The Art of the Road Trip Playlist

First some album news:

Earlier this week I uploaded the audio files from my album to the manufacturer in New Jersey and have since Okay’d the audio and graphics proofs.

It was an unexpectedly emotional experience to upload those files. Up until that point I viewed it as just a step in the process but when I hit that send button I felt as though my baby had been taken from my arms, out into the World, never to return. All I had done to create the content of the album was written in stone at that moment.

I was a nervous wreck for the rest of the day and to a smaller extend I still am.

Now I understand why it took me so long to get this done, why I put if off for months at a time. Now I am more sympathetic of folks who mix their projects for years.

It can never be right. There are already things I wish I could still change but I have to accept it as is and take my experience on to the next project and make that one better. When I hit that send button I grew as a person. I’m not sure I can explain it very well, but I feel as though the guy who I was before I hit that big scary send button is, to some small extent, no longer who I am.

To add to my nervousness with delays in the proofing process my CDs may not arrive in time for my first gig; a gig at a record store that requires you have CDs to sell.

Lets all keep our fingers and toes crossed.

Meanwhile I return you to your regularly scheduled blog…

When I was seven, my family took our first trip to Boston to see my Aunt, and Uncle and cousins. On our way home, driving down the then two-lane State Route 2 in our 1966 Dodge station wagon, we saw the same hitchhiker, not once, but three times Between Boston and Williamstown Mass. The third time we saw him my dad decided it was ok to pick him up and we did.

Close to what our car looked like

It was 1972, a different world.

“I can see Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash was playing on the radio.”

The hitchhiker was a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic in Troy, New York. He was a really nice guy as I remember. He sat with my brother and I in the back seat. We shared a box Bugles with him, pretending they were little trumpets before gobbling each one up. It was raining; just hard enough that the windshield wipers kept a steady rhythm along with the music. We took him right to the house he was renting with a bunch of other guys.

I wondered what it would be like when I went to college.

“I can see clearly now the rain is gone

I can see all obstacles in my way

Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind

It’s gonna to be a bright, bright, sun-shiny day…”

The irony that it was raining was completely lost on a seven-year-old.

 “I think I can make it now the pain is gone

All of the bad feelings have disappeared

Here is the rainbow I’ve been praying for

It’s gonna to be a bright, bright, sun-shiny day…”

Even though the song was on the radio for all of two minutes and forty-two seconds, of the half hour or so our hitchhiker friend was with us, in my memory, that song as playing the entire time.

After we dropped the hitchhiker off, we ate lunch at a small diner in Troy. It was the kind that had juke box stations at every table, though they all controlled one big juke box that everyone shared and that played to the whole room. I asked my Dad to have it play the song we had heard in the car. He flipped the little pages and found it. What was likely just a dime or a nickel later, my song was in the cue to play. Later I asked my Dad what happened, why it never played. He told me it already had. I missed it entirely. I was devastated. I guess I was busy being ADD and seven. I asked if we could play it again but I already knew the answer.

Perhaps the diner where we ate.

 I remember we parked next to a brick building

like the one on the left

To this day, every time I hear that song I remember that day vividly.

“Look all around there’s nothing but blue skies

Look straight ahead there nothing blue skies…”

Road music is powerful. It can be at least. Even though it’s the play button we’re hitting on the iPod, the red record light of our memory is lit extra bright when the right music is playing.

That means we can’t just hit ‘shuffle’ and take what we get. Let’s be a little proactive, let’s build our playlists for our upcoming cross-country journey; lay the foundation for some good memories.

Audra and I are both programming music for the trip. I don’t know what she’s got going and she hasn’t seen my playlists either. I’m sure we’ve doubled up on a bunch of tunes but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it…

Get it? ‘Bridge’? C’mon, ya know, because in music after the second chorus… oh, never mind.

By-the-way, James Brown will definitely be ‘taking us to the bridge’ on several occasions during the trip. Funk travels well.

For my method of creating the perfect road ‘mix’ so far I have gone through my iTunes and selected every tune I think might work in one situation or another and put it into a ‘buffer’ playlist called “Road Maybes”

My selection method at this first stage is simple; I listen to a segment of a tune and try to imagine going down the road listening to it. Does it work on the road? Does this music steer me forward or off into a ditch?

A road tune should have forward momentum and a sense of imagination.

Don’t mistake forward momentum for a fast tempo though the music should have more the feel of the white lines going by than the pistons in the engine. Even the most ethereal  music like Jim Schreck’s “Atmospheres” can have powerful momentum. “Red House”, by Jimi Hendrix, has more forward momentum than just about any other Hendrix tune and it’s nearly the slowest thing he played. Tunes like the up-tempo “Scuttlebuttn” by Stevie Ray Vaughn, and “Sugar Foot Rag” though I love ‘em, feel more like a demolition derby than open highway to me.

We’re trying to avoid those.

“Broke Down South of Dallas” and “Highway Patrol” by Junior Brown are both banned for strictly karmic reasons.

Junior Brown and his stand-mounted 

combination Telecaster/lap steel guitar

The aesthetics of the tune also comes into play. It should match the landscape to a degree. We’ll be passing through Texas, Oklahoma and Arkanas so I have selected a bunch of old and even some not so old country tunes. I’ve got blues too, going all the way back to Robert Johnson recordings made in the 1920s.

Old rhythm and blues and doo wop can turn any cold four-laned interstate into Route 66. No, we won't be playing the song "Route 66" by-the-way. We won't be on it and it's kind of a cliche' anyway.

Progressive rock and jazz, as much as I love them don’t always work as well on the road as I wish they did. Polyrhythms sound a tad too much engine trouble at sixty-five miles an hour and the urban sounds of jazz can seem out of place on the prairie. There exceptions of course: we will be taking some “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane, taking it “Frame by Frame” with King Crimson and of course playing “Road Games” with Alan Holdsworth.

Some tunes I selected for the reason we most often do: simply because I dig them. There are other songs I selected that I had never even heard before that sounded like good road music.

Do you have music in your iTunes, like I do, that you have no idea how it even got there?

I also want to take along my friends on this journey. I have a  lot of music made my friends of mine. They will all be coming along for the ride and playing one or more of their songs for us.

Classical is another tough sell on the road. I’m sure Audra’s lists include some Rachmaninov and Gershwin though. ‘DJ Audee’, as I call her, can somehow make anything work!

I really have no idea what kind of music to have ready for the inevitable being stuck in summer construction traffic. Death Metal might make me more likely to kill, country may make me more likely to kill myself. I'm thinking Micheal Hedges.

After I have all my potential music corralled off in the master playlist, I will take those four hundred some songs and divide them into separate playlists for different times of day and environments: Desert day, desert night, plains day, rain...

I asked Audra about her process of selecting tunes. She said her methods are more intuitive and based on the emotional content of the song. She also plans to have playlists for day and night, and customized for different terrains.

Though I mentioned being proactive and programming playlists, I didn’t mean by that, that we are structuring every minute, far from it.

Both Audra and I are planning to let the moment take us where it will. We may have selected a playlist and even arranged an order of songs but we will be making use of ‘shuffle’ (the iPod random play function) within those playlists as well as manually selecting what the moment calls for.

This is where “DJ Audee” is a master. I may be doing much of the steering of the car, but she will be steering our journey.

I haven’t selected any “Journey”. Don’t know why, just didn’t.

Silence, the sound of the highway itself, as I mention before in a previous blog, is important too. It won’t be coast-to-coast music on our trip, we'll drive for stretches with nothing playing at all until the road has said it's peace.

I didn’t purchase any extra songs for our road trip. I knew I could do plenty with the six thousand I have in my iPod not to mention what Audra has.

There was one exception though; one song I didn’t have that was an absolute must:

“I can see clearly now the rain is gone

I can see all obstacles in my way

Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind

It’s gonna to be a bright, bright, sun-shiny day”

What road tunes do you love? Got any recommendations?

Coast to Coast

In three weeks, for the purpose of my parent’s Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary and to play a few gigs, Audra and I will be getting in our trusty rental car and heading East until we are in the land of white hots and lilacs; of digital lakes, rolling wine country and the best supermarket chain on the planet: Canandaigua, New York.

Drive?

Are we insane?

Okay, that was a trick question, but in any case, there are reasons we are driving cross-country instead of flying. Because of said gigs in the Rochester/Canandaigua area, I need to bring along some gear that I couldn’t get on a flight.

Alas, like all reasons there’s a good one and there’s the ‘real’ one…

ROAD TRIP!

This will not be my first trek from one coast to the other without leaving the ground, not counting my time on the road as a musician, this will be number sixteen.

When I took my, then future, bride back home to see serious snow for the first time in her life we missed our first flight home due to an illness. A couple days later on our next flight there were problems with the flight and at one point we looked at each other and said, screw it; let’s rent a car and take a few days and just drive home.

We ended up with a convertible—real handy in January—and gave our relatively new relationship the acid test of spending three days in a car together.

We only had one fight. Can I help it if Easterners are naturally superior?

Since then we’ve made the whole round trip two more times together, once more by car and once by train. The first time together was a challenging but magical trip that I will never forget. I still carry part of my love for my wife that was born on that journey.

I’ve made the journey by myself a number of times which is something I think everyone should experience at least once.

It’s been a long time since Audra and I had a serious road trip. We’ve developed a serious 'jones' to hit the highway for a long time now. We even made an attempt at a mini-road trip earlier this year but it was thwarted by something or another.

I won’t kid you, driving twenty-six hundred miles over three or four days is no picnic, but if you do it right… no, if you look at it right, it can be a lot of fun.

There are the ingredients for a good road trip as I see it. A reliable mode of transit and a wad of cash can be handy but no, these are not the essentials. I’ve done it more than once without either.

A Playlist (what used to be mix tapes)
With one exception listed below, stay away the radio. It’s nearly as much fun to sit fun and program the soundtrack to your adventure as it is to cruise along listening to it. It’s a serious endeavor that deserves much consideration. If you have no time to make your own, maybe you can get someone to make some CDs for you. It helps if they have a crush on you.

Diners
Eat at least one real diner. You know what I’m talking about, where the waitress calls you ‘hun’. And there are at least two calendars on the wall from local hardware or feed supply stores and a picture of the little league team they sponsor. Because of our budget we are limiting our eating out to once a day but I guarantee you, one of those meals will be at an authentic American diner. By-the-way if you find one of those stylized idyllic diners with the chrome and neon keep going, it's not a real diner but a hipster stronghold in disguise. Chances are, a real diner won't even say "Diner" on the sign.

And no I will not apologize for using the term waitress, we’re not at frickin; Denny’s, she’s not wearing any ‘flare’. It’s a diner, diners have “waitresses”.

Silence
There’s one song you can’t forget to put on your play list: “the road”. Allow yourself to hear the music of travel for some good stretches. Drive with the windows open, just for a little while if it’s not too hot or cold.

No Hotel Reservations
Drive till you’re tired and uncover the mystery of what town you’ll sleep in tonight. Technology makes this a lot easier these days and national hotel franchises make it less iffy. Having the pressure of mileage or distance goals each day kills the spirit of road travel.

Blue Highways
Take a ‘blue highway’ as author William Least Heat Moon calls them. If I had the time (it would take a week or more) I would travel from coast to coast using only two-lane county and state routes. In the real world we’ll probably only be able to spend part of a day on a non-interstate route but we’ll do it.

 A photo Audra took during a cross-country road trip we took in 2003. To be honest, this is Interstate 15 between Las Vegas and Arizona. Great image though huh?

Country Music
Tune in to a country radio station. You don’t like country you say? Hate it even? Trust me; when you’re on the highway, especially AM late at night, a good station playing oldies country is part of sound track to your movie right now. Don’t worry no one will ever know.

Don’t listen to syndicated or network talk radio while traveling… EVER!

A Map
You’ll need a map; not for finding your way but for finding your way back when getting yourself deliberately lost on the state route I mentioned above. I’m not talking about GPS either. Both of our phones have that capability, but you’re not really traveling if you don’t have a good Rand McNally US highway atlas you can spread out on the hood of you car at a rest stop or dusty diner parking lot.

Expect the Unexpected
Travel has its trying moments; breakdowns, road construction, finding yourself deep in gangland Tulsa after taking that wrong exit. Take it all in stride as part of the adventure. If nothing bad happens at all, what stories will you have to tell? You might as well have taken a flight so you could complain about how there are not enough peanuts in the bag and how your LCD screen would flicker sometimes during the movie.

Company
Take someone to share it with. Just like everyone should travel alone once for the Zen of it, one should also go coast to with a friend for the fellowship of it. Even though it might get kind of crowded in the car with Audra and I, I would like to take you along as well by way of this blog and plenty of pictures. I will update the blog daily while we’re on the road.

Our departure date is August 11th.

Short and Sweet

This will be a mercifully short blog as I am busy getting my CD mixed and ready for manufacturing. In fact I nearly forgot about it altogether. I am committed to posting a blog every Saturday so... insert the mail carriers' oath here, and possibly a couple of sports motivation cliche's.

This morning I got up at 4AM and drove the dark nearly deserted streets of LA to Tennis Channel. I worked today but my call time was 11AM. Last night I set up my studio in the voice-over (V.O.) booth so that I could stubble in at Oh-dark-thirty and begin tracking the last few songs that need vocals.

The V.O. booth where I work.\

Yes, I got permission to use it.

The ladder was so I could cover a noisy AC vent.

One song in particular, "Rice Crispies and Gin"--the creepiest song I have ever written and yet everyone seems to dig it--needs the sound of a rough and gravely voice. The early hour did not disappoint and by the time I was ready to record the other pieces my voice had warmed up and smoothed out to suite the not-so-scary songs.

Now I'm doing some mixing and going through my many vocal takes to pick the best takes phrase-by-phrase. It's tedious work that has me nodding off a bit but it's necessary to do all I can to compete with professionally produced and funded recordings created in a real studio.

Only a very few years ago my project would not have been possible. Now, as you can see from the picture above, my ordinary laptop--and I'm here to tell ya, it's nothing special--with some special software (about $1000 total) and a simple USB sound recording interface ($400), can not only I record and produce everything I need, I can edit and manipulate the audio in ways that no studio in the World could accomplish twenty-five years ago.

The song being worked on here is "The Barn". I recorded ninety percent of it at my parents house during a Christmas visit. I borrowed a bass from my good friend Jim and used whatever my parents had lying around: a meditation bell, a frame drum and a Native American flute.

The portability of the laptop means I can easily migrate my 'studio' from my apartment to, my in-laws pool house to the V.O. booth I am sitting in right now. I have posted pictures in the past me schlepping large heaps of gear but a large portion of that is instruments and amplifiers (and laundry we take to Audra's folks to save on quarters ).

The studio itself consists of, the laptop, a small carry-on bag with mics, cables and accessories and a small rack case along with a couple mic stands.

With some postponed sleep and some luck I will have this recording off to be 'pressed' in a couple of days, but not if I don't wrap this blog up and get-a-move-on!

Then I return to rehearsing for the shows I will be playing in Rochester and possibly Canandiagua, NY!

Master of My Destiny (take two)

The dream of having a record of my own began the day I brought home the school owned upright bass for the first time when I was in 6^th grade. I remember designing my first album cover in my head: A blank background with a picture of me leaning my back against side the acoustic bass so that the instrument and I formed a sort-of “X” complete with my head turned to the camera with an all-to-serious expression. I think I even practiced posing for it.  

I’ve never told a soul about that until just now. In junior high and high school I used to sketch album covers for a fictional stadium rock band my friend Dave and I called “Arcaz”. Their live album was called “Backstage Gossip.”  

Bitchin!  

Through the socially painful high school years the thought of being on a record, of seeing my name in the credits and hearing my music come through the speakers, got me through a lot of tough times.

On the albums I have played on I often felt frustration of not being able to take my own direction follow my own instincts in both music and recording, like any self respecting control freak.

I majored in audio recording in college, not so I could get a job as a recording engineer (in reality, a babysitter of large fragile egos) but so I would be better armed with knowledge when recording my own music.

Now I am finally getting frightfully close to finishing my album which I have recorded entirely myself. The only problem with being in total control however, is being in total control. Releasing my project to the world means letting go, losing control.

It will be well worth it! Yesterday, I finished work on the CD artwork. I can’t stop looking at it. Even as I write this, I keep flipping over to the Illustrator window where the front and back cover artwork are open.

I’m not all impressed with myself; it’s just that looking at it makes this all a bit more real for me, not just some shadow I keep chasing; that dream that began thirty-some years ago.

I can just imagine opening one of the boxes taking one out and holding it in my hand. All my work and creative juices realized in one little disc with my name silkscreened on.

No, I’m not going to post a picture of the artwork, you’ll just have to wait for the CD to come out.

On the music end of things there’s a bit more work to be done. Final vocal performances  for more than half the tunes are complete and one or two tunes need some more instrumental tracking. After some clean-up editing, it won’t take long to complete the mixes which have been in progress since I began.

The final step before delivering my master to the manufacturer will be mastering.

Mastering is a voodoo art form that few people understand really well (myself included). Mastering used to be the act of an engineer operating a lathe that literally cuts the grooves onto a lacquer disc that is ultimately creates a die for pressing vinyl records. The mastering engineer would also make adjustments to the audio to accommodate the physical restrictions of the lathe and lacquer disc. 

A mastering lathe

These days it is more about the format of files and running the music through one final layer of processing to make it sound like and match, for lack of a better term, ‘music on the radio’. It is as critical a step as it ever was, perhaps more.

Mastering engineer legend and

Eastman School of Music graduate

Bob Ludwig.

Go look at ten of your records of CDs from the seventies and eighties, Bob’s name will be on three or more of them. Go on, I dare ya!

It’s time to introduce the villains in this story: time and money.

Those basterly dasterds!

My own procrastination has at least been an accomplice in the theft of time spent working on the album. In the past six months especially, I made little progress the recording and mixing. I have been thinking about it and rehearsing the songs constantly though. I have to believe that some of that delay and deep thought has allowed the songs, arrangements and my vocal performance to develop naturally. Many details of the songs have changed in that time and have made them better songs and arrangements.

To keep this from becoming one of those perpetually developing projects that eventually rots on the vine, it’s time to call the ball and move forward. I’ll beat myself up over time wasted when I have the time to.

In exactly one month’s time My wife and I are embarking on a cross-country road journey home to Upstate New York for my parent’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. While I’m in town I will be playing at least one gig sharing the bill with some friends of mine and possibly a couple more (I’ll give details upon confirmation). It is imperative that I have some product in hand to sell. This is just the real world deadline I need to push this project out the door and into the um... real world.

Scary!

The turn-around time for manufacturing (without paying extra) is twelve days plus approval time of proofs, so I will have to have a master to them in a little over a week at the latest. I am having the discs shipped to my parents’ which will save me a few days.

Villain #2: Money. With the expenses of the upcoming trip, I barely have enough to cover the manufacturing. I am having only three hundred discs made this run which is the bare minimum. I can make more at a later time financed by sales of the first run.

Don’t you just love the word “parlay”?

At this point, having the recording professionally mastered, as I have so taughted, has its problems. First of all, the music on my album is too widely varying from some in-your-face rock, to blues, to a blue grass-ish tune, for a cheap set-it-and-forget-it mastering job, the only kind I believe my small budget will bare right now. Also, the turn-around time of a mastering job would probably put me beyond my deadline.

Digital mastering tools—and yes, I am rationalizing here—are a great deal better and more accessible than they used to be and I know more or less what needs to be done for each tune. If I use my audio knowledge and common sense, take my time, stick to practiced audio principles and use the very nice audio monitors where I work, I’m confident can do a pretty fair job of mastering.

It’s unlikely that most folks who buy a disc from this run will even know the difference and be any the wiser…

Um… except you.

Not all that long ago it was inconceivable that someone could record an album in their home using a fold out portable device, software, an digital recording interface, and a few microphones that all together cost roughly a month’s pay. 

My studio in a few of the locations I’ve recorded my album from

 including a hotel bathroom in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Not shown is my parents’ basement in Canandaigua, New York.

I had no mic stand with me so I simply hung my microphone from a nail in the ceiling.

There is a quiet outcry about the ‘dumbing down’ of audio quality, and rightly so. MP3s, Youtube, ear buds, and laptop speakers have all conspired to bring the general audio fidelity of our everyday lives to a theoretical point somewhere in the sixties.

Kind of like the space program.

But at that same point in the sixties, it would take several months pay to go around the tightly guarded gates of the recording industry by going into a studio to make your own reasonable quality demo over a weekend and hope your best performance occurred while the clock was ticking.

Forget about world-wide distribution and the self promotional capabilities of the Internet.

I hope audio fidelity ‘smarts up’ again one day, but until that time I’ll take the jaw-dropping possibilities and freedom of what’s happening right now.

I have little doubt that you’ll be pleased, even impressed with both the music and the quality of the recording. As I mentioned, I studied audio recording in college and have made a careful study of modern recording techniques both through the Internet and audio professionals I know. You’d never have guessed I created it all on my no-frills PC laptop—lyrics, music, recording and graphics. I even used it to create and print sheet music for the string session.

The string session I recorded in my living room

Okay, so let’s compromise on the mastering for now: When a higher-end mastering job is a real option on the second run of discs, I can offer free downloads of the entire mastered version of the disk plus extras to those who supported me by buying a disc on the first run.

Thanks in advance for that by-the-way! 

I have added a username and password on the back cover for the first run disc for accessing those downloads.

There, I feel much better now. How about you?

How My Brief Film Career led to my Southern Belle

That’s right suckas, I have my own IMDB entry.  Weed it and reap!

Forget that I had to enter my own listing on half of those credits, including my only composer credit.

Forget that only two of the projects listed had any sort of commercial release and never in theaters.

It ain't much. But it's what I got and it was an experience.

The First Barbecue -what does a key grip do anyhow?

With my level of experience at the time—zero—there was only one way to make myself attractive enough to get any gig in film…

Work for free.

I answered ads for ‘intern’ crew positions on student films at AFI, USC and others. These films were not four or five kids running around with video cam-corders, they were master’s thesis films with crews of up to forty people, grip and lighting trucks, generators, and catered meals.

I started out as an electrician/grip. I learned something new every minute. I gained a reputation for learning fast, working extremely hard and most importantly in film, not being an asshole. As a result I was working as a best boy electric by my second film (a sort-of assistant manager of lighting).

On my fourth film, a rather large scale student film that was set in Auschwitz, I was asked to ‘best boy grip’. The key grip backed out at the last minute due to a paying gig so I was field promoted to key grip.

It was a stressful learn-as-you-go trial-by-fire experience. Many people wonder what the heck a “key grip” does exactly. During that shoot, though I was careful not to show it too much, I was one of those people.

“Key grip” is just a way of saying the chief grip. What the grip department does is in the simplest of terms is rigging of any lighting not on a stand, shading and treatment of light, (which is far more involved that you would ever think). They also lay track for, and operate the camera dolly (sometimes a sub department).

The key grip is also the production’s safety officer.

One memory I have from that film is that they were short on extras during a gas chamber scene. Even though it was around fifty degrees some of the crew doubled as extras, including the clapper/loader (the guy that claps the sign with the hinge when they say “take one” “clack”). They wore only a single flesh colored nylon sock, and not on their feet.

On that final day of filming we all endured a twenty-three hour, windy, rainy marathon that made me seriously reconsider pursuing film, on any level, as a career.

Fort MacArthur where we filmed

That’s What Insurance is For

I have had my share of killing film gear; even a truck!

Only an hour into my first day on my first film a Mole Mini (light) fell off the top of a cart I was loading onto a truck. I could hear the glass break.

Once, on top of an eighteen foot high parallel (platform) another electrician and I were changing the globe (bulb) in a six thousand watt HMI light. We had failed to notice the retaining clip on the $2,500 stipple lens was open. When we turned the light over the fourteen inch lens rolled out of the light, off the platform and smashed into a million pieces right in front of where the entire crew was eating dinner.

 A 6K HMI

A gaffer and myself were changing lenses on the same sort of 6K light. It had a Chimera (a nylon ‘tent’ that creates soft light) mounted to it. The lens must have been blocking a lot of heat because as soon as he removed it the Chimera quickly melted into a pile of liquid plastic.

 

A couple Chimeras

After a long day’s shooting, I was driving a truck with a generator in-tow back to its overnight parking At CBS Radford Studios. At a light, a driver pulled along side and told me that I was dragging something and making sparks. The door on one of the ‘jockey boxes’ (storage bins mounted below the main truck ‘box’) it had not been properly latched and had swung down to drag on the pavement.

The door was badly damaged enough that it would no longer close, let alone latch. The particular box that had swung open contained a lot of thick power cable. I pulled out loops from the bottoms the piles of cable hooked them around the corners of the door which held it up till I got to my parking spot at CBS.

I felt bad about the damage to the truck until the next day when another driver got lost on the way to the Malibu beach and drove that same fourteen foot high truck under a thirteen foot bridge, peeling the top off the truck like a can of sardines.

We thought the producer would flip out. She might have had it not been for the thousand other little--and not so little--things that had gone wrong during the shoot. Her skin had grown a little thicker each day. She took a look at the now convertible truck, smiled and said. “Oh well, that’s what the insurance is for.”

The Taiwanese Coffee Commercial –Second worst catered meal ever.

I would like to go to Las Vegas as a tourist one day. Of the dozen or-so times I have been there, it’s always been working.

One such time was shooting a commercial for a Taiwanese “American style” coffee commercial. The product was very sweet, very strong creamed coffee in a small soft drink can printed to look like denim.

We shot a series of American clichés which was an amusing illustration on how the Taiwanese view life in the US: a girl hitchhiking with a guitar on a desert highway, a bunch of bikers on Harley’s, an eighteen wheeler with flames painted on the engine cowling, city lights of Las Vegas, desert sunsets with young beautiful Asian people partying hearty—in the form of drinking little cans of sweetened coffee.

The star of this commercial was a miniscule pop star who was apparently quite a big deal in Taiwan. She had a small entourage that included a videographer that seemed to film every second of her day from her morning poop to her drooling and snoring at night. I suspect she learned English from watching a lot of MTV as her vocabulary was limited to the same seven or eight words spoken on that network.

She seemed nice enough though. While she was sitting on a motorcycle behind a camera car I would use of a flag (a frame with black cloth stretched over it) to shade her from the sun between the takes. When we were done she patted me on the shoulder and said “Yuh suh kuhl” (you’re so cool).

The production team from Taiwan were not accustomed to shooting in the US. Though better than the just coffee and cigarettes they put out to keep their crews going for hours at a time in Taiwan, their craft service, if it could be called that, left much to be desired. The drinking water they provided us with were those tiny little 8oz. bottles and there was never enough of them.

Did I mention we were in the desert?

For meals they purchased sandwiches at a local diner, got twice as many containers as there were meals, then divided up the meals into twos. Everyone got half a rather dry chicken sandwich and a tablespoon of coleslaw

The very worst catered meal I’ve ever been presented with was on a TV game show pilot called “Model Behavior” (about models, get it?). In a Styrofoam take-out container made several hours prior in some Mexican lady’s kitchen down the street, was a tiny unflavored chicken breast, a large mound of unflavored white rice on which sat one, I kid you not, one oven bake French fry.

Mississippi’s Burning –but it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity

Working on student projects was fun. After I worked on a few professional projects, commercials etc… the difference in atmosphere was palpable. As soon as there was money on the table, it was in someone’s best interest if the other guy looked bad.

I had a general bad taste in my mouth whenever I worked and was beginning to dread it.

When I agreed to go to Mississippi to work on a film in August it was a favor for a friend and for the adventure.

I’m here to tell you: Mississippi in August is something to be avoided even if you plan on just sitting around sippin’ mint julep, let alone the very physical and dirty working on a film.

I felt clean dry and comfortable for about thirty seconds every day when I left my bungalow hotel room freshly showered. When I stepped into the ninety degree, one hundred percent humidity, I instantly felt as though I’d run the hundred yard dash.

Imagine, if you will, what might happen if you were to take a twelve foot by twelve foot white cloth stretched in a frame on a small hill, in the middle of a cotton field in Mississippi, in the middle of the night in the middle of the summer and light that white cloth up with ten thousand watts of light.

Bugs came from miles away, I am certain of it; bugs so big they show up on radar; crazy looking prehistoric bugs that I’ve never seen the like of before or since. It was like a scene in an Indiana Jones movie, the kind designed to make women bury their heads in the chests and arms of their dates.

The 10K was beginning to smoke from being turned into a industrial strength bug zapper. This entomological orgy was swarming around the light and the white cloth like lobbyists around a senator.

"Oh, and by the way, we need you to get up on a ladder and drop a single (a screen that makes the light less bright) in that 10K."

A Mole 10K fresnel

Halfway up the ladder, I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I could feel insects bouncing off me like there was a hale storm of living projectiles. I felt my way around the big light trying not to burn myself. At that point a burn itself was not my main concern, rather the gasp of bug filled air I might take and shortly choke to death on.

The next day the entire porch where the light had been was crunchy to walk on.

The locals working on the crew were great entertainment as all newbies are.

An apple box is a ubiquitous tool in film that gets used for anything from supporting dolly track to having a short actor stand on to match height with his leading lady. Tom Cruise has spent the better part of his career standing on ‘apples’. Apples come in different sizes from a ‘full’ at eight inches high, to an “1/8th apple” or “pancake” (basically a one inch thick piece of plywood) and several sizes in between.

Various sized apple boxes

I was working on something up on a hill while most of the crew was filming at a share cropper’s shack down the hill in the middle of the cotton fields. We heard over the radio the key grip ask for a ‘half apple’. Soon after that, a local kid came running up the hill and asked us where the craft table was located. We pointed to the porch of the plantation house and he disappeared. He reemerged moments later and ran back down the hill with a granny smith apple he had carefully sliced in half with a knife.

We probably should have stopped him but why should we be the only ones to get a good laugh.

Near the end of the shoot, I was exhausted, sunburned and getting a little miffed at some of the New York-based crew that always seemed to give me the crappiest work to do.

Just two more days, just two more days.

In Mississippi it doesn’t seem to get any cooler at night and certainly no less humid, especially in the swamp where we were shooting. The best boy was a local guy that owned the lighting truck and said "tell you whut" a lot. He was carrying a light on a stand out into the dark swamp a ways from the rest of the crew. I was following behind him with a C-stand, sand bag and a flag. We were walking through leafy knee-high plants that carpeted the swamp floor. I wasn’t sure if I was glad or not that I couldn’t see the ground and what was crawling on it.

C-stands with various grip equipment

When the local guy switched on his light, he looked down and casually noted: “yup... snake.”

It was at that moment, while trying not to run and squeal like a little girl, I decided my film career was officially over.

The next morning a few of the crew were waiting for our van to take us to the cotton plantation an hour away. It was all indoor shooting that day, thank God! One of the guys said he had found a stray calico kitten. It was running around and was hard to catch. I asked the guy if he was going to keep it. “No way,” he said.

No one else was interested.

I was faced with a dilemma. If I adopted this stray kitten what would I do with her all day while I was working on the film?

But what if I didn’t?

If I took this kitten home, where I already had two cats, how would I get her there?

But what if I didn’t?

The van pulled up. I had to make my decision. I snatched up the kitten and took her to work with me. I could always leave her where we found her at the end of the day if I decided I couldn’t take her home. She squirmed around a lot during the drive but finally went to sleep in my arms about a half hour into the trip.

The more immediate concern was what I was to going to do with this tiny fur ball for the rest of the day while I was working. At first, I put her in the basement of the plantation house where she readily hid under a pile of boards.

Perfect! “Behave, I’ll check back when I can.”

An hour or so later I had a chance to visit my new friend with a bowl of water. I wondered if I had made a mistake. If she was hard to catch before how was I going to get her out of this cluttered basement?

I called out, “Baby kitten!”

She came running from somewhere in the darkness, affectionate and overjoyed to see me. I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it, but she was definitely coming home with me.

Still I needed a better plan for how to take care of this tiny kitten though this long day of shooting. When I learned that Whitney, a young cat-loving actress in the film, was working that day I knew my troubles were over.

“Oh Whitney,” I said with one fur filled hand behind my back. Guess what I have?

She was very happy to play with my kitten for the rest of the day. The hair and makeup people helped out when Whitney was on the set and even the local craft service lady went into town to buy kitten chow.

I didn’t have to think too hard about a name. Whitney was playing the part of “Young Delilah”

My Southern Belle/Little Redneck Delilah

Nine years later, save for a deleted Jeopardy scene in “The Bucket List”, I haven’t worked a day in film but Delilah is still my “baby kitten”.