Sunday, March 1, 2009 A Dirty Little Secret...
We've said from the beginning that Music Fog is all about full disclosure, no matter how creepy and painful it may be. That said, it's time that we (Ben & Beans) publicly confess something to Jessie Scott. But before we dive into that, we should give you a little background on who we are. At the end of the day, Beans and I are both "pressure producers" at heart; used to being under immense pressure in field broadcast settings (as you can see from how horrible we both look in this photo from Bonnaroo a few years ago). And sometimes--when the shit is really hitting the fan--it's best to keep your "talent" (in this case, Jessie Scott) in the dark so they don't get needlessly sidetracked from their job. Not everybody needs to know how the sausage is made...it just ain't that pretty.
Anyway, we had just rolled into Memphis for the start of Folk Alliance. Gear was unpacked and loaded onto the Celebrity Coach. One particular piece of fragile and expensive gear was new to the Music Fog crew: our Panasonic video camera. We had shot a bunch of "B-Roll" earlier in the day and were attempting to offload the footage into our Mac. Suddenly, Beans got it in his head that he had to stand up, kick the cord, and knock the camera onto the tiled floor of the bus. BANG!!! The LCD viewfinder snapped clean off. We hadn't even filmed a single artist performance and the camera was already trashed...
Beans was crushed: "What the hell are we going to do now?!" Not wanting to immediately freak Jessie out, I rushed the broken camera back to one of the empty bunks and began piecing it back together with a plastic knife and a cork screw. 30 minutes later we had a functioning camera again. But the viewfinder was still hanging on by a thread. Beans didn't sleep that night...seriously.
The next four days of filming were tense, as we had to secretly reattach the LCD display after almost every shoot. We succeeded in our goal though, because Jessie remained blissfully in the dark and was able to focus on her already-stressful job, and the artists were able to focus on their insanely-wonderful music.
The camera has since been fixed with proper parts and tools, so this seems like the perfect time to come clean. Again, sausage-makin' ain't pretty.
Jessie, please accept this humble/public admission of guilt...
Your Boys,
-Ben & Beans
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