Bluegrass In My Cup (Or, How I Made $30,000 in 12 Hours)
Note: The following post was originally written as an email in 2002, long before I started blogging. I was inspired to dig it up after playing bluegrass in Long Island this weekend with Dan Torday, who appears in the story, and further inspired after Dan sent me a link to our commercial, which you can watch here (no embed unfortunately). I edited it a little for grammar, clarity, and consistency.
A couple of months ago, I read an announcement on Bluegrass-L, a list-serv I belong to that’s dedicated to discussion about bluegrass music, looking for an “attractive, young female fiddle player in the NYC area for a national commercial.” I forwarded that post to my friend Katy Rose, who fit the bill: she’s a beautiful young woman with long red hair, a great sense of style, and a powerful fiddle player. I had been playing bass for her bluegrass band, the Nieces and Nephews (an UncleFucker straight-bluegrass side project) on and off for about 6 months.
Apparently, whoever was making the commercial thought she fit the bill too, because I got a call from Katy telling me she’d been invited down for an audition, and was one of 3 contenders for the lead.
About 3 weeks later, I got a call from a talent agency; apparently the people making the commercial wanted a band to back up Katy Rose, and Katy had suggested all of us in the Nieces and Nephews, as well as the drummer from her UncleFucker (the advertisers wanted a drummer as well). Not that this is especially important, but all of us in the Nieces and Nephews were youngsters by bluegrass standards, mid-20s to early 30s, and most of us are (if I do say so myself) pretty hip-looking people.
So I went up for the audition. It turned out the bluegrass commercial would be for Folger’s coffee. The theme was already written and performed by studio musicians, but they needed people who looked the part. Basically, they wanted us to learn the song and play it, so they could sync up the recording with us later.
“When you go up, remember to SPARKLE!” said Robin from the agency. So when it was our turn to play music and interview for the role, I tried to be as much of a ham as George C Scott in “Patton”.
“HELLO!” I said to the camera in my loudest and friendliest Jimmy Stewart voice. “My name is BRENDAN SKWIRE and I hail from THE GREAT STATE OF RHODE ISLAND although I now live in THE CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE, AND THE BIRTHPLACE OF OUR NATION, PHILADELPHIA! I have been playing BLUEGRASS BASS for about six years now, and although I was once a PUNK ROCKER, wearing LEATHER AND A MOHAWK, I am happy to announce that TODAY there is NOT ONE MOMENT that I am not listening to BLUEGRASS MUSIC!” And then we played some music, which sucked horribly. It didn’t matter of course: since the music was pre-recorded, the advertisers were looking for a look, not a sound.
By choosing us, Folgers cast a solid vote for the freaks. Izzy, our guitar player, was about 29 years old, covered with tattoos, and wore his long hair in Tonto-style braids. He usually wears a fake gold tooth, which only added to the weirdness. The drummer, Jamie, looked like Barney Rubble, if the affable caveman had just stepped out of jail on an assault and battery charge (he’s the guy wearing the porkpie hat in the linked photo above). Dan looked sort of like a librarian, and I looked like a refugee from the little-mourned urban cowboy era of the early 80s. Snap shirts with embroideries, tight jeans, cowboy hat, the whole nine yards.
As it turned out all of us except Katy got the job, and as principals, not extras, which meant not only would we get paid per diem, but we would also get Screen Actor’s Guild union scale and residuals, which I was told would total between a lot of money and a whole heapin’ lot of money over the next 4 years. Enough money that they advised me to get an accountant for next year’s taxes.
We filmed on Wednesday, April 17th. It was a LONG day. I planned to leave right after work on Tuesday. At the time, I worked at UPenn, but on Monday nights I moonlighted as a bartender for some extra pocket cash. I ended up getting about 2 hours of sleep the night before the big drive. After work, I used rush hour as an excuse to try to take a nap, but only tossed around, and so it was that on that same 2 hours of sleep, I hit the road for the Hamptons, 4-5 hours away, at 7:45 PM, arriving at the hotel at 12:45. Feeling ready to die (I almost fell asleep at the wheel twice), I asked the production guy, “What time do we start shooting tomorrow?” and he answered “Your wake up call is at 4:30 AM, so you’d better get to bed.”
As it turned out, I was the lucky one. The rest of the Nieces & Nephews were playing a radio show in Manhattan that evening and arrived at the hotel at 4:00 AM, a half-hour before the shoot.
We all loaded into the production company’s van, and they shuttled us about an hour down the road to the Deep Hollow Ranch in Montauk, which happens to be the oldest cattle ranch in the US.
Let me tell you: advertisers are crazy. They had built a stage for us to play on and had their art department make a banner that read “Bluegrass Pickin’ Festival”. I asked them if they had gotten it at an auction, but nope, it was specifically designed for the shoot. Some lawn chairs and a couple of backyard grills set the festival atmosphere, as did the porta-johns, which we discovered to our horror had signs reading “Prop only: DO NOT USE!” If you had to pee, you ran behind a nearby bush, but if you had a something knockin’ at the back door, you were what would be aptly termed “shit out of luck”.
Wardrobe had us dressed in some pretty cool vintage threads (actually no different from what I usually wear anywhere, more snap shirts and cowboy boots, but with stiffer price tags). And although it was a coffee commercial, we were there for about 4 hours until anybody actually GOT a cup of joe.
The young woman hired to play fiddle was from LA. Does anyone else remember a brief furor in the 1980s over teenage girls getting nose jobs and other plastic surgery? The fiddler was one of those sculpted people. She had had the nose, the cheeks, AND the eyes done. Imagine if someone had carved a cigar-store indian to look sort of like Lynda Carter as “Wonder Woman” and you have an idea what she looked like. I couldn’t stop staring at her, not because she was especially pretty, but because she just looked so… so WEIRD! Even funnier was that Izzy, who is as shameless a flirt as I am, had latched onto this girl, and she onto him. During the whole shoot, he kept egging her on, and the energy was amazing. Izzy’s one of those people that can get anyone enthusiastic about anything, and he had all of us jumping around and emoting. It was really funny, especially considering that we were all hallucinating and half-hysterical from the lack of sleep.
Actually, the girl wasn’t a fiddle player at all, but a classically trained violinist. She plays mostly with rock and funk bands, and even played with the Jimmy Page/ Robert Plant reunion tour from a few years back. She had no BG skills to speak of. Dan and Izzy later went to see her perform in the city, and told me it was the worst music they had ever heard in their lives.
The shoot took all day: it was lots of fun but also hard work, and lots of repetition. I can’t count the number of times they heated that cup of coffee up until it steamed, each time warning Dan to only pretend to sip the stuff, because it was so hot it would blister his lips. The crew and directors were very cool, and did not fit the stereotype of self-centered TV types at
all.
The sun was blazing that week; the filming took place during the early heat wave that hit the Northeast. If the browbeating sun wasn’t enough, we had to stand under these enormous white-hot lights that from 20 feet away still managed to make our necks burn. Between the lack of sleep and the heat, I felt like I was melting.
The plot of the commercial was fairly simple: it begins with some footage of the fiddle-playing girl getting out of bed, followed by some clips of the band “getting ready for our gig”. Then there’s some footage of “the big gig” and then us sitting around talking about the gig and sipping coffee.
What was interesting was that while waiting to do the scripted activities, we just hung around pickin’, and the crew loved it. They decided to film as much footage of us as possible, candid as well as scripted, to see what they could use. “Great, I LOVE the way you guys are talking to each other like that. Could you do that again? OK! That was great too! Now let’s do that again! OK that was PERFECT! Now, let’s do that again…” Folgers had sent some of their people to watch the filming, and they loved what they saw. They were especially impressed that we worked a full 12-hour day, with 100% energy, with little to no sleep (I wanted to tell them that I get about as much sleep or less at the average festival).
I don’t understand how the rest of the band and I made it through the whole day just fine, but we did. The lack of sleep didn’t catch up with me until about 10:30 at the Edison exit on the NJTurnpike on my way home that evening, when my eyes started to close in on themselves.
The words to the song went (I’m sure you know the melody):
The sun tunes up the sky
Open up those sleepy eyes
Only that aroma mountain grown
can make this day your own…
[the tempo picks up]
Now you’re feeling a brand new beat
Hello world, ain’t life sweet
the best part of wakin’ up
Is Folgers in your cup!
All lyrics copyright Folgers I assume
When I saw the finished product, I had to slow down the videotape to see myself: I think I got less than a second or two of actual screen time (that’s my boot stomping behind the bass, and you can almost see me off to the left in one shot). But who cares? Since I was a principal, the money began to roll in, and all told I made about $30,000.00 for a 12-hour day. To this day, I get letters from the NY State Board of Revenue, which thinks I owe them some money (my accountant told me that wasn’t the case).
There’s more to the story about how Izzy pretty much broke his part of the agreement that the talent agent would get a share of the residuals, and how that pretty much cratered any attempts by the rest of us to get more work. But that’s all back in 2002: I’m not complaining about the electric bass, the Ampeg SVT, the Mesa Road Ready 410, or the Martin D-18 that Folgers’ residuals bought for me.
Not complaining at all…
One Response to “Bluegrass In My Cup (Or, How I Made $30,000 in 12 Hours)”
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May 6th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
okay, the mando has to come out of the case! I can’t stand it anymore. Your killing me.
The commercial was cool, but it moved too fast. Although, I think I did see your boot.