Up to this point, Hicks with Sticks has posted 32 videos on Facebook, and not just any videos of local and touring bands, but the best of the lot.
Posting videos to HWS/FB rather than YouTube collects them under the umbrella that shelters everything else on the HWS/FB page. The problem is that it’s difficult to find the videos you’d like to watch because FB doesn’t provide an index, which the revised HWS Videos page does.
Quality is the first goal, which means good video and audio. Some stages are illuminated with red light which makes the musicians look like boiled lobsters on video. Tom Armstrong and the Branded Men and one Red Meat video were converted to sepia and B/W respectively to eliminate the lobster effect. Videos with excessive noise from the audience, or otherwise bad sound, do not get posted. In some cases, like Gal Holiday and a soon-to-be-posted video from The Good Luck Thrift Store Outfit, the video has been remixed using the audio track from a CD. The quality of the performance also factors into the decision to post. Sometimes magic happens, as the one-off band Rudi and Rudy did on their cover of a Conway Twitty & Loretta Lynn song, or the Shut-Ins with Gayle Lynn did with their wine-inspired rendition of “Baby It’s Cold Outside.”
The second goal of a HWS video is to present a clear field of view. All have been recorded from the front of the audience to keep the backs of people’s heads out of the frame. Care has also been taken to avoid shooting from angles where microphones obscure the faces of the singers.
The third goal is to enhance some mixes with clips from the Internet. A great many vintage Oldsmobiles, including Jay Leno‘s ’58, found their way into Macy Blackman‘s cover of “Rocket 88.” Pam Brandon and the Royal Deuces‘ video was shot with two cameras on her 50th birthday and supplemented with her pictures dating back half a century. Kinky Friedman‘s “Ballad of Charles Whitman” tells Whitman’s story. The video of the “KALX Station ID,” which features “terrorists” taking over UC-Berkeley’s radio station, is composedof found images.
Sure, it’s all another Internet time suck, but pains have been taken to make these a quality waste of time.
