In March I rapidly learned the new version of Final Cut as I worked to edit video footage from the February 28th Benefit/Tribute concert at the Red Rooster Bar & Music Hall. My first experiment with green screen chroma key effects was my Bo Bice story.
On Tuesday, March first Alosha and I traveled back from Nashville to Rochester. On Wednesday I was back in the classroom with my students. I told the story of meeting Bo and how when I introduced my son and daughter to him (using ASL because they're both Deaf) he immediately launched into a story about his son being taught signs in pre-school. I videotaped both English and ASL versions of my story against the green walls in our ASL video lab at Keuka College, stopped at the Apple store on my way home to pick up the Final Cut Express software, then got to work that evening playing with the program. That night I had the first video uploaded on the family's You Tube channel:
My father and mother were still in Nashville helping Todd and Kip. Dad had his laptop in their guest room and was issuing updates to friends and family. Wednesday night's update revealed that Todd had checked in to the Alive Hospice to try to better manage his pain and that he'd be staying a night or two until it was under control.
In addition to pursuing the editing of the concert footage I also started to dig through family films. On March 4th I edited video footage from my June 1987 visit to Nashville.
In May of 1987 I had just returned from a four-month internship in Bristol, England; interviewed for my first job (English instructor at Gallaudet University); and graduated from the Linguistics program at Gallaudet (in that order and all in about one week"). June provided some down time as I waited for the full-time job to start in August. I brought my trusty VHS-C camera that had travelled with me to England, France and back to document the normal household routines of Todd and Kip in their old house on Starlit Drive.
I had also downloaded a bunch of Todd's performances that were already on You Tube and posted our own copies on the family website (I'm a big supporter of backup files, so I was harvesting what I could find and reposting them). Dad's report on March 5th was that Todd was wearing out. He wasn't in agony, but he just didn't have the stamina to make it much farther than from the bed to the chair and back again. Dad announced that Todd was not going to be leaving the hospice. By Saturday I had completed mixing four different acts using the multiple video camera shots of the February 28th concert.
The first was what I called "Margaritaville Mike" and involved a fellow I met while I was setting up the cameras and getting ready before the concert got rolling. Mike had set himself up at the edge of the wet bar that we were using to store band instruments and as video central for Todd's skype connection and my main video camera. Mike had bought one of Todd's CDs and wanted me to keep it safe for him so we agreed on a spot that we would keep it where he could grab it when the concert was over. Through the night Mike proceeded to drink steadily and repeatedly asked me and others to pass along song requests to the musicians playing. Everyone was playing a strictly planned set revolving around their own hits and/or Todd's songs, so Mike's requests just couldn't be easily met. But Mike had money... either lottery winnings or results of a lawsuit. Tim Buppert coordinated Mike's desire to donate just under two thousand dollars (it took two different credit cards, but the donations went through) and Mike bought himself a song - Margaritaville. Mike carried it off better than one would have expected (He wasn't as thunk as I drank he was). When the concert was over, Mike forget to take his CD with him. I'll let you know if I find out whether he ever got it or not.
Because the concert footage is not technically a family video (no members of the family appear in it), I have since created a separate You Tube page for these kinds of videos (concerts & tributes to Todd plus Todd's performances) and so this video is now located on You Tube's RockDocTDC channel.
Peter Noone's performances, Steve Holy and Ty Herndon were all completed on Saturday, March 5th. You Tube provides space to add descriptions of the videos and I felt obligated to credit the songwriters for each song performed, not just for the ones Todd had written. So I worked to figure out each song that had been performed and identify their authors. My first surprise was to discover that Bo Bice co-wrote one of the songs he performed with Todd – “Keep on Rolling”.
In between songs I listened to the testimonies being given by the people on the stage. I had heard some of these testimonies that evening but now I was able to really watch and listen to each person without distraction. One after another praising my brother for his humanity, for his compassion, for his support for newbies in town and his honesty in how he dealt with them, guided them, and worked to build them up without taking advantage of them.
On Sunday I was on to Restless Heart and Thom Shepherd and the Nashville Songwriters Band. Restless Heart (and all the other groups previously) was easy enough to find information. It was a longer and more complex effort to understand the lyrics for the songs performed by Thom Shepherd and the Nashville Songwriters Band and then trace them to the band members who had co-written them. It was this process - digging around Wikipedia, You Tube, ReverbNation and MySpace - that provided the impetus for this project.
I dug around and followed leads like a CSI agent (Country Song Investigator-Nashville). I found extra traces of my brother as I bumped the edges of co-writers and co-performers contributing to various albums or artists. It spiraled and spun into a massive interconnected web and I'm still following multiple loose threads.
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