Sunday, November 4, 2012

FIDLAR - Cheap Beer Video

This song goes way back almost 3 years ago to November 13, 2009.  I actually have this stuff cataloged.  Technically the first FIDLAR song written, although I do have a few tracks Zac had written from the month before that were heading in the same direction.  At the time, everyone was just friends hanging out, getting drunk and jamming.  Zac and Elvis were working at a studio in Eagle Rock and we all used to get drunk and jam there after hours.

This particular night, we were making our way through a 30-pack of Budweiser.  Zac had come up with the riff and we were trying to come up with lyrics.  I remember him saying, "I dunno, I just want it to say something like I drink cheap beer so what fuck you" and I said, "Well just say that then."  And out came the song.  Our friend Dan had been out the week before from New York.  He got shit faced and threw up all over my back seat.  We cleaned it out with a window squeegee at a Shell station.  He made it into the second verse.  It's crazy to look back on something that was done purely for our own amusement and to see it now being released on a real record.  A record I'm insanely proud to be even the smallest bit a part of.

So anyway, onto the video.  I got an email a few weeks ago about doing a video for this song.  We tried one idea that I just couldn't get to work.  I was super frustrated because this song was important to me.  I didn't want to put this other video out but there was a deadline and I didn't know what else to do.  The night before I was supposed to deliver this thing, Alice and I were at a bar and I was seriously bummed out on the whole situation.  Then out of nowhere, we got this idea for the biker video.  This was on Sunday night.

I called up Brandon and asked him to get me a couple more days and that I was doing a new video.  The next morning, I called up James and Shanon and asked if they were free that night.  I went to work, told Craig the idea... He was down to shoot it.  He and I have worked together for somewhere around 7 or 8 years.  We basically see things identically.  So we made a shot list, Alice got everything prepped and we started shooting at 10:30 that same night.  By 3:30am we were finished.

Take something like the "Oh" video, which I'd consider to be similar in style.  That thing was shot over 3 separate days, months apart.  We usually do this stuff pretty slow and casually.  But in the case of this video, we were all excited and the idea was fresh (and we had no time).  By Tuesday evening, it was cut and roughly colored and by Wednesday it was sent to the label.

I'm super proud of this one.  Maybe I'm just still excited about it.  But I think everyone involved killed it.  It's super fun, rough, and just as ridiculous as the song itself.  I think the time constraint made this thing what it is because we really didn't take any longer than a few seconds to make decisions and that also allowed for a lot of free flowing creativity, which I think is great.

FIDLAR - Cheap Beer from Ryan Baxley on Vimeo.