Sometimes You Have to Work on Christmas (Sometimes) – the Video

(from the Christmas EP Enhanced CD)

This video was made in the Fall of 1999, when Harvey Danger was adrift in corporate limbo, waiting for our second record to come out, wondering if it ever would—wondering, in fact, if the entire previous year had been a collective hallucination. So, I figured, why not spend a bunch of my own money and make a music video no one will ever see to accompany a song no one had ever heard?

Thanks largely to the otherworldly generosity and acumen of Ms. Aime Graham, a crew of professional filmmaker types was assembled in a hurry and fancy equipment (Super-16mm camera among other gadgets) was procured under the unwitting auspices of a certain grillion dollar rock’n’roll museum that was fixing to open in our little town. We shot for two days in a borrowed apartment and two local movie houses—neither of which was the actual theater referenced in the song (as long as you’re asking)—and got very nearly every shot we’d planned.

The completed clip was screened once at the original Little Theater in mid-December of ’99, and never seen again, as far as I know—unless you count a couple of mildly uncomfortable living room exhibitions and the odd download. In a very real sense, this project (based on a true story, I might add) was the very definition of futility: All these great people worked really hard to make it, almost no one saw it, and it cost a lot of money. But when I say a lot of money, I mean (literally) less than 1/100th of the budget for the next video we wound up making, and that one only aired twice. But, you know, the band looks amazing…

— Sean Nelson