Mixtape Love: Outtakes, pt. 2 with Grip Plyaz

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Outtakes is a series of blog posts in which CL staff photographer Joeff Davis talks about photo shoots from this week’s Music Issue.-

Grip Plyaz, “Fuck Dat Hipster Shit”-

Grip is a cool dude. We did the photo shoot on his birthday, and when we showed up to meet him at the pizza joint on Edgewood where he works he was wearing a hat that read “Teenage Millionaire.”-

When I heard his name for the first time, I immediately thought of shooting him in a dentist’s chair with a dentist coming at him with a huge pair of pliers - which is my own personal worst nightmare. But I didn’t think we would ever find a dentist willing to let help make it happen. On a whim, I left messages at like 20 different dental offices and when I came in the next morning I was surprised that I had received responses from half of them saying we could do the shoot in their office.-

We settled on the office of Jeffrey and Sarabess Baumrind because they were a father and daughter team which seemed really cute. They were also based downtown and claimed they had several other rappers as clients (though they told us they couldn’t reveal their names).-

We got the huge pliers from a local store. In talking about how to pay for them with CL’s music editor, he suggested we just “rent” them - which meant buy them and return them after the photo shoot, he explained.-

I was like, “We can’t do that. That’s not cool.” So I called the store and spoke to the manager, who also suggested that we buy the pliers and return them. That’s exactly what we did.