Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 32-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Prelinger Archives
Over the years, various filmmakers have taken an interest in making a feature-length documentary about Mecca Normal. One Montreal-based director made it as far as a National Film Board Of Canada meeting, but that’s where the project ended. We have a fair amount of usable footage from a variety of sources and several good stories to hinge things on.
The video I put together for “Between Livermore And Tracy” (from our 2014 album Empathy For The Evil) reminds me of all this. I suppose because the lyrics and the music feel cinematic, it works beautifully with the degraded black-and-white footage of outings near a body of water that I found in the Prelinger Archives.
The film I want to make has a lot of potential for collaboration with the right filmmaker. Maybe it isn’t a documentary at all. Maybe it’s a story that uses the Mecca Normal story within it. Very creative—possibly non-linear—imaginative and beautiful as opposed to a standard history of a band.
“Between Livermore And Tracy” from the album Empathy For The Evil (M’Lady’s, 2014) (download):
