The band is called Shoot the Moon — think the Darkness without the wink. The song is the proletarian ode “It’s All Good,” and it sounds sorta like Collective Soul reinterpreting Loverboy’s “Working for the Weekend.” Thirty-two of us have offered to be extras in the Devilfish Films video for this single, shot on a late Sunday afternoon in a 2400-square-foot Canton studio, and our sole mission is simple: “Lots of fist-pumping.”
So instructs director Lawrence Sampson from a faux-club stage that he and his volunteer crew fabricated in a day. “We’re kind of playing it over the top a little bit,” he admits, after summoning a gangly kid with Smurf tattoos and a “nice” pink Mohawk to the front row.
“It’s All Good” draws from the lighter side of MTV’s late-’80s Headbangers Ball: Shoot the Moon toil away in a basement practice space until the cellar walls magically disappear, leading them onto a club stage before a packed house (that’s us fist-pumpers). All the while, frontman Sam Jodrey — Sampson’s lanky high-school friend who also drums for the local DIY hardcore band Toxic Narcotic — narrates the transformation with feel-good rock clichés like “You gotta work all week/And it’s such a drag” to “So tonight’s your night/We’re gonna show you a good time.” Work may break you, but rock will redeem you.
Sampson, a boyish 33-year-old with a slight resemblance to Jay Mohr, knows about art’s redemptive powers. Growing up in a blue-collar Newton neighborhood the youngest of six, the effusive artist spent his childhood scribbling pictures. “I ate ice cream and watched TV and drew pictures,” he says. “That’s all I did as a kid.” He expected to be a manual laborer, but at 15 the illustrator came up with the idea of selling caricatures on Cape Cod and landed a cart spot on Main Street in Hyannis, working for a guy who let him take home 20 percent of his sales. “At night, it was like the drunk crowd, the vacation crowd,” Sampson recalls at a post-shoot wrap party in his Waltham loft (a sign on his apartment door: BEWARE OF ATTACK ARTIST). “Because I looked like I was 10, I gathered this audience. The third night I did it, I came home with $300 cash. And my parents were like, ‘Oh — art’s okay.’”
After high school, Sampson spent a year at MassArt, but classes weren’t really his thing. So without any fancy degrees, he’s spent the past decade earning a living as a commercial artist. He’s sculpted life-size props (gargoyles, Buddha, crypts) for elaborately themed events. (“But then after a couple years, I realized, ‘I make party props for overprivileged kids in Wellesley.’ Okay, next.”) He’s made vehicular sculptures, like a VW bug morphed into a fiberglass-and-steel tortoise for Turtle Transit and a Land Rover molded into the Monster.com mascot. For Aerosmith’s Just Press Play tour, he co-constructed an enormous chrome hand that reached up from the stage’s lip every night. “That was one of my dreams realized,” admits Sampson, a childhood Aerosmith fan.
In the past couple years, he’s leaned toward filmmaking. His prop-construction experience got him jobs making the backdrop for the Explosion’s Axis-filmed video “Here I Am,” plus designing and fabricating sets (a brothel, a trailer hideout, a bloodied crime-scene bathroom) on Robert Patton-Spruill’s locally filmed action-adventure flick Turntable. “In Hollywood, [set design is] like being a plumber, but around here it’s a big deal.”
