The Home Video

In the last few months leading up to the disbanding of Grasshopper, Mike and myself were burning the midnight oil on the regular working on a project. We had decided to make a Grasshopper home video, so we were spending countless hours working with Owen at Rogers Cable 10 in Brampton. As soon as the employees all cleared out, Owen would give us a shout and we'd head over to meet him. We'd literally spend hours there each visit, usually clearing out of the studio just before sunrise as the employees were on their way back to work.

A lot of bands were releasing home videos, so we decided to join them. The formula was quite simple. We had videos of two songs being performed on Owen's show "Fusion" as well as two live videos from performances at our beloved 1150 club, and of course our actual music video for "Born Loser"

We wanted to give our fans something more than just music, so between each video we had slickly edited together about five to ten minutes of random footage of us behind the scenes. It was an intimate expose on us as people, and the things we did in our spare time. Things such as us skateboarding, hanging out talking, having sessions etc. We also dubbed over the footage with interesting audio, mainly instrumental beats topped off with an array of funny answering machine messages from "The Grasshopper Hotline", audio clips of us talking on the radio, and anything else we could find that we thought fans would enjoy.

I'm not even sure how much time we invested in this, but I'd guess it was somewhere around 30+ hours once everything was said and done. It was amazing having access to the television studio once again. We were able to do all sorts of slick editing and visual effects. I really admired Owen for giving us this opportunity, even though he put in most of the work, while Mike and I loosely directed the whole project.

The fact that Owen was doing this during his free time for absolutely no pay just showed exactly how much love he had for his craft. The guy was super talented and was genuinely one of the nicest dudes I ever had the pleasure of working with.

The sad and tragic part of this however, was the fact that after all of the hard work we put in, nobody would ever see this video. We had completed it after a few months of hard work, but it was all too late by then, as Derek had made that fateful decision to weasel us out of our band. I found it disheartening that our true fans would never get their hands on this piece of musical history. Not only were we robbed of our positions, but our fan base had been robbed of ever viewing or owning the Grasshopper home video.

This was all I had left of a band I loved being apart of. After everything was said and done I would still watch the home video on many occasions, reliving the memories of the great times we had together. It filled me with joy and happiness, yet saddened me at the same time. I truly felt like a lot of people missed out on something special we had created for them. 

I haven't watched the home video since the mid 90s, but to this day I still have a copy on VHS somewhere in my vault, and it would be pretty amazing to be able to share it in this day and time. I personally don't have the means to do this, but one can never say never...