Clearly, when I became an Unprofessional Music Blogger, I had overlooked the power of video. I was trying to operate in the style of the original Grateful Dead tapers and that had its role, but not-so-much on platforms like Facebook. Or YouTube, if you weren’t producing things to look at.
It was somewhat analogous to the days of trying to operate a little independent iconic record store based on homage to great music when MTV came along and shook the antfarm.
Other people in Byron’s were shooting great video with their phones. I had a forty dollar phone that was unwilling to shoot great video. If the stars were aligned, however, and all the other conditions were just right, I could shoot SOME video and on September 19, 2020, I tried really hard. For the very few who have read read some of creative work I’ve done (we are working on that), I’m pretty sure that September 19 was my charcter Judy Angel Eyes’ birthday and I usually think about that every year. As everyone might recall, 2020 was the year disintegrated by Covid. A local rising star, Clint Riedel was playing at Byron’s after most of a year of silence, with Brad Hoefing, that duo being known as Clint Riedel And The Truth.
I posted some stuff to YouTube, including “Hey There Ma”.
In all, I captured seven songs and a partial:
That Covid thing really did a number on the troubadors. Nearly all of them stopped touring, and most of them stopped booking, throwing 2021 into some chaos. There’s a year-to-year rhythm at Byron’s if you study it and even though I was a newbie, I could tell it was disrupted.
But we all persisted, and after a somewhat lumpy year, things began to return to normal. I worked on my audio-people seemed to like that.
