Making a music documentary is an insane undertaking. INSANE. My dad approached me 8 years ago and said “We are making a documentary”. He didn’t ask, he just excitedly informed me of what we would be doing. Well, here we are still making a music documentary. We’ve done 3 or 4 edits only to find you need to do 3 or 4 more interviews and that should be enough, right? We have two more interviews we are lining up and this thing is being bagged. Maybe.
And I can’t wait to share it with music enthusiasts and especially my fellow nerdy musicians who remember meeting your buddies on the sewer (IYKYK) to stumble through classic rock songs or maybe summer days riding in the car while your parents turned up all the classics from the 1970s and 1980s. You music lovers will love it too.
As a kid, I laid on the floor staring at the meter bounce up and down with a speaker on each side of my head. I set the volume low enough not to wake anyone in the house. I knew I would be a full-time musician one day. There was no other option or Plan B.
I thought I failed in life when I didn’t end up living most of my days on a tour bus and/or long nights in the studio.
I vividly remember the day my dream job working at a record label ended in 2008 due to the recession. Back to retail jobs and scrambling to figure out how to do something I love. It wasn’t long before I picked up a camera and started snapping away. I fell in love immediately and worked my ass off day after day to be the best shooter I could be.
As my career grew, I attended a few photojournalism seminars and everyone started saying “if you want to make it in this business, flip that camera to video mode. You are all multimedia professionals now.”
Once I flipped that camera into video mode, everything changed. My love of audio production, art, people, music, photography, story telling, could all live and exist in this one medium. It all made sense when I showed up to Rodney Mills (Just google him) birthday party. Everything I knew and loved in life intersected when I ran over to him to start recording his story about how he and .38 Special snuck into the studio to use Stillwater guitarists Rob Walker’s voice box for their record.
I was listening to the man who sat behind the board during “Sweet Home Alabama”, tell stories no one has ever heard. This is it. All my experience, my passions, my success and failures make sense.
This past weekend, we drove to Maryville, TN to sit down with the Grammy Award winning band The Kentucky Headhunters. I shot my interviews and then switched that camera back to photo mode and documented away.
Greg Martin of The Kentucky Headhunters sits for an interview in Maryville, Kentucky.
Knoxville based band The Dirty Diciples didn’t disappoint as an opener. I watched as a young enthusiastic guitarist wandered around backstage anxiously awaiting the start of the show. With his guitar in hand, he came back in frustrated cause they pushed the start time 15 minutes. I remember the good nervous energy right before you walk out to perform.
I loved being around that energy again.
Filmmaker(and my dad) interviews Greg Martin from The Kentucky Headhunters.