The story behind the Mouthpiece "Cinder" video

Following my recent Mouthpiece entries in anticipation for the release of the discography next month (January 20th, 2009 on Revelation), I thought I'd take a stab at giving the back story on the "Cinder" video. Next week I'll get back on track with the album cover stories. Hope you dig. -Tim DCXX

Late December of 1995 Mouthpiece put together a week and a half long West Coast tour with Orange County, California's 1134. We had come off our first U.S. Summer tour and 1134 were just signed to New Age Records, so there was some momentum and excitement happening. We packed into Mike Hartsfield's trusty New Age tour van, played in Corona, Hollywood, Long Beach, Berkeley, Sacramento, then headed north to Seattle and then the extreme opposite south to San Diego. After all was said and done, we piled a ton mileage on that New Age van and had ourselves a great time.

On our last day in Huntington Beach, which was where Mike Hartsfield and the New Age HQ was housed, we had no show and essentially, a day off. As I remember, previous to this day, we had talked to Hartsfield and put this final day aside to talk business. When I say business, the plan was to spend the day at the New Age warehouse, talk royalties and make plans for our next record. As exciting as all of that may have sounded, Hartsfield also threw out the offer to shoot a video. Shoot a video or talk business... we opted for the video.


Chris, Sean, Jason, Tim and Matt in a limo on the way to the airport

Over the past few months prior to this West Coast tour, our guitarist Matt Wieder and myself had talked about what we would do if we ever got the opportunity to shoot a video. Of course we wanted the token chaotic live footage, but we also had an idea of shotting a video in a elevator. The idea of all of us jam packed into a elevator, playing hard and going off seemed like it could be kind of interesting. When Hartsfield pitched the idea of actually shooting the video, we told him what we had been thinking. It just so happened that Hartsfield had a friend whose father owned a hotel, a hotel with an elevator of course.

We loaded the van with lighting, stands and a few pieces of camera equipment, picked up the hotel connection friend and headed to our destination. The hotel we were going to shoot the video at was somewhere over near Disneyland. I remember once we got there we kinda claimed a room to store our stuff in, then headed to the elevator to size up our shooting space. The hotel happened to be pretty dead that day, so we didn't really have to worry about hotel patrons getting in our way or us getting in their way. The coast appeared clear, so we set up our equipment in the elevator while Hartsfiled got all the camera equipment prepared.

Before we knew it, the action had begun. We had decided upon the song "Cinder" and played through a boom box tape player and tried to play along as well as we could. We did shoot after shoot, some with all of us in the elevator, some with only a couple of us in there and then some shots with each of us alone. I remember Hartsfield telling us to be as natural as we could and just try to act like we were on stage. It was pretty much impossible to act natural while packed into this bite sized elevator, but we did what we could. We also wanted to figure out some way or another to pull our roadie Ed McKirdy into the video, so we worked in this ridiculous plot line. Ed would pretend to be a hotel patron trying to get from one floor to another via the elevator, but couldn't get into the elevator for reasons unknown to him. All the while we would be seen playing in the elevator. Seemed funny at the time.


Me, Sean and Matt hanging at McKirdy's apartment checking out the Ressurection 7" on CD. Matt had just bleached his hair and Sean was actually bleaching his hair as this photo was taken.

Thinking back, for the most part, we always tried to keep Mouthpiece percieved as a serious band. Although we were all the biggest goofballs around, we were serious about hardcore and what we were saying, so we tried to generally keep the two sides seperate. Sometimes we let a little of the goofy side slip out and this video for "Cinder" was a prime example of that. We weren't getting paid for it, we weren't going to increase our record sales by doing it, we didn't care. Shooting a video just sounded like a fun thing to do and that's all that mattered, bottom line.

Unfortunately, with Hartsfield being the guy that filmed the video and the guy that would edit the video and the same guy that was running an active record label, the footage fell to the wayside. By the end of 1996 Mouthpiece would be broken up and the video seemed as if it would never see the light of day. Truthfully there probably wasn't much of a point to releasing the video once we broke up.

Jump ahead to 2004 and talk of putting together this Mouthpiece discography had begun. Jason and I thought it would be great to try and get all the unedited "Cinder" video footage from Hartsfieild and attempt to put the video together ourselves. We were thinking that once the video was finished, we could toss it on the cd as interactive bonus material. Turned out Hartsfiled offered to finish the video himself. It took a few months, but considering this discography has taken close to 5 years, the wait for the video was nothing.


Never forget the Ferps, never forget the tiuerps

So there you have it. Although the video has made it to YouTube and has been seen by a minimal of 30,000 plus people, it will end up appearing officially on the discography. As off time as my vocals are to the song and as goofy as the video ultimately is, it was a lot of fun to do and seeing it brings back nothing but good memories.

Follow the link below to Revelation for information regarding the Mouthpiece - "Can't Kill What's Inside" discography
Revelation Records