When our long-time friend, Georgia Greville, reached out with the idea of the Grease Brothers Project, Aaron and I agreed immediately with her creative direction. Georgie had been working for Mtv at the time and they had just launched something they called the ‘Think!’ campaign, which highlighted a variety of conscientious ways to reduce ones adverse impact on the environment.
The goal of the project was to create five separate Public Service Announcements hoping to motivate Mtv viewers to think a bit more about renewable resources. We never thought everyone was going to go out and convert every vehicle, but we aimed at inspiring people to think outside of the box, in terms of their own personal considerations. Just do some weird shit and pretend you’re Doc Brown, that’s what we do.
We converted a 1985 Winnebago, LeSharo turbo-diesel mini-motorhome as the vehicle for the project. For a week or so we drove it all around Los Angeles filming at an abandoned oil refinery, Malibu beach, a 76 station, over the 405, and ended with a Piebald show (a band who Grease Brother, Aaron plays guitar for) at Chain Reaction, in Anaheim. The show was a great finale to the project. It was a lot of fun, piling everyone into the LeSharo and heading out to celebrate the end of the whole thing. The crowd at Chain Reaction loves Piebald and they knew a lot of the audience so afterwards we displayed the van, and the LeSharo, to anyone that wanted to ask questions about the conversion system and how we fill it up.
Within a month or so, the shorts started to run on Mtv and our early two-thousands flip-phones blew up with messages from old friends and distant cousins. It was a really fun project and throughout the whole thing Ben Fee was by our side, shooting B-roll, and most of these photos.
Well, I’ve dug through all my old hard-drives and did a quick YouTube search, but as of now I can’t find any of the resulting PSA’s. If they ever resurface I’ll post them here. Thanks again to Georgie Greville for coordinating the Grease Brothers project it was an excellent springboard, which led to a bunch of great opportunities, and really fueled the early trajectory of Grease Not Gas.
(Pun intended)