Image via Instagram
When Grant Singer made "Dayzed Inn Daydreamz", his third video for Ariel Pink’s album Pom Pom, the director relegated the singer to a cameo and gave the lead role to Rick Wilder. Shockingly thin, hair dyed marmalade orange, and a hoop through his right nostril, Wilder is an arresting figure. His character alternates between a dull job at a grocery store, drinking in a trailer park, and prancing on a bar’s stage in glittering silver pants.
Though his sunken face is not familiar to most, Wilder once fronted the Berlin Brats, the group he founded in 1972 that Rodney Bingenheimer described as "the first real L.A. homegrown glam rock band" in the Los Angeles punk scene oral history We Got the Neutron Bomb. After the Brats broke up, Wilder lead the Mau Mau’s in various forms since the late 1970s, with sporadic recorded output. He is also interviewed in The Decline of Western Civilization III, the documentary made in 1998 but widely seen for first time with the boxset release of Penelope Spheeris’s series.
After Singer got the opportunity to do three videos leading up to the release of the Weeknd’s new album Beauty Behind the Madness, he again brought in Wilder and made him a through line in this trilogy. In "The Hills" Wilder looms in the mansion that Abel Tesfaye hobbles into, in "Can’t Feel My Face" he throws the lighter that ignites the singer, and in "Tell Your Friends" he catches a couple bullets. With his hair slicked back and in dark suits, some have taken his character to represent the devil or the music industry (same diff?), but in keeping with the Weeknd’s insistent opaqueness, Singer won’t really talk about the videos’ meaning or what it’s like working with the artist.
Singer and Wilder have become friends over the past year and plan to continue collaborating in the future. At a restaurant in West Hollywood, the two talked about their relationship.
Pitchfork: How did you come together to work on the Ariel Pink video?
Grant Singer: I first saw him in the elevator of the Gaylord Apartments in Koreatown. I was meeting a band that I was doing a video for that was living there. You were living there at the time?
Rick Wilder: Attempting to.
GS: I was immediately attracted to him, visually. It was a thing that you really can’t explain where you’re drawn to someone. I couldn’t stop thinking about him and potentially working with him in some capacity. I tried to track him down. I went back to the Gaylord, couldn’t find him, he wasn’t living there at the time. I attempted in many different ways to contact him, like emailing someone who I thought was your manager that I found online. It wasn’t until Don Bolles, from the Germs and the drummer of Ariel’s band, gave me your number. And I called you and we met.
RW: At Denny’s.
Pitchfork: You approached him about being in Ariel Pink’s video?
GS: Yeah. It’s very cinematic. It’s a narrative. It feels way more like a short film than it does like a music video. It was either going to be made with him or not be made. It was riding on the fact that we get Rick to be in it, and I was ecstatic about the fact that he agreed to be in it.
Pitchfork: You had learned about his history and who he was?
GS: Totally. By that time I was very well educated to his history and became a huge fan. While we were shooting "Dayzed Inn Daydreamz", we were playing his music in the trailer when he was dancing, we were playing the Mau Mau’s.
RW: There was a little T. Rex in there.
Pitchfork: Rick, when you got the call from Grant asking if you wanted to be in a video, were you immediately into it or did you have to think about it?
RW: Actually I really didn’t want to do it. I’m kind of notorious for having an eccentric way of looking at how one should go about making it. I’m a bit more—what’s the word?—arcane. But I saw the stuff he was showing me on how he would do it. I’d like to think of myself as a student of film, I really like old films, so I thought, "This guy has a future and it sounds like a good idea."
Pitchfork: Have other people approached you for opportunities like this?
RW: Yeah, sort of, but they didn’t show me anything like that and they didn’t talk like him.
Pitchfork: Was the Ariel Pink shoot fun?
GS: It was a smaller shoot, so it was intimate, but it was something I’d been wanting to make for so long.
RW: The only thing odd was Bakersfield.
GS: It was in this area called Oildale, which is north of Bakersfield.
RW: Is that what they were saying? I thought they were saying, "This is oil’s ville." You can tell I’m not from there.
GS: It was very bleak. It didn’t feel like a place that was receptive to us filming. The way that we filmed the place, I wanted to create a sense of realism as much as possible, to blur the lines between documentary and fiction, so we picked locations as if Rick would actually live there and everything should be in walking distance to one another. We wanted to create atmosphere. Obviously it was all carefully constructed and not real, but we wanted it to appear as real as possible. But that shoot was really fun. Sometimes when you want to make things for so long and you finally have the opportunity to make them, you don’t take them for granted. With Rick, he was really easy to work with. I didn’t even have to give him much direction, by that time we talked so much about the project that I just let him do what he needed to do and that was it.
RW: Well, you give good directions.
Pitchfork: Rick, do you have acting experience?
RW: Some acting at AADA [the American Academy of Dramatic Arts] in New York, a year and a half there. Other than that, I’ve been in like a hundred films, but only two talking roles. I was in a Cheech & Chong movie [Up in Smoke]. That was a long, long time ago. I was interviewed in The Decline of Western Civilization III. I was in Decline number one for a second. I wanted to say a lot of shit.
Pitchfork: I had heard you were going to be in the original Decline of Western Civilization more.
RW: Yeah, and then she [director Penelope Spheeris] changed her mind because she didn’t want to buck the new system that replaces the old one.
Pitchfork: I heard you were going to MC the shows. Is that right?
RW: I was going to go around and say what I really thought. I would be the only one taking the shit, I didn’t think that would be weird, but I guess she thought the bands would freak out.
Pitchfork: After the "Dayzed Inn Daydreamz" video, did you always intend to work together again?
GS: Yeah. It was such a great experience—for me at least, I can’t speak for Rick—but making that video specifically, it felt right. I didn’t know what we were going to work on next, but I knew we were going to work on something else. Even to this day, I know we’ll be working on something else in whatever capacity.
RW: I hope.
Pitchfork: So how did the Weeknd video come about?
GS: After the Ariel Pink video came out, La Mar Taylor, who is the Weeknd’s creative director, got in contact. Off of "Dayzed in Daydreamz" and "Picture Me Gone", he asked me to do the first single off of the Weeknd’s new record. That was in January or February.
Pitchfork: When they asked you to create one video, did you always conceptualize creating this character who could reappear in other Weeknd videos?
GS: Initially I had no idea what I was going to do for the Weeknd. I hadn’t even heard the song. It wasn’t until I heard the song and met with Abel [Tesfaye] that things started to shape up.
Pitchfork: When you brought up the idea of having Rick in it, were they into it?
GS: I don’t want to talk about how that came about.
Pitchfork: Did Rick seem like a natural fit for the idea you wanted to convey?
GS: I think... [30 seconds of silence as Singer figures out what he is going to say] Yes, things sort of progressed naturally, I guess you could say.
Pitchfork: Did you have it in mind that Rick’s character was something that could continue?
GS: Uh, yeah.
Pitchfork: Were these the biggest projects you’ve worked on?
GS: Yeah, they were big videos. "Can’t Feel My Face' is a huge song.
RW: The song of the summer.
GS: And "The Hills" has like 150 or 160 million views. It’s something crazy.
Pitchfork: When you were making it did you anticipate that it would be this big?
GS: No, I had no idea. No one did. Maybe the Weeknd did. Who knows? We just wanted to make a good video and make something that was cinematic that really evoked the music. That was the only intention, to make a good video.
Pitchfork: So there was no pressure that this video had to break the song big?
GS: Not at all. I was a fan of the Weeknd. I believe you like the Weeknd too.
RW: I always liked all that rhythm & blues stuff, from my Stones fixation I always kept going. I kind of like House of Balloons and the Trilogy albums.
Pitchfork: When Grant asked if you wanted to be in a Weeknd video...
RW: Yeah, I knew who he was.
Pitchfork: What type of director is Grant?
RW: Well, he can be an asshole sometimes. He gets what he wants, in a sort of guerilla way. I noticed that. He doesn’t scream that much, maybe once or twice.
Pitchfork: How is Rick as an actor?
GS: He’s super easy to work with. I give him very little direction—I tell him what the shot is, what needs to happen, he does it, then it’s over. There are people, obviously, you have to be more delicate with them and work with them to get what you want, Rick is the opposite. He knows exactly what I want, does it, next shot.
Pitchfork: What is it about Rick that allows him to pick that up from you?
GS: Right away, even before we ever worked together, just by talking and seeing my aesthetic, he knew the tone I like. From the time I first saw him in that elevator, it was like that connection. It’s not love at first sight, but it’s an immediate connection with a total stranger. It kind of felt like a thing that was destined to happen, so when we did start working together and talking, we were just immediately on that same page. He just knows where I’m going. There’s no surprises, there’s no confusion.
Pitchfork: Have you had relationships like that with directors before?
RW: Never.
GS: The thing I found with Rick, is that most people are obsessed with youth or things that they think are embodied in young people, and I’ve never really been into that. What I’ve found with Rick is an authenticity and this pure rock'n'roll aesthetic that felt very real to me.
RW: Keep going, keep going.
GS: It didn’t feel like an act, it felt like completely real. When you have that, it emanates in anything you do. Acting, it still comes from that same place, that’s attractive to me. When people have that, you don’t really have to work with them, you don’t have to direct them, per se. You just sculpt it.
Pitchfork: Have people been recognizing you since the videos came out?
RW: Oh yeah.
GS: A mini riot started outside of 7-11 when all these kids recognized him. He couldn’t even go inside and get what he wanted to get. He had to run back to his car.
