To some, car stereo systems are an obsession, but can the power of extreme bass reunite you with your emotionally distant wife via an alternate dimension where Henry Rollins fights you? You'll never know until you watch “Pierce The Morning Rain” by Dinosaur Jr., which features a suburban dad, played by James Urbaniak, being sucked in the world of car stereos as his wife, played by Maria Bamford, looks on. We talked to director Scott Jacobson about the real life car stereo tricks in the video, how he pulled off  the amazing cameo from Henry Rollins, and, of course, the hair trick.

Doug: How did you get involved with this project?

Scott: I wanted to do a Dinosaur Jr. video. I got in touch with somebody at Jagjaguwar probably a year before their latest album came out and just said that I was interested. Then I forgot that I had done that, and finally around the time the album rolled around I heard from them. It just started from there. I think he showed the band my other videos and then I pitched just a few concepts, and this dB Drag Racing idea was one of them. It was the one I wanted to do the most. Yes, that was the one that J. Mascis ended up signing off on.

Doug: Was there a reason why you wanted to do a video for them?

Scott: I’m just a huge fan. There are not a whole lot of bands who you can do - this one wasn’t like an all out comedy video - but who you can do something that leans in that direction. Some bands, if you try to do something funny, it would just be completely wrong - they need videos that look cool or just really slick and have a lot of tech tricks and have effects and stuff associated with them. That’s not my forte. Dinosaur Jr. just definitely seemed like it’s my kind of band. I’ve been a fan since I was 14 or 15 years old. I’m a mega fan of theirs.

Doug: Yeah, their last video features Tim Heidecker, so they definitely lean in that direction, like you said. Did they request that of you when they reached out to you, or did they assume that it would lean that way, given your previous work?

Scott: Yeah, that’s probably it. They didn’t really give me any direction at all. They just sent the song, I sat with it for a few weeks, and that was I came up with. It’s pretty rare, actually, for a band, at least in my experience, or maybe it’s atypical, but for a band to steer you in one direction or the other.

Doug: I’m curious about the original treatment, then, when you got back to them, and specifically, did it include the name Henry Rollins in the original treatment?

Scott: No. I think I came up with that midstream. I had already written the treatment. Originally, the video, it was not just James Urbaniak, but a few other guys who he was working in a car with. They each got in and they each had fantasies. They were triggered by the super loud bass. It was more of just a straight up comedy video and there wasn’t much of a through-line. When I honed it and I figured out the plot that I ended up actually using with Maria as the guy’s wife, the buddies fell away and it just became about James. It felt like I needed a fantasy that was about getting out aggression. When I thought of that, the idea of somebody beating James up immediately presented itself and there is nobody else, I knew Henry Rollins was a fan. He’s a huge fan of Dinosaur Jr. and a big supporter. I don’t think that fantasy would have been nearly as fun or would have made sense with anybody but him. I have no connection to him. I mentioned to Jagjaguwar that I wanted to involve Henry Rollins and they were just like, “Great!” and they forwarded it along to J. Mascis and I never heard back. They were touring. I just went ahead and contacted Henry myself just through his website and I got an almost immediate reply back from him just saying anytime, anywhere, he would do it. He could not have been cooler. That was one of the definite highlights of making the video, meeting him. It’s no surprise that he’s just a natural raconteur. When I first showed up to set, he had been there for a half an hour already. You would swear that he had been in the military or was just out of the military. He keeps that rigorous schedule and he was there more than on time. He had his coffee and he was sitting, like he was in the video, with that ramrod posture. He turned to me, does that look - the Henry Rollins glare. I couldn’t tell then that he had a sense of humor. As soon as he got on set, he was really funny and telling great stories and really, really helpful. He was awesome.

Doug: Henry Rollins absolutely kills it in the video. He’s so great, as are James and Maria. I’m curious, how’d you end up getting them to be in the video?

Scott: James I’ve known for a while and I had him in a Nick Lowe video in a small part, and a video I made for The National a long time ago. He’s just somebody I’ve been a fan of since Henry Fool, which is this Hal Hartley movie he made probably 15 years ago now. I love Hal Hartley and I loved James in American Splendor. We had mutual friends, so I just drifted in his direction over the years and always wanted to do something with him. This is the first time I’d been able to give him a lead role in something. I don’t know Maria. It was another situation where I think James knows her, and I was brainstorming ideas for a wife for him in a video, and he suggested her because they had made a pilot together. I’m a huge fan of hers, too, and so is James. I just got in touch with her through her agent.

Doug: When you bring actors like that, it’s definitely not typical to have actors or comedians of their caliber in a music video. This is definitely a treat - although known actors have appeared in your videos. I’m curious, though, with an actor like that, do they bring something more to the table than what somebody else would? Do you give them some freedom to improvise and bring more to the character?

Scott: Definitely. I don’t know how people make these videos without professional actors, because you have so little time to shoot them. You have so little money. This shoot in particular was plagued by just people for whatever reason had showed up late, and we didn’t have enough daylight, and we didn’t have time in this location or that location. You really have to have people who are going to nail it in just a couple of takes. They’re also doing it for either free, or for next to nothing. In that case, if they have an idea, you want to hear them out. You don’t want to play a hard-ass director and move them around when this is somebody who is giving you their time and they’re doing it as fans, too, a lot of the time. I got Tim Heidecker in the Nick Lowe video, just because he loves Nick Lowe. Especially with James. James is just incredible and he is such a professional, and so you just let them go. Especially in The National video I did with him, a lot of his improv made it, and he was just having fun.

Doug: I guess on the other end of that spectrum, as far as performers and them being professional and used to being on camera, I looked through the YouTube comments a bit and it looks like one of the guys whose crazy car is in the video is commenting a lot and adding this second-mark that it is in the video and stuff. I’m curious what that process was like, finding guys whose cars are actually like that. Was somebody else mainly in charge of that or were you involved in that process?

Scott: I had to do it all. I went on a bunch of online forums and I placed ads. I went on craigslist and placed ads there. I followed down a lot of blank leads. I came up against a lot of weird characters who would lobby really hard once they heard that I was hiring. I offered money too, obviously. I have no friends who have cars like this, I had to pay someone for their time. Once I dangled the money out there, I got a lot of guys whose cars were just completely inappropriate and completely the wrong thing. I asked for an SUV that looked like it could conceivably be driven by a family man, and I would get guys sending me pictures of their pimped-out station wagon, crazy rims, and ground effects. I finally just went through the dB Drag Racing organization, which seems to be this loosely affiliated bunch of competitions just all over the world where people soup up their cars. We went to one - the footage at the beginning of the video is this dB drag race in Escondido - and we just showed up, not knowing if anyone would want us to shoot their stuff. But, of course, the reason they do it is to show it off. It was not hard to get people to open up for the camera. Like the guy who did the hair trick in the video. Everyone was telling me, “You’ve got to talk to so-and-so. He and his girlfriend can do the hair trick for you.” It’s when the woman leans her head out the window and the bass is just so overpowering that her hair flaps. We did it and the first time we shot it there was a setting that was off in this camera and so we had to shoot it again. I was nervous about asking them because this was 30-seconds of really intense sound. You’re a little rattled or disturbed by it, but we had them do it a second time and he was more than happy. All these guys were just so sweet and obliging. I looked all over for the car that we’d actually use in the video, and then I finally just got in touch with the home office of dB Drag Racing and they hooked me up.

Doug: It’s definitely worth it. Those little bits, they definitely bring some of that authenticity there.

Scott: I meant to do a lot more of that stuff with the car that we had - like James and the other guys working on them towards the end of the video. I parked it behind my house and when they cranked it up, it set off every car alarm on my block. There were papers that rattled off my wall, my neighbors were looking out the window, pissed. People also on-set were just visibly scared.

Doug: You’ve done a lot of writing in a lot of different formats. When it comes to writing a music video treatment, how does that compare to writing on some of the others things that you’ve worked on?

Scott: It’s pretty drastically different. In some ways it’s similar. It’s a lot like tailoring something to a particular actor. The idea has to seem like a good fit with the band, even if it’s a weird fit. You have to give yourself license to be weird and non-linear a lot of the time when you’re writing music video stories. If it’s just weird for weirdness’ sake and it doesn’t seem to match up with the actor or with a band, people notice. The couple of times that I feel like I’ve skipped the long process of just listening to the song over and over again and just thinking about the band before I wrote a treatment, you can tell. The videos don’t turn out as good. For a script, obviously you have dialogue to fall back on. I use a lot of subtitles the first couple of videos I made, and then I started to feel like that was too much of a crutch, so I tried to just tell the stories without them. It’s been hard, but in a fun way. I’ve gotten so used to writing dialogue for comedy shows. To write something that isn’t necessarily straightforwardly funny, or isn’t just gag-packed and where I can’t just fall back on verbiage, has been a useful exercise.

Doug Klinger is the co-founder/content director of IMVDb and watches more music videos than anyone on earth. You can find him on twitter at @doug_klinger.