Unlike some of my MTV brethren, I never made much of a splash in the world of music videos; I guess I was too busy making funny promos. I did do a few videos over the years: “Itchin’ for a Scratch” for the Force MD’s, and the Del Fuegos’ “Don’t Run Wild” spring to mind. Funnily enough, after a several-decade break from the format Dennis Scheyer (yep, him again) introduced me to Vivian Cook, and I ended up shooting a number of videos for her, including her haunting cover of the Nirvana song, “Come As You Are.”

The “Come As You Are” clip was really a bonus; something we grabbed at the last minute because Vivian Cook had recorded the track and it was so damn good. The real gig was crafting a short film for her which included videos for three of her songs (an idea I totally stole from Mark Pellington’s Chelsea Wolfe film “Lone”). The full-length short is over at the Short Films page; here are the three stand-alone clips.

Sheryl Crow is an old friend. We go back so far that when I asked her to record a new version of “The Joker” for my movie “The Pompatus of Love,” I was doing her the favor. By the time she delivered the track… the situation had completely reversed (to the extent where her record label would not allow me to include the track on the soundtrack CD). While at Playboy, I made a lot of stuff, and one day I had the idea that I could pull off the old Roger Corman trick by bringing a second crew in over the weekend to use the same set from a Playboy video for an entirely unrelated shoot; in this case, a Sheryl Crow video.

I knew that nobody was going to let me shoot a Tom Petty video, but I also knew that the ballad “Southern Accent,” evocative and beautiful as it was, would never be a single. So, while working on the “Southern Accents” documentary for MTV, I grabbed additional shots wherever I could, knowing that I would edit them into the centerpiece music video I was secretly crafting in my head. (You can watch the full-length show over on the Television/Series page).

Just because I never had a music video career doesn’t mean I didn’t ever try to have one. Since most of the Playmate videos I made while at Playboy in the early 1990’s were, in effect, NSFW music videos, I thought that montaging them into something that looked like a “music video” might get me some work. It didn’t. But lots of folks have found these montages on Vimeo and added them to their collections. I can’t imagine why. Fun fact: these pieces were shot all over the world… Rio, Munich, Bratislava, Amsterdam, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. Oh, and I suppose it bears repeating: many of these images are NSFW.

I really do love documentary work, and I love music, so when you combine the two we’re very much in a sweet spot for me. The organization now called the Music Business Association used to be called NARM: the National Association of Record Merchandisers (because their members sold, you know, records). And once a year NARM would hold a convention, during which each record label would present an overview of their most important recent and upcoming releases. For three years in a row I had the honor of producing and directing the presentations for Private Music, a label founded by Tangerine Dream’s Peter Bauman. It wasn’t a “New Age” label, although some of the music fell into that category. Instead, Bauman encouraged the artists to create personal music that resonated deeply. The gigs afforded me the chance to meet and work with remarkable artists like Suzanne Ciani, Nona Hendryx, Leon Redbone, Kristin Vigard, Andy Summers, Leo Kotke, Carlos Alomar, and James Newton Howard.