If you had driven 2 hours to visit a ghost town, and arrived at a locked gate that said ‘Guard Dog On Duty’, would YOU have ignored it?

One of the best parts of shooting this music video was when we drove 2 hours out of Phoenix to go to a ghost town called Vulture City. Sounds good already, doesn’t it? We drove through craggy jagged red desert landscape spotted with the giant stabs of 10-foot cactuses, only to find that the ghost town was closed (again, I suppose). We stood at the gate, and contemplated jumping it, despite the sign warning us of a ‘guard dog on duty’. But all we could hear was the wind rattling the tattered iron roofs of abandoned shacks. No dog in sight. And come on - we had driven 2 HOURS.

We stood around, umming and arring, and Kenny eventually decided he would jump the fence and go check it out. As he was putting his stuff down, Cara started waving to some speck off in the distance, behind the fence, on a platform that went over the top of one of the abandoned buildings. And the speck started waving back. “I think that’s a person up there…yep definitely a person.”

2 minutes later, a stocky woman on a 4-wheeler is careening down the dirt path toward the lacked gate we were still standing behind. We tried our best to cultivate her sympathies for our plight and give us a private tour, hinting that we were a combination of filmmakers, artists, and musicians. Maybe that would have some cache out in the desert? But she sat on her side of the locked gate, on her 4-wheeler, and let us know there was nothing she could do. Couldn’t let us in. A log had to be kept of any time the gate was opened. There were sensors all around the property that were activated during closed hours that she would have to account for. Just couldn’t be done.

She did, however, chat to us for 15 minutes, and answer our questions about the minutiae of the desert and the local surrounds. What, for example, were all the letter boxes across the road? (We were in the middle of the cactus-riddled desert - it looked like an art installation of letter boxes to nowhere). She let us know that there was in fact private property back there - ‘Whispers Ranch’ or some such - if you followed the dirt track. BUT! She warned us, ‘I would STRONGLY recommend you DO NOT follow your curiosity into that property. There are some NASTY types in there.’ This piqued our curiosity. ‘There are ANARCHISTS…’

Now, normally, if someone out in the boons (excuse my gross generalising here) warned me of anti-government types, I might happily assume that they were referring to the type of people who I might in a regular week call my friends. But she followed up by letting us know that the property also housed a massive meth lab, and a branch of the KKK. And we realised that the type of ‘anarchists’ that set up shop in the middle of the desert in Arizona, in neighbourly quarters with the KKK and meth makers are probably the type who have storerooms of guns and will also shoot you in the face.

So we took her warning seriously. No Guard Dog sign required.

She apologised again for not being able to let us in, after discussing the effort of childbirth with us by politely suggesting to Fionn that he use a watermelon in creative ways if he wanted to know what it felt like. And let us know that there was an interesting little cemetery up the road if we wanted to check that out. So we shot some more scenes of the music video, and paid our respects.

And driving away, we were glad that we didn’t decide to jump the fence, knowing now that she was probably sitting up there on that distant platform with a pair of binoculars and her own defense system, watching for her neighbours.

Tv Placement time…

Just found out my song, ‘Burned Again’, is being used in an episode of Hawaii 5.0, airing on February 13! Very exciting! My first tv placement!