I must admit that I’ve spent the last several weeks obsessed with John Lee Hooker. There is something about this song/performance/video that has captured my imagination and won’t let go:

Yeah.
There is so much in that video that could be analyzed. Picked apart, etc. But the bottom line is that it’s brilliant. A brilliant artists interpretation of a average song captured by someone who really “got it.” Maybe it was the limitations of the technology of the time that makes one think that the ones who captured this really “got it” … who knows? The fact is that this video is the perfect visual representation of this song. And it makes you wonder if this had already been done, how the hell could this abomination could have come to be?

So much is wrong here. At least as much as was right in the first video. I suspect that the filmmakers succumbed to the temptations of the unlimited (or at least too large) budget. This video is so lifeless, so divorced from it’s content that it’s hard to imagine exactly what what going on in their heads. For example: what made them think that kids belonged in a video for a song that’s title included such blatant references to booze? Why was it necessary to cut every 2.5 seconds and not always to the music? How much expensive film stock was wasted on take after god forsaken take of this horrible piece of shit? How many hours did John Lee Hooker have to abide a moron of a director?

I dunno. Hard to tell. But I think you get my point.

I had the privilege of working on this project for the Mountain Dew aluminum bottle can roll out (the first soft drink to be packaged like this) with Peat Wollaeger my friend and a stencil artist. The over all experience was a good one except that at the end of the video a frame comes up that says that it was shot on an RCA Small Wonder, whatever that is. This is completely false, I shot this video with a Panasonic DVC 30 and a Panasonic DV-GS 700 (for the time lapse) each with an after market wide angle lens attachments. Post production and color finishing was done with Apple’s Final Cut Pro.

Overall though I think this was a worthwhile project. The artists got creative freedom to do what they wanted with the designs, as well as got a little chunk o’ corporate cash and some good exposure. All good things. The bottle designs are cool, and I hope to collect a few myself.

The site design really sucks though. It’s one of those wacky late 90’s style all Flash site where “coolness” trumps function. The design isn’t all that cool though. It’s all science fictiony and “electronic” looking that is soooo dated looking it’s really sad. Looking at it you can almost hear the meetings that must have took place while the thing was being designed.

“OK it’s gotta be green” Check.
“Lets make it space agey but still rough looking” Check.
“lets make the pages load as if they are drawn by lasers” Check.
“We gotta have a cool hip-hop beat behind everything–the kids still like that music right? Yeah a hip-hop beat” Check.

If these were their best ideas I would hate to know what their bad ones were.

Obvilously the main problem with an all flash site–besides the poor functionality, and it’s ugly dated looks–is the fact that there are no permalinks. So there is no way for me to say, link from here to the page on the site that this post is about. I have to give you the main site address and hope you find it. I tested out the “tell a friend” button (another throwback to 90’s web marketing–harvesting email addresses) on Peats page to see if I could get a permalink emailed to me that I could use, and yes I did … but … it didn’t … work. DOH!!

My buddy Peat Wollaeger, a stencil artist from here in St. Louis recently got this sweet gig painting a Mexican wrestling themed room at the Hotel Des Arts in San Francisco. Next time I’m there I’m gonna try to stay there and get that room. Here is a time lapse of him working. He likes to make movies around his work, which makes it as much a performance as art. We’ve also been working on a special secret project together too.

Here are a couple of movies I made about him at different times here and here.