See Music Video That Gave David Lynch a Hernia

Just before David Lynch began making Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in the early Nineties, he started up an experimental music project with his collaborator, composer Angelo Badalamenti. They dubbed the project Thought Gang and after asking some musicians to improvise sounds for Lynch’s poetry, the filmmaker said he wanted to find a vocalist for one of the works, “A Real Indication.”

Badalamenti said he’d do it (“I thought it was going to be horrible,” Lynch told Rolling Stone recently) and it was so funny to the filmmaker that he laughed himself into a hernia. “It was like a light bulb burst in my stomach,” Lynch said. “I had to have an operation and go through all this stuff ’cause of Angelo.”

Some time after he started feeling better, Lynch made a video for the tune with Angelo, walking around Los Angeles reciting the story. In the clip, which Lynch shot by attaching a camera to a long fishing rod and driving around Los Angeles, Badalamenti talks about the breakdown of a relationship and how he’s going on, leading to the revelation, “I’ve got a real indication of a laugh coming on.” Although he previously released it, in color, the filmmaker has since turned it to black and white and put it out again to herald the release of the Thought Gang album, which comes out tomorrow – more than 25 years after they had begun work on it.

“It’s really experimental music,” Lynch told Rolling Stone of the project, “But there’s just killer players working on it …The sounds that came out of Thought Gang were a cacophony,” Badalamenti said. “It was an incredible, organized cacophony. The players all were one, feeding off each other.”