RETRIBUTION

I had totally forgotten about this video until earlier tonight, because I think I only saw it once. I have a DVD copy and all the raw footage, but never actually sat down and watched what Martin and his co-producers put together.

Let me tell you a little bit about it.

I was in a band called Cherem for about seven years, from late 2000 until I quit in the fall of 2007. We made two albums a couple compilations and toured a fair amount. It was a lot of fun but a lot of work. Martin used to live in Salt Lake City and moved to LA to go to film school. He heard we were coming through town on tour and told us he wanted to make a music video as a project for one of his classes. He told us that it wouldn't cost us anything and that all we had to do was show up. We gave ourselves a day off in the middle of a quick week-long tour through California and met up with him after we played at Chain Reaction in Anaheim.

On a side note, I have an entire separate blog dedicated to Cherem/band tour stories that I've updated exactly once this year. The problem is that I'm trying to go in chronological order, but haven't had time to fill in the blank spots. I have a word document with about 45,000 words in it and a lot of it is the later shows that I wrote about while gone instead of retroactively. My New Year's Resolution (I just decided this, and it may have been my resolution for 2010 also, but that's in the past) is to get a good chunk of that updated and finished. I don't think anyone else really cares, but it'll be fun for me to look back over years down the road.

Now, back on track, here's a few things I remember about the day we shot this video.

- I remember saying that I didn't want this to look like every other hardcore video, but understood that wasn't entirely possible given their budget (which was $0 aside from the equipment rental). Unfortunately, we ended up with a pretty basic music video and the exact kind I didn't want. Can't complain too much though. It was fun to do and I'm stoked they did it for us.

- For a music video to work, the track needs to be played loud enough for everyone to mimic what was going on while still playing their hardest. This didn't quite work because they had forgotten to bring something to play the song through. One of the guys had to drive his car on to the soundstage and play his stereo at full volume, which still didn't work because Clint's drums were so loud.

- Everything looks stiff in a video, you have to over exaggerate every little thing as much as possible before it even looks remotely real. And that's hard to do when you're trying to play along to a track that you can't really hear. Also, we're all terrible actors.

- The soundstage was in a parking garage off either Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard and since we had to start at 8am, it was still a little cold. I have poor circulation anyway, so I kept my hoodie on while we played the song probably 10 times for them to film it from different angles and get close ups of each of us. At about 10:30, it started getting really hot, but we'd already filmed about three runs through the song, so I was fucked. If I took the hoodie off, the whole thing would just look strange, because the takes wouldn't match up. By the time we broke for lunch I was dying.

- We didn't really have a bass player at that time. We'd had a fill-in for the two shows, but he was from Redlands and went home after we played the Anaheim show. Luckily, our friend DP was in town staying with his girlfriend. We made him come with us and stand in as our bass player. Also luckily, they didn't use much of the live footage from the show in Salt Lake because we had someone else playing at that point and that didn't line up either.

All in all, it was a fun thing to do and another experience I can break out at boring family dinner parties where I inevitably end up telling stories to entertain people. Which happens quite often.