PANDEMONIUM BALLET - THE MOVIE

this video was taped in March 1973

"As I recall, one of Mike's friends down at a local TV station came up with an opportunity for us to create a video, at the station. My recollection that perhaps it was the A/V department at Eastern Michigan University, someone help me here... at any rate, we carted our equipment to this studio and set up in front of these large TV cameras which connected to a video mix control console (I guess you'd call it) where they could switch from camera to camera, fade in and out, even do superimposed special effects.

In those days, things were not virtual, were not digital, and were not easy, and certainly were not free, so we had allocated for our use about 30 minutes of studio time, so we had to load in quickly, set up, get ready, and we had one take once the cameras were rolling. It was sort of like the old days, the way Louis Armstrong and the Hot 5 recorded.

reference: the song "Heebie Jeebies" was released with missing words, and turned out to be the first recorded "scat" singing, because Louis had dropped his lyric sheet during the ONE take they had bought. without the lyrics, he invented words and it became SCAT singing.

Well things didn't turn out quite as great for us as they did for Louis, however, and here's why:

The video was only about three minutes long and it was to be of us, the Martian Entropy Band, playing my original, Warp Factor 217 which was our high energy show-closer. During the solo portion of the song, Tim normally plays his guitar for 16 bars over some chords, and then I play a solo for 16 bars while Tim plays chords. I was all of sixteen years old at the time, a bit green around the ears shall we say, and I had this great idea for the video -- when it came time for Tim's solo, I would strum the chord on my guitar, and then play the tom-toms with a drumstick until time to play the next chord, and do this like 4 times for the 16 bars. I thought it was a great idea, and it went off well in rehearsal. But before we got to the TV studio, I had a great idea, why don't I hot-glue my guitar pick to the butt end of a drumstick, so I could strum the guitar and then easily go right to the drums? Yeah, great idea... I had not tried this in rehearsal, however.

So when we finally got geared up to tape, the producer called "Take 1", and we wailed into Warp Factor 217. Everything went great, the engineer switched back and forth between cameras and I'm sure it looked great to him -- until the part arrived where Tim took his solo. I grabbed my drumstick with guitar pick glued on, and gave my guitar a hearty strum, but I hadn't accounted for the leverage gained by having a large drumstick attached to my guitar pick, so the pick literally hooked into my strings and yanked two or three of them right off the guitar, throwing the rest out of tune. At the same time, it the hot-glued surface popped off of the drumstick, and the stick went flying across the room, with me in hot pursuit. I lunged down on the floor and caught the drumstick before it rolled under some equipment.

But by then, it was time for my guitar solo. I put down the drumstick and grabbed my guitar pick and went to play, but my two upper strings had been yanked out by the drumstick-pick fiasco, and the rest of them were horribly out of tune. We could not stop in the middle of the recording since we only had this one take, so the only thing I could do was to go on with the show, so... I just started playing on the out of tune strings, choking them and yanking them, it sounded like some far-off Asian music (or not quite as nice). A totally different tonality altogether! Well, I did my best. I learned a real solid lesson that day, which was, never try things in a live show that you haven't worked out beforehand in rehearsal. Especially things involving hot glue, drumsticks, and guitar picks...

I remember we all left the studio feeling like, "Oh, well, better luck next time..." I remember watching the finished video a few weeks later, it was pretty hysterical, to tell you the truth, but quite embarrassing for me to watch. In between psychedelic effects, and flashing back from one camera to another, you could see me lunging across the floor after my errant drumstick, and then scrambling back to play my guitar, and then you could certainly hear the horrific squawks that came from my destroyed guitar tablature. Frankly I was glad that film was not going to be released into the public domain anywhere.

The finished video was entitled "Pandemonium Ballet". I can't think of a more apt title.

Does that thing still exist anywhere? It might be a real riot to see it again, if it does... we could put it on YouTube..."

h. 3/4/2008

Yes it does exist, and thanks to the tireless efforts of Steve Wild, who is in fact originally Tim's friend from college (and a great friend to all of us) the producer of the video, and long time Martian Entropy Band afficionado, we have restored the video from the vault and you are watching it now, if you have flash and a sound card! and screw YouTube, the movie is actually 15 minutes long but they'll only host 10 minute videos so... we got our own stream folks