When funk-metal quintet Sevendust came to New York to shoot the video for "Waffle," the latest single from their album Home, they couldn't have picked a worse weekend. The city was gripped by bitterly cold weather that made the outdoor shoot particularly grueling. "Man, we were just in sixty-degree weather this afternoon in Atlanta," said lead singer Lajon Witherspoon. "And now we're freezing in an atmosphere fifteen below with wind-chill. Life never ceases to amaze me."

While his bandmates were off for the first day of the shoot, Witherspoon spent the entire day on the brutally frigid outdoor set reciting his verses in front of the cameras -- wearing only a few thin layers. During breaks, he would rush to the electric heaters placed near the director's chair and absorb as much warmth as possible before the tapes began to roll again.

The video, directed by Marcos Siega (who also shot Blink 182's hilarious "All the Small Things"), deals with the concept of how rock & roll's idols have changed over time. "We did it in the format of a timeline," Siega explained. "We show a certain group of kids from the late Sixties dressing up like their Led Zeppelin idols, and then we show them morph into the punk rock era, which was dominated by bands like the Sex Pistols. They then morph into the glam rock scene, which was briefly influenced by bands like Poison and Cinderella. We then morph the set of kids into the modern scene, which was pretty hard to pinpoint, but I think we did fine."

However, Siega hopes that how he chose to represent the video's here-and-now stage does not bruise anyone's ego. "We decided to have the modern-day kids wear red hats like [Limp Bizkit's] Fred Durst," Siega said, emphasizing, "for no other reason but to compliment him on the influence he has on today's youth. We really hope that Fred takes it the right way."

The second day of the shoot, the whole band was in attendance. "The trick," Witherspoon advised his bandmates, "is to drink plenty of hot cocoa." During this session, he and the rest of the band (bassist Vinnie Hornsby, guitarists Clint Lowery and John Connolly, and drummer Morgan Rose) were shot performing on the rooftop of a six-story building on the Upper East Side. "This is worse than being in a freezing pool," complained Hornsby, and asked Siega not to shoot any close-ups of the band members' crotches, noting, "I don't want girls to think I have a small ding-a-ling."

But aside from some minor moaning, the Sevendust boys were troopers about the whole event. "These guys have been touring, like, nonstop for the last three years," said Siega, "so two days in the freezing cold would be the last thing to break them."

PAT CHARLES
(February 2, 2000)