The Helio Sequence, “Keep Your Eyes Ahead” Director: Whitey McConnaughy

[March 5th, 2008]

[KEEPIN’ IT STREET] Real Portland bands show real Portland love. Whitey McConnaughy, the local director responsible for videos like the Thermals’ white-roomed, star-studded visual take on “Pillar of Salt” and Panther’s infamous cardboard-box-staged opus “You Don’t Want Your Nails Done,” is often the guy who helps spread that love via film.

Location plays a big role in McConnaughy’s work (previously featured Portland locations include a MAX stop, Voodoo Doughnut and Holocene), and the video for “Keep Your Eyes Ahead,” the title track to the Helio Sequence’s new album, continues the trend. Viewers play “spot the landmark” while the Bagdad Theater, the Hawthorne Bridge and the downtown skyline appear behind the duo as it plays aboard a tiny makeshift stage in the dead of night.

“It’s not like I’m Ludacris,” McConnaughy says via email of repping his city. “I do love Portland, though, and there’s not many cities where we could have pulled this off with such a tiny budget,” he adds, noting that passing police never asked whether he had a permit to shoot in the video’s outdoor locations (that’d be a “no”).

Instead, the shoot’s undisclosed budget was blown primarily on its roving stage, a multiple car battery-powered beast strung with amps, stage lights, Christmas lights and H.P. Lovecraft-style contraptions with no clear purpose aside from looking cool. McConnaughy says he wanted it to look faux-futuristic, “as if a little kid designed it with junk he found.” The end product—built with help from Thermals drummer Lorin Coleman and a guy named Thor—looks half-stage, half-cockpit. It’s stunningly out of place beneath Portland’s bridges, where it lights up chipped concrete and puddle-pocked pavement as scarf-wrapped Helio frontman Brandon Summers sings, “I just ’bout fell right off the bal-con-y,” his face ghost white and stretched by an oversized light-up magnifying glass.

The band occasionally appears out-of-focus and wrapped in suits of lights, but most shots find them bundled tight in winter attire and rocking out as if playing for a packed house of overjoyed fans. But it’s not Summers, or drummer Benjamin Weikel—or even the robot stage—that stands out at the end of the day. Portland, once again, steals the show.