Groovenator 5000

The Groove & Nothing But The Groove

I finally got off my butt and did another music video, the first one in perhaps four years. As usual, there has been the continued accumulation of raw material; vacation footage, film and photos from public domain archives, and special effects templates. There is rarely a plan to tell a linear story when doing a video; just get layered imagery to accompany the audio. I leave the relationship of the video and audio strictly up to chance most of the time.

There are a lot of new songs to chose from, both the remixes done in 2016 and the new material recorded in 2017. In fact, I need to do about a dozen music videos; it's a way to purge old stuff out of the system, get ready for the next batch, wipe the slate clean. I've always had a love/hate relationship with music videos. They were one of the ingredients, with the birth of MTV, that, IMHO, ruined music, making the visuals more important than the sound. But when done right, they are a form of art.

Naturally, what you consider a well done video will differ wildly from my opinion on the same subject. Years ago, I liked linear narratives, little stories told in three to five minutes. Now, I like semi-abstract images piled on top of each other, forcing the synapses in your brain to overload and find connections that aren't there. Your mileage may vary.

Here's one of the rare music videos that I did that has something like a straight narrative. It was a cover song, and old blues called 'Mother Earth' that I heard from a Memphis Slim record. His version was just solo piano and voice, and it was chilling. I later learned that Eric Burdon & War as well as Gov't Mule had done versions. Not to brag, but I think that mine was more interesting. The video has a linear content, not exactly following the song but telling a parallel tale.

For over twenty five years, video editing was part of my skill set, practiced and perfected over thousands of projects. It's a strange place to put your mind; manipulating graphic space over time. It's a bit like being Dr. Strange. It is also the most pure design element in video production, even more than text overlays. In editing, form must follow function or nothing makes sense. Except in music videos, which can have a couple of different functions; either trying to sell a product or image, reflect on the song, or refract on the sound. I refract.

In film school, the more experienced staff warned me to never do music videos, which were a hot commodity in the late 1980s/early 1990s, and to certainly NEVER put one on my reel since no production company would hire me. It made sense; these places were looking for someone to edit either corporate or news pieces, and the skill set for those has nothing to do with the more self-indulgent music video. I followed the advice and I did get hired, the only one in my graduating class to work in our field. Two decades later, I did one for a friend who was trying to become a musician. Only later did I learn that he had an affair with the actress that he had hired during the shoot, ending his marriage with my unwitting help. I was not impressed.

Editing, as I soon learned, is an odd discipline; it's easy to get lost in the weeds. The longer the finished product, the more complicated things get. In the bad old analog days, there was a lot more off-line work, since there might only be one good editing console with chromakey and dissolves. Engineers were your best friend; if the system went down, they had to get things working again, keeping the signal to noise ratio at a minimum. Paper edits were common, logging all the raw footage and marking the in and out points on a pad and handing it to an editor. It took a lot of time and the equipment was costly.

Computers changed everything, although for ten years it was two-steps-forward-and one-back. Pre-production could be minimized or sometimes eliminated, since you could make infinite variations of the same piece with a few key strokes. It wasn't all fun and games; my first digital editing system was built on a defunct computer platform, the hard drives had life spans of six months and were incredibly expensive. The heat generated by the whole contraption made the entire room unbearable in the summer. Eventually the hard drives improved and now just about any phone or iPad can handle some type of editing.

Anyone who has edited can tell you the universal rules to follow when making cuts; on action or to the beat of music. If you add music to the audio track, or if it is part of the ambience of the video, it dictates the rate of cutting. Physical action, from walking into a door or someone getting punched in the face, will require some network of cuts to be dynamic. The parallel that I have found in my life is in learning to drum.

I did get paid to drum exactly once; I was seventeen. There was a band that was friendly to the one I was in; we shared and traded equipment, being based in the same neighbor. These guys were more drug punks that us, and the drummer got busted and thrown in jail right before they were to play a gig. I was returning some amps when they told me their dilemma, the three remaining guys trying to rehearse. Sitting down being the kit, I banged out a respectable 'Iron Man' and they asked me to fill in. I did it as a favor and for the experience.

In total honesty, the Black Sabbath material was easy; all you had to do was follow the guitar. But when they switched over to Led Zeppelin, all my deficiencies came to the surface. There, the drums were supposed to lead. I was ill-prepared. The gig was a sweaty mess as I badly stumbled in front of fifty people; I received $25 for my efforts, which I donated to the real drummer's bail. And I never soiled a drum stool for another thirty five years.

Much later in 2009, after completing four albums using pre-recorded loops strung together as drum tracks, I found the process of music creation getting easier. But I was frustrated with the inability to take the music where I wanted. The songs had to follow the drums; I was starting to write and arrange pieces where drum loop could not be constructed that were satisfactory. It was time to try drumming again. I was in my fifties and crazy to even attempt this feat.

The first electronic drum kit was little more than a child's toy, and I fumbled along with it for two years before I started to be able to dial up the necessary ingredients to get a decent percussion part. Then there was a better kit with a better bass drum pedal, something that kicked back. A drum head snapping back is what allows for speed. It's all in the wrists and ankles, not arms and legs. When you are playing the drums, the set will play back to you, bouncing in sympathy.

That's when I found the groove, a loose term that means different things to different people. To me, the groove is the spine inside the beat, the repetition that may not be on the beat but provides the propulsion that the song requires. The groove is what makes you want to nod your head or tap your feet. Funk, jazz, rock, and all other genres are subsets of the groove.

It is no accident that the first song that I did a video for out of my 2017 batch of 45 songs was the one with the biggest groove. It makes it easier to edit to the beat, although I'm more concerned with random synchronicity. The song is based on chord progressions that T Bone Walker first played. They were common in certain R & B artists and migrated right into funk. It wasn't too difficult to slide the ninth chords hard up into a pattern where I could lay down a very wide groove on top, and that's exactly what I did.

You can really hear the snap back from the drums heads; it almost sounds like swing more than funk. There is a groove so wide on this one that you can ride it. You can also ride against it, hitting the off beat. If you really want to hear some people who could play with as well as against the beat, check out the J.B.s. It wasn't all on the one. Sometimes they could lay back, playing behind the beat, creating friction that way.

The other group to study for groove is of course Booker T & the MGs. The big difference between bands is that the MGs never seem to break a sweat, The groove is there, but it is a cool vibe, not the sweat-dripping-down-my-spine James Brown funk. From the MGs, you start to see the groove insinuate into white rock groups like Creedence Clearwater Revival. But the heavy funk also found its way into the beat of Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith as well. Fusion, particularly guitar fusion from Jeff Beck, John McLaughlin and Larry Coryell, absolutely depended on a funk pulse, as did electric period Miles Davis.

'Groovenator 5000', the song behind the video above, depends on pushing the one on the aggressive chord change, then laying behind the groove on the long vamp sections. The drums, playing fills behind the changes, mediates the two sections. It sounds like a manual transmission switching gears, finally hitting the open road. In these relatively flat spaces, the instruments are allowed to solo. I keep the brief organ solo to a percussive slab, but the guitar gets into exotic scales outside normal funk or rock, creating extra friction. In fact, the guitar manages to solo in three different scales, using minor and major ones over different chords. In essence, I'm playing the changes as you would in a jazz song.

As for the video, it is a layering of sometimes over a dozen elements on top of each other. Obviously, I'm cutting on the chord turn-around, using action stabs to emphasize the beat. All the techniques are straight out of Surrealism, taking everything out of context and only using the most sensational images. There is a Chinese ghost movie blurred way in the background and a Japanese samurai flick from 1973, when the technicians were among the best in the world.

Louis Bunuel and Salvador Dali did two very famous and controversial movies in 1929 and 1930. They were part of the Surrealist movement and they were designed to create riots in the theaters, cutting up narratives, leaving out all the contextual boring bits, only jumping from extreme moment to extreme moment. The plan worked all too well, and both had to leave Paris for a year while the lawsuits simmered down. Both films are still notorious, especially the first one, 'Un Chien Andalou', with the famous eyeball slicing opening.

I use similar techniques here, instead using decapitations and other over-the-top gore to accentuate the beat. It was difficult to edit and took around eight hours to complete. Besides the fast cuts, many a mere five frames or so, there are also slow dissolves and my usual excess of overlays. I experiment more with masking and picture frames in this one, not my usual method, but it works. There is also for reasons of incongruity a plane flying over an icy wasteland.

Writing this blog entry inspired me to go a little overboard in 'Groovenator 5000'. There is no reason for any of the images other than they fit the beat of the music. If you wish to create a message or a context, you are free to do so. Your eyes will try to penetrate the layers even if your mind tries to tell them to stop. Remember; 'Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.'