So, we decided I would just hang for a few until we were back online. Well, a few minutes turned into a few more and a few more and it was starting to get a little harder to breathe since I was mostly sealed up in there. My foot fell asleep and my leg cramped up. But, it was only gonna be a few more minutes. I could wait it out. Plus, the asleep foot would probably make my zombie walk more realistic and my cramped legs would make my grave rise more haggard and believable, which maybe it did. Or, I was just trying to convince myself that I was actually any good at this acting thing. Who knows? Anyways, after like 15 or so minutes (or 2 hours; at least that’s how it felt to me) everything kicked back on and we got the shot. Worth it.
Finally, being a zombie. When Kevin came to me and said he had this crazy idea for a “zombie love story,” I asked him, “do I get to wear a Thriller jacket?” He said “yes” and I was in. Then, I got nervous as I’m definitely not an actor and this concept would require I play a believable zombie. In my other two videos, I mainly just had to look good and sing my songs, but with this one I actually had to kind of do some acting. Turns out, it was really fun. Can’t say I found a new calling in life but it was quite enjoyable. It’s funny actually, I was talking with another musician not too long ago and he too said acting in his music video was his favorite thing to do. Weird how we all want to do what others are doing… Another fun memory about being a zombie was injuring my hand while practicing being a zombie and rehearsing those Thriller moves for the video. An injury as a good memory? Why yes. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was in my shitty, little apartment in Portland, OR. It was a tiny two-bedroom that was basically a one bedroom apartment where they chopped the living room in half to make another tiny bedroom. So, there wasn’t a lot of space in either of the bedrooms. I was in the “office” bedroom, the smaller of the two, and I had the Thriller video up on the computer while I tried to emulate a few moves. I finally picked two of the easiest ones, as you can see in the video around the 1:50-2:20 mark, and started practicing. I got really into trying to do the dance moves like a zombie might and didn’t realize I was a little too close to my printer and slammed my hand into its sharp, plastic corner. I tore off a pretty sizeable chunk of skin. In the video, if you look really close, you can very briefly see a band-aid on my left hand. Coming out of the grave and getting dirt in a very fresh and very much still wide open wound wasn’t fun, but again, worth it... My final good memory about being a zombie was the two hours into and the hour spent getting out of makeup. Being an Aspie (Asperger’s/”Aspie” refers to someone on the autism spectrum that is generally still high-functioning), the thought of someone touching my face and head for an extended period of time was not something I was looking forward to (haircuts are a nightmare for me. Luckily, because of Covid, my wife now has that responsibility which makes it less stressful on me), but the person who did it made it such a great experience. It’s always fun for me to watch people who are passionate about what they do. The only part that was rough was the last day when we were shooting the on-stage performance scenes. Normally, to remove the makeup, it was a slow, steady process of using makeup remover wipes and some alcohol for the tough spots since the makeup was alcohol-based. We used alcohol-based so it wouldn’t need to constantly be retouched as I sweated or crawled through the dirt. But, on that day, we were in kind of a time crunch, in part because I had locked my self out of my apartment that morning and in part because shoots are just always on the edge time-wise, so we had to move even faster. We started with the makeup on for the zombie performance shots then had to get it off as quickly as possible. But, since it was alcohol-based makeup, “as quickly as possible” meant we had to basically drench my face in rubbing alcohol and scrub. Needless to say, my face was on fire when I went back up for the “normal” Bradley shots. But, again, totally worth it.
So, the jacket and fake gun are from Let’s Go Out Tonight (the venerable Jon Fickes had the distinct pleasure of ending this zombie’s life). I hope you maybe learned something fun about the behind the scenes. If you have any questions about the video you’d like my thoughts on, feel free to leave a comment. Next week we’ll talk about Lookin’ at Luckey and a funny story about a wine bottle. I’ll see you then.
Here’s to hoping I never have to dig a grave in the Pacific Northwest ever again…