During the height of Bovine Ignition Systems, Jeremy and I got into various ideas for video projects and perhaps shooting a music video of some sort. After all, it was 1987 and MTV ruled the planet. Any self-respecting band needed a video. But how would we afford one? The answer came when we found a "shoot your own video" place had opened up at the Galleria mall in White Plains. This was a straight Impulse Buy kind of operation, obviously intended for the locals to record themselves singing over some stilted Huey Lewis and the News or Madonna tracks, then video record themselves singing while sunsets showed in the backgrounds. But Jeremy and I saw it another way: an entirely cheap and easy way to record our big music video breakthrough.

We talked with the guys running the video place and asked if we could provide our own music; they said sure. We asked if we could provide the videotape for the background images; they said sure. We asked what the length of a video could be; they said up to six minutes. And how much would this all cost us? $50.

What a bargain! Jeremy and I set immediately to work, writing up a parody of the Beastie Boys' Fight for your Right to Party called, well, the obvious. We then asked two of our friends, Jeff Federman (Drums) and Ted Kamp (Bass) to give us a rare "live" feel to our song. We recorded the drums and bass at Jeff's house and then Jeremy added his own guitar solo later. By the time we were done, we had ourselves a pretty cool-sounding song! And at five minutes and some change, it would easily give us time to rock out at the video place.

We went to White Plains with a pile of equipment: prop guitars, cow dolls, hats, crutches, Hershey's Chocolate Milk, and a bunch of other stuff. We each dressed in what we thought was appropriate: Jeremy in a yellow checked shirt with tie and me in some sort of black hawaiian shirt with a stolen Mercedes hood ornament on a necklace.

We recorded the video in one take in the blue-screen studio. The effects were added on the spot by whoever our videographer was. We had also prepped him with some basic directions of where to aim the camera, and when. He basically followed those to the best of his ability. For the background video, we gave them a video of Frank Zappa's 200 Motels, chosing a particularly weird and trippy sequence.

All in all, it was a major success, and we had a fantastic time. Jeremy and I each got a copy of the tape and treasured it for years. Jeremy has since lost the glasses and I have a goatee, but you can see the spirit of two friends rocking out in this video.

As a bonus, you can see the actual video encoded in DiVX and running the full length. unless you're a die-hard, though, you might just want to browse the thumbnails and claim you looked at the video; it wasn't going to make it on MTV (or VH1) anytime soon. But as a piece of BIS history, it is priceless.

View The Video (DiVX, 37 Megabytes)