Making the “Alone” Video
Posted by Matt
Back in April when it was warm, John and I got word that filmmaker Phil Harder had come to see one of our first gigs. John and I had known of Phil way back in the 80’s when he had shot about 200 music videos of various scruffy bands in and out of Minneapolis, all in the 16 MM format. I remember thinking that the work was raw and fresh, and Phil was amazingly prolific. As the bands that Phil had shot became more successful, they brought Phil along, exposing his talent to ever-higher budgets and ever-huger stars. If you look at his resume, the famous names go on and on.
Recently, Phil had become neighbors in Minneapolis with our keyboard player, Dave Salmela. Dave is kind of a quiet phenomenon. The opposite of pushy, Dave never asks for anything. But somehow, he always ends up in the middle of the action. Wherever there is art or music being made, Dave is always standing there with a key role. His curiosity and his easy nature draws creative people toward him. That’s how The Twilight Hours crossed into Phil’s orbit. He offered to shoot a video for one of our songs.
Music videos. We all embrace and accept them, but what an odd form. Fantastical imagery is generated, vaguely related to the lyrics of the song. Budgets are limited so the band always has to commit in advance to the insane imagery suggested by the the director. Then, after all the ridiculous footage has been captured at great expense, you just have to pray that the pictures and the music really do connect and make sense in some sort of dream logic.
Now Phil had his own motivation in making this video, but his selfish reason only makes about as much sense as the dream imagery you’d see in any video. Here was what Phil needed out of the project: Phil had a rickety little house boat sitting down on the turbid banks of the Mississippi River. And due to some art installation that Phil and Dave had created, the walls on the inside of this boat happened to be covered with mirrors and shiny plastic materials. So, to Phil, the insatiable musical film maker, the situation in his boat amounted to a kind of cosmic obligation to shoot as many music videos in this mirrored room as he could before he had to tear down all these mirrors and put up some other weird props in there.
The Twilight Hours were just lucky enough to come across Phil’s radar as he was undergoing this mania to shot videos in his mirror-walled houseboat. I think he ended up shooting about six different bands in there.
We gave Phil a CD of our soon to be released album, “Stereo Night” so he could see if there was a song that inspired him. We kind of expected him to pick out something that would be upbeat and “hit”-ish. But he surprised us and said that he thought that one of the slower songs, Alone, would make sense in that mirrored environment. Immediately, we saw the poetical logic of that choice: the lonesome lyrics set against the infinite reflections of a mirrored chamber. This surprising song suggestion by Phil got things off to a fine start because it was an inspired leap. It made us want to follow.
I sent John and Phil an email telling them that I thought that the lonliest image I had ever seen in movies was the image in “2001: A Space Odyssey” of the astronaut Dave spinning away from his ship, voiceless, helpless and utterly alone. This suggestion triggered a flurry of ideas from John and Phil. In a way, the mirrored room looked like the interior of a 60’s TV space capsule. But even better, Phil and his filmmaking partner Rick Fuller had gathered a treasure trove of public domain NASA film footage from the early space flights which we could use in our little movie. Phil became excited about the notion of projecting these old clips onto and our faces and instruments as we lip synced to the song. Way back in the 80’s, John and my first album together, “Applehead Man” used that very sort of projection process on its cover. We love that look. Phil proposed to capture everything on his dinged-up 16 MM camera. We would have grainy film within grainy film, a recipe for beauty.
Predictably, once we got into that hot, cramped boat, things just turned into a marathon under lights. Phil was crawling around on on the revolting shag floor pointing his camera and quietly commanding us into various positions and configurations. Film loops were strung from the floor to the ceiling and projected from two old projectors like the ones John and I used to see during film hour in our 6th grade classes. Sometimes the music would be playing at double speed, making the “sync” part of lip-syncing kind of a joke. And at all times the muffled music would be playing from a barky little boom box through the thin wall of the boat’s cabin. The situation was not plush. We’d shoot for a while and then open the doors to cool off in the dank river air. At one point, as we broke for a quick dinner, Phil became agitated by the changing light of dusk. Dinner went by the way side and in a big hurry we shot the profiled footage we see in the second verse with the river shimmering in the background. All this hanging out on the boat and that’s the only water you end up seeing!
Phil brought all the right elements into play. The great old NASA footage. The corny mirrored room. The awesome grainy, slowed-down film format that he loves. And all that unabashed childishness that he possesses in spades. I truly hope that in the years ahead I can remain as childish and id-driven as Phil is now.
Thank you, Phil!
14 Comments
Thanks Matt! Perfect example of “liner notes” enhancing the piece.
Posted by Spike
Yes… Thanks so much for this video posting and liner notes which are really great to read…it’s really great to see this video again because it’s hard to absorb much of anything after only one view…and the liner notes do make it better!
I just love the imagery especially with the video playing against the backdrop of the TH ocean and sky, it fits perfectly…especially the shot of the rocket releasing it’s booster near the beginning of the video you can imagine it falling into the ocean behind you…I also like the one shot of Matt from below and he’s spinning away it mirrors the image of the tumbling astronaut…and the first close-up of Matt with those big glasses and the reflections of the, is it the porthole?...made me think that it looked like Matt had a space helmet on…those glasses are so big…but they look good..I mean they’re not too big…
Posted by Kara
What weird decor for a boat…it must’ve been some crazy scene back in the day…obviously it was some sort of 70’s party disco scene…but maybe not…I’m happy that the song chosen was Alone….it’s my favorite…and the video hasn’t ruined it at all…in fact both the video and the liner nots have made it better!
The old crackly film is wonderful…I also like the shot of basically the moon closeup with Matt’s face barely visible in the craters…I hardly would’ve notice the river in the second verse that sunshine is so bright…but thanks to the Liner Notes…I noticed the reflection…
Posted by Kara
How about those two shots of them all standing around a boiling cauldron of “eye of newt”...like a coven of witches…that’s funny…John looks so serious…and mournful…Steve looks really kindof cute…Dave wore a black jacket so you can’t see too many images on him…and Jacques has a great little feature when the guitar kicks in…
Posted by Kara
Wonderful that the video is now available. And thanks for the “liner notes.” John will despair at my saying so, but keep them coming.
So, I don’t remember Jacques playing a Rickenbacker at any of the shows. Is the blue axe he wields in the video really what he plays, or is it a prop intended as a reference to other material on the record?
-psh
Posted by psh
Elegant, elegiac, and eloquent. Never has rolling around the shag carpet of a houseboat yielded a more evocative expression.
Posted by SkipSpence
My opinion: Yes, surely that is *the* blue Rickenbacker mentioned elsewhere on the CD and played by Matt back in the 90s.
Great video.
Posted by floyderdog
Great vid and story. I never quite got into Alone like some of the other tunes on the new release (although I generally thought it was good tunage). I just chalked it up as a connection misalignment considering everyone else on the forum likes the tune so much. But now I notice an elusive urgency in the song and have a new appreciation of the tune thanks to the video.
And I loved all the Apollo videos. This being the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, I’ve taken a strong interest in the absolutely amazing and daring feat that we, as a species, pulled off at such an early stage of our flirtations with space travel (let’s see… let’s stick a dude in a late 60s, low production run “device”, hurl him at around 255 miles per SECOND, send him 200,000+ miles away from Earth, and see if we don’t kill the sucker. Oh… and have him bring back a moon rock for a souvenir). Very prudent that astronauts in space are tied in with themes of loneliness.
Great work!
Eric P.
Posted by Eric
...and did you notice that it was a full moon last night…and so this morning driving to work in the still dark, with the moon still bright in the western sky..I thought how beautiful and how alone..
Posted by Kara
Floyerdog/Dan-
The blue Rickenbacker. I totally forgot about seeing Matt play that way back. Thanks for the reminder. I think I saw him play it at a two man, post-Trip show. Just him and a drummer playing some of the stuff I would later think of as the Planetmaker songs—Raking Service, QOT, Susannah, etc. Nice call.
-psh
Posted by psh
Does Phil spell “Phillip” with 1 or 2 “l"s?
Posted by drneau
Other-worldly was always what I thought of your music…and now once again.
Posted by Anita
Does the video only come in Quicktime format? I have a clunky PC and it runs even clunkier vista. I am afraid I will be so in love with Itunes and Quicktime I will need to buy a MAC I was hoping it would be uploaded to Youtube? Or as a a flash video?
Posted by bradymonster
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0qrJrO61jI
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