Barstool Blues
DELETED SCENES:
Cold Open (deleted scene):
Text: In hindsight I probably made the text in this video too small (then i wrote “so i guess sometimes hindsight is more like 80/20.” But just now I googled 80/20 vision to make sure and was surprised to learn that 80/20 is actually super-perfect sight, which is the opposite of what I was trying to say.)
The text you see in the clip is an 11/12 point mix of courier and courier new, when in hindsight, it should have been more like 20/21. The y are an excerpt from the press release on Josh’s near drowning in 2006. I tried to make the text mimic the bass line in the music:
I tuned the 6th string on my electric guitar way down, so it was the tonal equivalent of a bass, and began playing 4 descending notes on the 6th string, if I remember correctly, from the 10th fret down to the 7th fret, then tapped my guitar looping pedal so that riff would keep playing, and played the same notes in reverse, the 7th fret going up to the 10th, on top of the first bass line.
So one bass line ascends while the other descends, they cross paths mid phrase, but never actually meet at the same fret (i.e. 10-7, 9-8, 8-9,7-10). It gives the impression of movement, but not up or down, which is why it sounds so creepy.
With those two bass lines playing, I improvised those licks, in whatever key I determined the song to be in at the time, which was months before shooting Barstool Blues. After I recorded the loop into my computer, I saved it as “A Drunken Drowning,” but I didn’t know what I would ever use it for. From start to finish the whole song was done in less than 5 minutes. I wish it was always that easy.
Catch in Reverse (deleted scene):
There was a point when I wanted this video to move along very slowly, like an episode of the British Office. But it morphed into more of a fast-paced music video, for better or worse. As that began to happen, there was a red blinking arrow, shining brighter and brighter, pointing at this scene. Though I liked how it complements the scene that follows (where we were talking about the NFL commercials’ camera tricks), it just slowed things down too much and subsequently it takes too long to get to the boat.
A “Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” means somethings gonna happen (deleted scene)
This is how we were originally going to get to the bar. The Dylan songs you hear playing on my iPhone and later the TLC song in the bar, ended up commenting nicely on the video. But I thought all the shots were too shaky and blair witchy, and found another way to get to the bar..
BELOW IS A MENU FROM SPANKY’S
where we had breakfast the morning of August 22nd. We actually sat next to Josh’s Grandfather in the diner (who has a cameo at 3:40 into the movie) but we didn’t know it until I went back to the restaurant to retrieve my forgotten wallet. There was George Anns, Sr. sitting at the table right next to where we had been seated. George had remembered me from the year before, we chatted briefly, and then I grabbed this menu to cover my head in the pouring rain.
PRE-TRIP EMAIL BANTER
BELOW ARE DRAWINGS
from last year’s trip to Wallenpaupack, from my 2008 “Aw, Gus” Album on Facebook. I had just bought Neil Young’s Heart of Gold DVD in August and was watching it on the way down. What I see from looking at these sketches are the seeds of the shots and sounds of the Barstool Blues video. Though I didn’t realize it until now, they turned out to be a storyboard a year in advance…it’s amazing how things come back around.
