(When we heard that Tokyo Police Club was to appear on Desperate Housewives, we just couldn't let it go by without asking Graham Wright to tell us all about it. Ed.)When I was a little kid, dreaming of rock stardom, I pictured a lot of cool perks. To date, almost none of those things have happened, but they’ve been replaced by a whole bunch of other weird stuff that I never would have expected.
By far the coolest thing, though, was when we flew to Los Angeles and spent two days on set, filming an appearance on the hit show
Desperate Housewives.
The number one question, from reporters, fans, and bemused family members has been a resounding “
how?” How did four yokels from Newmarket, Ontario end up jamming it out in an hour of television generally reserved for watching catty middle aged women have sex with their gardeners (or something)? Well, I’ll tell you how, little Jimmy.
We have a good friend in LA named
John Paul Bullock III. He is an aspiring television writer, and currently works as Script Coordinator on
Desperate Housewives. And, because hes the nicest person I’ve ever met, he spends a lot of time talking us up to all of his friends on the writing staff of the show. When their storyline called for a Battle of the Bands, they picked the first band that came to mind: us!
As anyone who watched the episode will see, our scene was spent rocking out at ‘
The White Horse’, otherwise known as the coolest rock and roll club in Fairview. The men of the show have formed a garage band (though one of the members may have an ulterior motive! Dun dun dun…), and finally get up the courage to compete in the local battle of the bands. Unfortunately for them, they have to cross swords with that most bitchin’ band in town:
Cold Spash.
Filming the show wasn’t that different from shooting a music video. We set our GENERIC MUSICAL EQUIPMENT (no brand names on TV) up on the stage of the White Horse, and they played our song loudly over the speakers as we pretended to play it.
The difference here was that a bunch of beautiful LA extras were standing in front of us,
pretending to love our show. At one point, they had to shoot real actors saying real lines, so they gave us all tiny earphones, and we mimed to our song in silence while the beautiful extras mimed rocking out, silently. It was definitely weird.
The script of the show called for “Band Guy # 1” and “Band Guy # 2” to each say a line. Through some arbitrary selection process, which I am certain was designed by my enemies,
Dave and
Greg got the lines. Don’t worry, though, they still let me walk in front of the camera, holding my keyboard, which is actually a lot heavier than I thought.
Other than that,
being TV stars was kind of boring. When we weren’t needed (which was often), we just sat around the set and ate copious amounts of catered food (anyone who followed my
Weezer tour blog won’t be surprised by that), and played hacky sack with the crew. We even had our own stand ins! They call them the ‘second team’, and their job was to stand in our spots while they lit the stage and focused the cameras. So I felt pretty swanky.
And in case anyones wondering, we didn't get to stay and watch them burn the set down. And we don't know for sure what Cold Splash's fate was. But, if
I have my way, we'll be back before long and we'll be solving all the mysteries and flirting with all the housewives.
Lets start the letter writing campaign now, people! I wrote the rest of this blog before watching the episode, but now I’m back from our fancy soiree at Greg’s place. It was a real trip watching myself on TV like that. Just the way it looks is very “TV”. They cut my big “walking in front of the camera” scene, but at least Dave and Greg got to be TV stars., and
I got to dance around like an idiot in front of millions of unsuspecting Americans. So I call it a win.
What did you guys think?
