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Intothewoods.tv

Directed by Jordan Kinley Sound by Miliken Gardner Camera by Thomas Oliver Edited by Jordan Kinley Words by WG

As a writer here, I sometimes have to piece together the details of a shoot. When I'm not around for the filming of a particular episode, it can require some work.

In the case of our Homesick session with Bare Wires, there was little to go on. I knew this much: our crew had driven to California and filmed a band performing in a living room in a bad section of Oakland. That wasn't enough.

Of course, there were familiar threads in the responses I got back from the production crew, like "Miliken was pissed at Jordan," or "Jordan was making fun of Miliken being fat," or some similar display of complete professionalism.

But for this session, no one seemed to remember any of the details. Everyone I spoke with-- the crew, the band-- could barely recall anything about the shoot.

Luckily, the footage made it back; the only proof that this day ever happened.

And all the evidence is there. The rock 'n roll, the beer cans, the incidental footage of a party house's indoor wilderness. The evidence was translated into questions and passed off to the only person I had left to turn to.

Bare Wires frontman Matthew Melton couldn't tell me much else about the events surrounding his shoot. The band was preparing for a West Coast tour with Thee Oh Sees. They performed the song "Loner" from a place called the Fuzzplex-- a dilapidated residence that serves as a free-for-all practice space when it's not hosting house shows. (Apparently it's also a place where details get fuzzy and your colleagues come home as amnesiacs.)

"A bunch of slackers live there," I was told. "There are always interesting lifeforms hanging around... most of them don't even pay rent. On any given day, the majority of people hangin' out at the Fuzz are non-residents."

And that was it. It was all fruit in the high branches. I asked Melton about back when he was living in Memphis and working as a photographer. It turns out he took the photo for the cover of Jay Reatard's Blood Visions (that same iconic image we kept seeing last year after Reatard tragically passed).

"I got it in one take," Melton explained. "He told me he wanted to look like a caveman being birthed, so I poured an entire bottle of raspberry coffee flavoring syrup on him. What a fucking mess."

I suppose some days are meant to be remembered and others aren't; Reatard's raspberry caveman afternoon will be around for a while. The details of our day with Bare Wires? Not so much.