Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Indirectly Yours


Filmed in 1989 by Rocky Schenck. Some of it was filmed indoors, as you can see at the beginning, by the majority was filmed in Bakersfield with me sitting on the back of a flatbed truck driving around the outskirts of town. It was a little mind bending for me as I'd grown up, for a time, about 30 miles north of there in Delano. 

Rocky was wonderful and did a beautiful job on it and the look is still rather timeless, and hard to tell what era it hails from. 

At the time, the hope was, that Rocky would make the film to this song and that a second song was to have a video as well. 

I was trying to talk my record company Rhino in to giving me money to make a video for the song What's Wrong With Me with a young cool Brooklyn based film-maker I'd had several great conversations with and was a fan of his work. I lived in the Park Slope part of Brooklyn at the time, not far from him, we talked about life in that part of New York, our parents-his father was ailing, and our work. 

The film-maker sent Rhino, at their request, a film reel of what he'd done, which included a favorite of mine Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, acted out by Barbie dolls. Rhino later told me they'd watched his reel and found it to be too 'unpolished, amateur and unprofessional' and they weren't going to hire him, Todd Haynes to make my video. Too bad, he went on to make some great films like Safe, Velvet Goldmine and I'm Not There.

At any rate, this song here, Indirectly Yours was on my second album Naked Movie Star, recorded in Mid-town Manhattan and produced by Lenny Kaye.  

2 comments:

  1. I saw Superstar before it got banned, it was twisted, sad and disturbingly great. Great to talk about over a slice at Smiling!

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