On Monday morning, March 14th I was doing my normal MWF morning commute from Rochester to Keuka Park in New York and listening to my iPod. A song started up that I did not recognize and then my brother started to sing. It was a song from his anticipated third CD - "Star". So I listened to the song as I continued driving and then heard other songs fill the time until I arrived at the College. Keuka College is a beautiful but remotely located school on the west shores of Keuka Lake. There is no T-Mobile service at the school or for the thirty minutes of my commute that surround my travel to or from it.
I taught my morning classes and then started my return trip shortly after noon. At nearly the same location that I had heard Todd's song earlier in the morning my phone began to ring. Dad was calling to tell me that Todd had died at 9:30 am local time... about ninety minutes after the song had played. We talked for a few minutes. He told me that Todd's corneas were being donated and that once they had been removed his body would be cremated and that there would be no funeral in Nashville... at least not right away. He and Mom would be headed back home by Thursday. I talked to my sister for a while. She was riding with Kip back home from the Hospice and we both agreed to attend the ashes ceremony on the Gulf Shores, whenever it would be scheduled.
I called in to work to take the afternoon off. I drove home and went to the store to buy food for supper, including a small cake. I had decided to get Alosha from school and we would share supper and light a candle on the cake in memory of Todd. Sometime in the afternoon before I went to the dorms to get Alosha I put together the last images that I had of Todd and mixed in the music of "Til I Get Used to the Pain" and "Star".
On Tuesday morning I called in to both of my jobs to take the day off, drove Alosha to school and returned home. I had one more project to pursue. I needed to identify all of the twenty-plus years of home-movie video recordings that I had. I was looking specifically for the family reunion we had in Colorado in 2005 for which I had already found pictures, but felt certain that I should also have video footage. In between viewing snippets of videos to identify the dates of over 100 recordings I began to read the Caring Bridge journal entries. At first from the most recent postings backwards in time, and then I decided to start at the beginning. I was impressed with how calmly and resolutely Todd faced his situation. Ever realistic about the long shot for finding a cure, Todd seemed to be at peace with what was happening to him.
I lost track of time that day. I slept, cried, read, viewed video segments, repeat, rinse, etc. By late evening I had finished the Caring Bridge journals. I had identified every video that I had without finding video footage from summer of 2005 and came to the realization that I had not used the video camera at all during the reunion because I had found that video footage often disappeared without being viewed while photographs were a lot easier to share. Suddenly my urgent frenzy to complete my documentation of Todd's life came to a crashing halt. I had found what I could find. Todd's battle was over. It was time for all of us to rest.
I was finally able to return to doing my work with more complete attention to details. I only know that's where my energy went because my Facebook messages and youtube creations have a significant gap from March 14th until March 25th when I launched the RockDocTDC YouTube channel. Dad had mentioned to me that Todd didn't want the family reunion videos to be available to non-family members. Dad specifically asked me to make the video using his collection of photographs private. I decided one path to pursue would be to generate separate YouTube and/or web pages to commemorate Todd. I started by uploading the shorter performances from the February 28th Red Rooster concert to the new channel. Eventually I took down the original postings from the family's channel. Until the new channel receives permission to upload longer videos, however, I am still keeping the long ones (more than 16 minutes) on the family site so that people can still view them.
In the intervening time I had begun collecting Todd's musical film and television contributions. His music had appeared in the films "Tequila Sunrise", "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka", and "Angel Eyes." I had never seen any of these movies so I added them to my Netflix queue, watched the movies and captured the portions of each film that included Todd's songs. I began mixing them into the next video, but there were some more obscure additions that I had to pursue first.
One was a lifetime made-for-TV movie called "We Were the Mulvaneys" which had four songs within the film. One of them was entitled "Fall in Love" which was credited to Todd, Austin Roberts and Bill Martin. This song did not appear on Todd's website and I had only found it through obscure half-references in Movie-based webpages. I watched the whole show and heard only two songs. Then I went back to the credits and figured out one was a Frank Sinatra song that was being played instrumental-only in a country club scene by a guy at the piano. All of the music in the show was from "live" performances, not from recordings that played in the background of scenes. So then I went back to the high school dance where the other two songs appeared and listened hard to the backgound noise and music when two characters are talking downstairs from the gym. There it was. A song I actually knew but no longer had any recording of it to remind me of its lyrics. I had a new mission. I needed to find that song and the others on the cassette tape that my brother had given my parents back in the 1980s.
The other frustration in putting together the video snippets came from the Baywatch television series. Todd had co-written the closing credits theme that David Hasselhoff sang vocals for during seasons 2, 3 and 4. One episode from season three of Baywatch - "Point Doom" - included a song performed by Giant. So I decided to add the relevant DVD to my Netflix cue and watched the "Point Doom" episode. No song that matched the lyrics for "Save Me Tonight". At the end credits the singer didn't sound like David Hasselhoff to me. I was confused. I dug around the internet some more and discovered that the DVDs had copyright disputes and none of the original music in Baywatch remained in the DVD version of the show... all the music was replaced with generic, uncredited (and unimaginative) music. So I decided to complete the compilation video with explanations for the gaps and dubbed Hasselhoff's song over the end credits I had captured. The compilation video was posted to the RockDocTDC You Tube Channel on March 27th, 2011.
