A Pitstop on the Road to Albertane

There are a ridiculously small number of things in this world that could cause this llama to get out of bed at eight in the morning and haul butt into a frigid early November day. In fact, the number right now stands at 3. You guessed it -- Isaac, Taylor and Zac. That's it. Did you say class? Pshah. Never. The trip, I instantly decided upon seeing the oddly kaleidoscopic Road to Albertane (RTA) box, was more than worth it.

"Should we come back? Are you sure?" Woooaaahhh Zac. It's way to early in the morning for complicated questions like that. First of all, where'd you go?!? Unless some freakish rewinding accident caused my tape to ship unrewound, this is indeed the beginning, not the end. Words to the wise: you must "come" before you can "come back."

The editing of the video makes me wonder if maybe at least one member of Hanson would need Dramamine after watching it. Really, it would have been fine to focus on one camera angle for say, two or three seconds at a time. Someone's been internalizing the MTV/NYPD Blue style of videography entirely too much, methinks. Taylor himself seems a bit confused by the funky camera work during the initial non-performance sequence as he watches the lens go from eye level to hover some point above his head. "Hey Ash!" his expression seems to be begging, "stand still for a second so I can talk, okay?!"

Another dizzying factor is the multiple concerts that are used to create each song for the tape. It's incredibly cool, and as soon as I plugged in the video I began looking for the two concerts that I had attended during the original leg of the Albertane tour, but throughout the live portions of the video I find myself chanting "blueshirt-redshirt-green" opposed to actually watching the performance. A wee bit distracting.

After Hanson and their cronies were so emphatically anti-camera what do they spend a fifth of this video showing? Teenies with their cameras in the front row taking shots of the boys that are about to make them black market heroines. No doubt the fact that I notice this comes from my self-hatred for not having the guts to smuggle a camera in when I had the chance, but really. "People don't want you to be nice, just consistent," says my favorite author, Terry Prattchet. Enough said.

Montreal, my first Hanson concert and, regrettably enough, my only experience in the front 10 rows, appears early on, even before the tour statistics flash on the screen. I find it amusing that they report 520,000 in attendance at this point. While I personally only had the opportunity to witness only three shows, many people I know saw more in the neighborhood of six. I understand that fanaticism tends to run in the fanfic community, but think for a moment. If you figure that each person went to two concerts the number drops down to 225,000. (Whoo! It's too early to think but I'm pretty sure I just did some math!) If one factors even further for the deeply obsessive Hanson fans the truth is exposed: each of those 36 concerts was filled by the same 10,000 of us who were more than willing to give up silly pursuits like employment to travel across the country with our favorite band.

I have to say that when I first saw the yahoo clip of River I was a little concerned. My little boys in bathing suits? Were they suddenly going to go Spice Girls on us and attempt a photo shoot in the footsteps of the orange bathing-suited Baywatch cast members? When one considers Hanson's particular affection for the hue it doesn't seem that unlikely, does it? When I finally got the video I was grateful to see that the swimming pool bits were brief and tasteful. I have nothing to say about these clips that will not make me sound like a pathetic teenie, so I'll stop now. Well, I'll stop right after I comment on the fact that the puberty faerie has been good to these boys. Look at that… um… flip technique. Breathtaking, isn't it?

Another exciting point for me in this video that no one else probably cares about is the plane ride. Hanson gets off bus. Hanson gets on what my dad--a former pilot dead set on proper use of terminology--would call "a cute little baby jet" all by themselves. BINGBING! My little jaunt with Hanson has just become all the more statistically spectacular. They really do charter private planes, even if only for small hops. Apparently they only fly Continental when they suspect an obsessive older fan might be tortured by their proximity and her utter lack of anything intelligent to say.

Throughout the tape the boys see fit to show us various spots that they visited on the tour, several of which appear to be in England. One of the teenie magazines I bought while I was there taking classes this summer (why is it so much easier to buy something called Smash Hits than it is to purchase a lowly little issue of Teen Beat?) mentioned that Hanson had seen stonehenge on this trip, and now we get to watch them stand around and be passively unimpressed by the big hunks of rock. Well, a few months later I, too, made a pilgrimage to the tourist attraction that wasn't, as my bizarre guide called it, and later in the same chartered trip thing we saw Salisbury Cathedral. And so did Hasnon! Or at least I think so, judging from some church footage shown later. The arches look right, at any rate. The Hanson's apparently also visited the reconstruction of Shakespeare's globe, judging from the 2.5 seconds of them in front of wooden walls shown later in River. After spending about six hours in that theater in the course of a week, I can even tell you that while Hanson appear to be all alone checking the place out they didn't rank a gentleman's box.

And here we were, thinking Hanson was working slaving away at their craft all day when all they really seem to do is play soccer in the venues while we, the fans, sit and await their glory outside. Initially I was wondering if the woman in the flowered skirt that appears to have been stolen from my grandmother's closet was the TT&MON girl, but she looks to old. However, she just seems really, really cool. Playing soccer with a bunch of recently adolescent boys in 20 pound doc martens while barefooted and in a skirt? You go girl! Go to the emergency room, that is.

Those of you who have been curious about the identity of Ashley Greyson, Hanson buddy, videographer and all around good guy, can find out here if you're quick with the pause button. Just please, please don't make me sorry I told you. Ashley is a person too, and deserves to be treated with respect. This does not include following him around, stalking him, or even screaming at him. So if you can handle these responsibilities, read on. If not, skip to the next paragraph and up the prozac dosage. Right before the soccer scene is left and we are returned to the live version of river with a close up of Ike's face, we see Isaac high five an oddly Carson Daily-esque man. Well this is the mythical Ash! I'm not sure what concert this was filmed before, but I sort of think it may have been Montreal. It's definitely in an ice rink, which is what the Molson Centre is, and I definitely recognize the red seats. Just think! I would be sitting on Hanson's soccer field in mere hours!

Now we come to the acoustic set. It's quaint that Hanson think we wouldn't notice the utter lack of hysterical screaming, or for that matter, fan shots. Soundstage, much? I forgive them, though, because the songs sound incredible. One cute moment is right after "'til the sun won't rise" in the beginning of stories when Taylor doesn't quite hit his "ooohh" and Isaac gives him the nastiest look imaginable. The "come on everybody" that Isaac throws out in the middle of the song is also a rare moment… mostly because he appears to be talking to himself. We've already established that there are no fans there to appreciate his witty showmanship! The close up shots and calm atmosphere actually give us another opportunity to be reminded why Hanson will hopefully have non-speaking parts on Melrose and Buddy Farro. Actors they are not.

The coolest part of seeing this video is being allowed to see what it's like backstage. Especially when Ike is cutting it up with his broccoli friend Puff Greenie. The boy is out of control funny in this segment, as is Taylor with his "fruit.. CANDY… fruit... CANDY" dilemma. Isaac has a complex and we can only hope that Taylor eventually decided what about, but RTA doesn't see fit to answer this question, instead leaving Taylor slightly flustered and attempting for all he's worth to wrest the spotlight away from Ike.

A crowd point in look at you from Taylor! Someone apparently just recently figured out how to use special effects on their editing equipment, as is visible in this song. First it's fuzzy, now it's sharp, now it's slow, now it's fast. You! With you hand on the speed! Stop the insanity! The shot that shows one of the boys casting a huge shadow on at what appears to be red rocks is amazingly cool, perhaps the most artistic and just plain neatest one of the entire tape.

Forget who is John Galt. The real question these days is who is Isaac on the phone with?! He's chatting cheerily away about his creative process, but to whom? Elvis? Guess we'll never know. Zac finally gets some airtime here, insisting that he "wants to garden!" The flowers he is the process of painting are actually pretty good, allowing one to extrapolate that they've come a long, long way from the muscle men in MON!

Weird exhibits the return of the phantom special effects abuser. Taylor blurs into Isaac, Isaac into Zac, in this--the trippiest version of Weird known to man--Hanson says "no one can hear but you're screaming so loud, you feel like you're all alone in a faceless crowd" and the teenies let loose a mighty roar. Woah. Did I miss something? The song seems to be all about how no matter what you do you're always trapped as merely a worker ant in a colony 5.6 billion large. So the teenies do exactly what Hanson say doesn't help: they "scream so loud," forming exhibit A of why Weird is such a truthful song, methinks.

I now want to tour with Hanson even more. Their bus is a lot nicer than my dorm room, and I think their bunks are about twice its size! Kidding.. sort of. When I first came across pictures from RTA (check out both justhanson.com and hansonhotel.com for good shots) I saw the teddy bear/dog think that Isaac plays with during the Taylor's tour of the bus. "I love you" says Isaac, making the little dog kiss the screen. He's playing, I know, but that odd noise you just heard was indeed my heart melting. The next question is who does the dog/bear belong to? There are a lot of bunks on that bus, so it seems probable that at their younger siblings sleep there, but I would just love to hear it belonged to a member of Hanson. Yes, boys, however reticent they may be to admit it, have stuffed animals too. My theory is that the dog is Taylor's, and he realized that they would be filming in the region of his bunk so he casually hid it. Isaac perhaps saw this and decided to humiliate his little brother. How cute would that be?

Sometimes suddenly becomes a Brady Bunch episode with these three little screens of action. My goodness, there are some Brady parallels, aren't there? "Hair of gold.. the youngest in… braids?"

Taylor has been quoted as saying, "don't taunt the fans" but apparently he's changed his mind. Before ever lonely the "you have the glowy things so we can see you" is what I would term a low blow. Way to give those teenies false hopes! During Ever Lonely there are quite a few cool shots of Zac with his drumsticks glowing against the dark of the theater. I think there's more of him shown in this one song than in the entire video. Perhaps even in the entirety of Hanson on film, on second thought!

Taylor's hair thing is on his arm in two outfits… the blue and red short sleeved shirts. He never puts his hair up in performance, leading this llama to ponder its significance. In a bizarre side note, Tay seems to wear his watch on his right wrist. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't convention state that a right-handed person should wear their watch on the left hand? This is what my mom told me back when I got my baby pink strawberry shortcake digital watch, at any rate. Along with this, the ring finger of the left hand is magically reserved, also according to my mother, for a wedding ring. Initial shots of Taylor wearing a ring on the same hand as his watch seemed a little odd, but after some mental calculation I realized he wears his watch on the wrong hand. Random.

Isaac seems to have taken extra special care with his hair for the Seattle show. It looks far fluffier than the norm, probably due to blow-drying and extreme primping sessions. I suppose one can't blame him, though. This thousands of copies of this tape, just like TT&MON, will doubtlessly follow him around for the duration of his life on this planet. Imagine a seventy year old Ike, his dentures still in a cup beside his craft-o-matic bed, plaid bathrobe tied unevenly around still slender waist, clutching the Rolls Royce of walkers as he heads out for a social event in the Senior Citizens home. "Hey!" At least one elderly woman will probably shout as she hobbles by, "You're Ike Hanson, aren't you? You know that I'll never forgive you or that bad hair day you had during the only concert I saw of Albertane tour in 1998…"

After Ever Lonely we cut to a tantalizing discussion of Hanson and songwriting filmed in a venue with this freaky lime green light scheme thing going on. Isaac and Zac look positively supernatural… but Taylor somehow manages to look positively supermodel. Is that blush on those rosy cheeks? A notable moment in Hanson history occurs during this interview segment as Zac is allowed to speak for more than two consecutive seconds without interruption from either siblings or interviewer. Taylor seems to be glancing in horror at the notebook possessing inquisitor, and doesn't even work his way into the conversation. As time progresses the look on the middle brother's face gets weirder and weirder, looking almost like he's got a gobstopper or something. Either that or Tay's getting bitter about Zac having had the spotlight, your guess is as good as mine. Throughout this clip Ike sings alone with his guitar in the brief shots, making me yearn for More Than Anything. The new song that he appears to be composing, though, is a winner: it's got leaves and blowing breezes and love… what more can one ask?

Back to the soundstage, erm, the live acoustic set that was filmed in front of several thousand Hanson fans who were either so enraptured by the music that they couldn't scream, or gagged and bound. I leave you to draw your own conclusions. We see a performance of what is perhaps Hanson's most beautiful song, With You in Your Dreams. Now, thinking back through some of the early tour reviews I read I seem to remember some girl talking about how she had seen Zac crying during this song, over come with emotion. So that would probably explain the calm dreamy waving of his drumsticks along with the opening bars of the song, eh? He did this little move at every concert I attended, and I swear it gets cuter every time I see it. The editing of this section is considerably different from the earlier songs, perhaps another testament to its canned nature. The camera calmly glides from brother to brother, garnering both extreme close up and smooth frontal views. Hmm.. so Ash and Mr. Hanson apparently were rigged up to the lighting equipment and lowered down, ala elementary school versions of Peter Pan, just to get some of the angled shots. Zac continues the earlier spirit of invisible crowd interaction by wagging his eyebrows quite suggestively several times during the song in a manner quite reminiscent of his actual behavior during the acoustic sets. He always seemed to look around, stare at some fans, and just generally relax.

Along comes another segment of shots of various arenas and brief snippets of the boys, including the already infamous "Isaac-in-a-wife-beater" cameo. My, how our little boy has grown, say many of the people I've talked to about this shot. The rest of the fans who noticed the tank topped Hanson teenie should be regaining consciousness sometime in the next few days.

If you look here you can see the Montreal's Molson Centre logo, a landmark which to this day I can't drive past it without getting a goofy grin on my face. Another one of the pictures here is of a brick building called "Brady Theater." Nope, this one probably isn't on the tour program because it's in downtown Tulsa! This is rumored to be a location where Hanson practiced for the summer tour, and if you check out the back page of MOE #2 where there's that odd close up of Taylor with the water bottle you'll see the back side of the building. This was one of the sights on the llama's tour of Tulsa at which the teenie instincts struck. I have, for no apparent reason, in the neighborhood of five shots of the sign. Oh well, I suppose it's no worse than me taking pictures of every sign I saw with the word "Tulsa" on it. But as one of the next shots shows, I'm not the only one who takes weird photos of totally unimportant things. Take London's Hanson street, for example.

We get a closer up view of the Molson Centre here as Ike tunes his guitar. Kim, Amanda2 and I would be seven rows back in those little red chairs, fighting for our lives admidst a sea of pyromaniacal teenies in mere hours. In fact, now that I think about it, we were probably listening at this exact moment from our post outside, as we waited for the radio interview that never was. The Good Loving segment that follows is the first time in the video that the outfit changes become glaringly obvious, as do a few moments of slightly out of synch mouth/word shots. It's not as bad as those cheesy horror movies from the 50s or anything, but you can definitely see the time gap between when the words are heard and when they are said. I can't even imagine how hard it must have been to edit all of these scenes together, though, so I think we owe the diligent creators of the video a few get out of jail free cards.

While the guys from Admiral Twin, Hanson's opening band, don't get any airtime in the tape, their fans do. During A Minute Without You we see a cute little sign held aloft reading "I'm from Tulsa!" in big letters, and then underneath in smaller ones it says "Melodramatic Wallflowers." Uh… okay. Are these people living in a time warp? Did they not realize that that pesky Jakob Dylan band necessitated a name change to Admiral Twin? Which, incidentally, is taken from a drive in movie theater on Admiral Road in Tulsa. It's called Admiral Twin because there are two screens, each one capable of showing a separate movie. The reasons why the band is called Admiral Twin are not so obvious, though...

The signs shown are once again sweet, showing a lot of hard work on the part of the fans. Too bad they were a huge pain and blocked the view at Great Woods so badly that I'm not even sure if there's any footage of that show in the video. I couldn't even tell what the guys were wearing. Fine. So this is half due to my horrid, horrid, really, really bad seats, but the signs played a role as well. The Mabee center in Tulsa may have been run by some totalitarian fascist types who tried to get the audience to sit down during the show, but at least they kept the signs out! Annoying signs leads me right to the one that says "green jello". Enough said.

Many other pages have noted what people call Taylor's big O face in such instances as the cover of Seventeen last year. It was Taylor trying out for Boogie nights, in my opinion. Never before, though, have I noticed Isaac having such an…ahem… impassioned looking moment. But in towards the end of Solider, right after an "no longer lonely," the Ike-ster has this funny, closed eye look on his face right before throwing his head back and taking a big breath. What's this? Is our golden boy hoping to conquer the world of adult movies after he owns the music world? Once again, I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

"Yeah Baby," Austin Powers moment much? Isaac is apparently a big, big fan of funky accents, judging that half the time we see him he's talking in one. There's the "I'm coming for you," Elvis voice, the incomparable Austin, the "Billy Bob, doctor of treeology" voice, the "they killed my family" voice, and I bet even more that I can't think of off the top of my head. Wow. "Get over the puff daddy," is Taylor's take on the situation as our private moment with Ike begins to descend into another puff greenie-esque brouhaha.

It seems like several moments in the video have been orchestrated to maximize an impression of the boy's control in the shows. They were earlier shown filling out a set list, and now we're granted with a view of Taylor sweetly chastising some random man.

For some reason, when I was a fifteen-year-old girl the antics of fifteen-year-old boys held little charm. I was much more impressed by the kind of boy fifteen year old girls should not only not be impressed by, but should also be avoiding at all costs. But now that I've reached the advanced age of 22 the pleasures of things like miniature golf, playing with my food, and video games have come floating back into my subconscious… along with an odd fondness for waterfights. The battle waged between the two tour buses is of epic proportions, the war to end all water wars, even. As we watch the excited preparation for the deluge the adult in me comes crawling back to the surface, though, to marvel at the bloody cool bathroom on the bus. Shinny mirrors, cute little sink, Zac… what a nifty room!

Hopefully no law enforcement officials are watching this, because something tells me that the bus driver egging the boys on and passing on the right would probably not go over to well in traffic court. I must confess that despite several viewings of the scene in question I have no idea who the people in the other bus are. Theoretically they're Admiral Twin, but the combatants look entirely too young. And one appears to be a girl, if I'm not confusing John Russell's longish dark hair with something it's not. I know now what my intelligent conversation with Taylor is going to be about. His aim. Getting the water balloon through the small window of the other bus from more than five feet away at a supposed seventy miles an hour… wow. Just wow.

Mmmbop. It's there, it's Mmmbop. There isn't much more to say about it, other than to point out the sweat flying off Taylor, as highlighted by the low camera angle, front lighting, and the lovely fan (deep breath… the kind with an on/off switch) in the background. Perhaps the svelteness of the Hanson members can be drawn back to this; they must burn about a billion calories every time they set foot on stage, most especially Taylor with his occasionally painful to watch thumping. In fact, during Where's the Love it's hard to imagine how Taylor actually manages to hit the right keys. He just pounds cheerily away at the keyboard like it needs to immediately be beaten into submission for some reason.

"There's all these like these weird ties," say the boys in front of yet another road sign bearing their name, this time with the added distinction of being in Milwaukee and intersecting Oklahoma street. Better call Mulder and Scully in on that one, Taylor. How freakish. The fan who sent the book in must be tickled pink at this point. Recognition from Hanson is a pretty exciting thing, and it's neat that even if they don't go through their mail themselves, apparently someone does, judging from the number of cute fan gift stories they can whip out at demand.

Taylor goes crazy in Man from Milwaukee, even for him, bouncing up and down and waving his hands hysterically in the air. The funniest thing about this is definitely when they cut mid-action and blend into another concert. You can see how they tend to repeat the same actions at the same time in each song, sometimes even down to a hair flip begun in one outfit and completed in another.

One thing that RTA seems to have over TT&MON is a relaxed atmosphere. I get the feeling watching this that it's a lot closer to real life than the obviously scripted earlier video efforts of the band. This is much more candid, much more believable than most of TT&MON, probably in part because the boys have had time to grow comfortable in front of the camera. This summer it seems like they barely noticed when people were taping and just went about their business, allowing us a glimpse of their lives all the more precious for its informality. For example, a lot of people heard about the near fatal Taylor-golfcart-FANS! Situation and it was endlessly cool to see him complaining about his power by Tonka transportation and then nearly mowing down a bunch of girls. They're not working hard at projecting some super-human, awesome image with RTA. Instead, they're having fun. And so are we.

Solved mysteries:

-what is Isaac's complex? Still anyone's guess.

-who is Isaac on the phone with? Could be Elvis. 

-who is the woman in the grandmotherly skirt? She appears to be one of Hanson's roadcrew as appear in the Mt. Rushmoe shot in MOE #3.

-who are the people on the victimized bus during the waterfight? According to Hanson themselves in a Yahoo chat, these are roadcrew.  One of them is supposedly also the woman playing soccer.

- did they show any Great Woods footage at all? That they did! There are about five seconds shown.  You can tell where it is because as they get shots looking out from the stage you see a low overhanging ceiling with big, round pilars supporting it.

- how long will it take for my VCR to explode from over use? More than two months, apparently.