As time progressed I was able to do more and more- I could put my right hand behind my head where before I couldn’t even touch my nose, weight restrictions were lifted by Dr. Griffin, I COULD DRIVE A CAR AGAIN!, I resumed a regular performing and practice schedule almost, off the narcotics, and therapy sessions were cut way back. One thing I found very touching was meeting people who had heard about my accident that had also had orthopedic surgery and came up to me at the concerts. It was wonderful to meet people who had had similar experiences. I was able to do my normal routine except that I was getting bad wrist pains at times and I would often wake up with my left hand numb (a symptom of tendonitis) . Also if I set my right elbow on a hard surface in just the right way the pain was excruciating. But I was functional pretty much and forged ahead.
I made a point one afternoon of hiking the trail alone that I had the accident on. I used a hiking stick, something that had I used a few months back would have prevented the fall. My heart was pounding but I was not going to give up a favorite trail. When I posted my exploit to facebook my friends were not too happy with me, but I did it. No freakouts or stumbles.
I got back into the recording studio with engineer Jon Sawa and asked him about doing a music video together. We had a piece picked out, the Danza by Edin Solis for the soundtrack, and I wanted to be in the video but not IN the video, in other words let the scenery and landscape be predominant at times if that’s what was warranted, and get away from a static film of a guy in a room with a guitar. I would be not so much the featured “artiste” as “guitar monkey”. Little did I know what I was letting myself in for.
The first shoot seemed to start well enough. We drive out to a field near Hampton cove where there’s a single oak tree, we get set up to shoot. And the camera gets finicky and decides it doesn’t want to come out and play that day. That Lumix acted like a snotty three year old brat for every shoot it seemed like. Eventually Jon would coax it out of its camera tantrum and it would play fine for a while but then do its ”I don’t wanna!!” routine all over again. But we did get it done. We shot in about a dozen locations throughout north Alabama in temperatures ranging from 35 to 95 degrees. We shot in a cotton field, on a hiking trail five minutes from where I had the accident, an abandoned shack, a cabin in the historic park at Burritt Museum, and eventually, THE PRIME LOCATION. More on that in the next post.
I had a lot of fun working with Jon and the Prototype Multimedia crew. At the cotton field shoot, Jon wanted me to duck down quickly while holding my guitar to get the shot he wanted. So he would yell “Go down Phil! Go down!” I finally said, “Jon, I know it’s just semantics, but could you say get down instead of go down?” The phrase “it’s just semantics” still cracks us up. This video is from our day at Burritt. It was freezing cold that day.