Meet Geoffrey Earle, the sociopath: spitting beer in people’s faces, popping a little girl’s balloon with his cigarette, slapping asses, shoving joggers – all while singing, “I’m gonna steal your guitar. I’m gonna sell your guitar for drugs. I’m still the only friend you can trust.”
“Generally, I like playing an asshole,” says the leader of local electro-pop executioners Stiletto Feels. “Nowadays, I play an asshole more than I actually am one.”
“Steal Your Guitar” strums the lead single off Stiletto Feels’ The Big Fist. The debut album finds Earle enlisting various musicians to improvise over song sketches, then manipulates their contributions into cohesive songs. On “Guitar,” the singer channels a conniving roommate he shared a rental house with, a trusted friend named Mance.
“One day, Mance asked if he could take all of the roommates’ rent money and then write a big check from his bank account to pay the landlord,” explains Earle. “I thought, ‘Well that’s weird. It’s the kind of thing someone would want to do if they were trying to steal.’ But it didn’t make me suspicious, because I never heard from the landlord.”
Three months later, Earle received an alarming call from the property owner: rent hadn’t been paid in four months. Not coincidentally, Mance had moved out only the day before. When Earle and his roommates inventoried their stuff, they discovered that future Stiletto Feels guitarist Cody Skinner’s priceless classical guitar, made by renowned Czech luthier Petr Matousek, was missing.
Earle tracked Mance down and confronted him, while also making a surreptitious recording of the conversation using a pocketed iPhone with the voice memo function running – just in case he’d later need it in court. Earl also tracked down his former roommate’s mother and broke the news that her son was embezzling rent. His full-court press proved successful: the rent tab was soon repaid in full and the custom guitar was rescued from a pawnshop.
“After a few years, I changed phones and synched the files from my old phone,” says Earle. “All these old voice memos popped up and one of them was that recording of me confronting Mance.
“I wrote the song based on what he said in that conversation,” he continues. “Not only did we get everything back, but inspired a song, so it was happy ending.”
The video for “Steal Your Guitar” puts Earle in the rascally lead role as he walks a warpath of dick moves – captured in a single, sprawling shot by director Sam Tackman and cinematographer Michael Ozmun.
“[Tackman] came up with the entire concept, doing it in one big shot,” confirms Earl. “We sped up the track two-and-a-half times, and then I had to learn to lip synch to it. We did about 20 run-throughs of the scene, but I didn’t have to spit in my friend Dave’s face 20 times.
“Just the last three.”
This article appears in December 4 • 2015.