The story behind an era-defining Silver Lake music video

Good morning, it’s Thursday, August 6. You can expect a slight respite from brutally hot temps, before it rockets back into the 90s this weekend.

Twenty years ago, Silver Lake indie rock band Silversun Pickups released their debut album Carnavas. Formed in 2000 amidst a crowded field of neighborhood contemporaries, the band became locally known for the house parties they threw in their shared hillside home overlooking Silversun Liquor, the store where the roommates-turned-bandmates got their name.

As the band built momentum through a series of Silver Lake milestones — a Monday night residency at Spaceland, a slot at the Sunset Junction Street Fair, opening for Elliott Smith — they eventually hit it big with the album’s lead single, “Lazy Eye.” A component of that single’s nationwide success was a music video set in a packed bar where the only people older than 16 were the band members (and ex-bandmates) themselves.

Yes, the video tapped into the overwhelming stakes of a teenage crush. But it also captured the end of a Silver Lake era that was already beginning to slip away. Having lived my whole life within a two-mile radius of Silversun Liquor, I reached out to everyone involved in the video — the band, director Suzie Vlček, crew members and the two leads — for an oral history that chronicles their memories of the video shoot, and a version of the neighborhood that no longer exists.

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