A few  years back I put some lipstick on this porker. Originally slapped together in 1988 as I fiddled with the television production equipment made available whilst enrolled at Hampshire colleg.The initial result was less a music video than it was an utter embarrassment. 

With the tools at hand, a Grass Valley switcher, a pair of Ikegami studio cameras, a "Computer Controlled" A/B Roll and a collection of Sony shuttle edit consoles, I took any footage I could find, both of my own work and stuff borrowed from friends. Along with a bunch of live video that Mascis handed over, I sat down with my pal Tim Aaron and cut a video for what was perhaps one of my favorite songs off the new Dino record.

At the time I might have tried to foist on you some high-mindednonesense about my intentions to invoke a specific mood through found and treated footage.  How with color and visual timbre I attempted to mirror and expand on the emotional and aural impact of the song.  Or perhaps I could hand you some shuck and jive about this particular video being a visual interpretation of the zeitgeist of Hampshire college in 1988.  But in reality this clip was just another example of the age old collegiate habit of endlessly staring into one's own hand. " I mean have you ever REALLY looked at your hand?"  At the time it just seemed like the perfect thing to do. 

Anyway, with the invaluable help Tim Aaron who contributed a lot of time and footage to the initial cut of this video, we made the pitch to Mascis.  With visions of our names emblazoned in the lower left corner of the small screen late some sunday night on 120 minutes, I was absolutely certain that this would be the short route to a major directorial big break!

Okay!  Okay!   Perhaps the proverbial green sweater that I had donned in layers and layers had clouded my judgment.  Certainly these half-baked aspirations of coat-tailing my way to instant indi-rock name-check status put me in the running for "honorable mention" as douche-bag of the year.

All big ideas aside however, all it took was for one screening with Mascis and reality took it's quick and exacting toll. I believe his quote was "Do tehy sell snickers bars upstairs? I think I need a snickers." Yeah but what did you think of the video? ........... And with a deafening silence the project was mothballed, destined never again to see the light of day.

That is until J and his manager surprisingly began a few years back to pester me for a copy of the video. Their intention was to include the clip with the re-issue of Bug.  Although honored, I was certainly thankful that I had gone ahead and definitavely lost the master tapes long ago.  But after some determined harping from the pair I decided to make the effort to look a little harder for a copy of the vid.

In the end I was able to drum up a dubious VHS dub.  One that had incidentlayy been serving as the foundation for a squirrel's nest for countless years in my attic.  Pee-soaked, edge gnawed, heat damaged and subsequently riddled with dropout, this dub was even more unwatchable than the original.  Thanks to the advanced of digital video editing however, I considered this nothing less than an opportunity to redeem the project. If only just a little.  And so I took the salvageable footage and came up with this cut which I believe is much closer to the type of music video I had originally hoped to edit.

Sure it's still a bit of a steaming pile of pudding... but it was Amherst 1988 and these are some pictures from then.