#101: Celebrating accidental transcendence with the Found Footage Festival
The foremost curators of forgotten videos have been on a particular mission for 20 years.
For 20 years, Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher have been on a specific mission: to celebrate, as they put it, “videos that time forgot, dredged up in dusty thrift stores and estate sales throughout North America.”
Joe and Nick began the Found Footage Festival with live tours, where they screened a continually updated rotation of clips at bars, theaters, and music venues. It has since expanded into a highly active YouTube channel (anchored by their weekly show, VCR Party Live!); Rewind-O, their streaming service that’s “like the Criterion Channel for long lost VHS”; and a massive archive of VHS tapes and DVDs that has provided clips to The Goldbergs, The Tonight Show, and others.
It’s a peculiar media empire, but one whose mission is simpatico with Band Name Bureau. I hadn’t thought about that until the Found Footage Festival came through Chicago in December for its 20th anniversary tour. I’ve been a fan since 2005, which is coincidentally when I first started tracking band names at The A.V. Club.
So I connected with Joe and Nick via Zoom ahead of their spring tour dates. Considering the photo above, you won’t be surprised to learn Joe showed up with half his scalp shaved—the latest incarnation of a long-running gag he and Nick have for their driver’s license photos (see below)—but also wearing T-shirt for a Cribshitter, featured in 2007 Year in Band Names.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length blah blah blah.
Band Name Bureau: You have featured a ton of music-related videos over the years: instructional ones, performances, home-video releases, and so many Branson-based performers. Do you have a favorite type of clip?
Nick Prueher: I think for me, it’s anybody performing on public-access TV. I know Joe was just gifted a bunch of Peoria Public Access featuring this local longtime music teacher who’s been in Peoria since the ’30s teaching music. She brings on people from her church, and they just belt out hymns and old standards, and even modern songs, without a tuning fork, without much formal training, and with questionable accompaniment. But I love that. Stairway to Stardom is another talent show that ran from the late ’70s all the way up to the mid-’90s in New York, and that featured a lot of aspiring singers and songwriters performing.
I think before there were the elimination rounds on American Idol—the people that they cast specifically because they’re not super well-trained—that’s what you had.
Joe Pickett: The William Hungs.
NP: Yeah. You had a lot of public-access people giving it their all. To me, that has that feeling of “homemade,” or there’s a lot of heart to the singing. It’s almost like the Shaggs or something, listening to an album like that, but you get the video.
JP: We watched all of that Peoria Public Access on our Patreon show, and there’s one kid on there that was so bad. It’s a kid singing, so of course he’s not going to be great. But he was remarkably awful, just screaming the lyrics and just no rhythm and completely tone-deaf. I mean, he’s 7, so cut him some slack.
NP: Sounds like you’re not! Sounds like you’re not cutting him some slack from your tone.
JP: [Laughs.] I’m not, really. He was so bad. But no, it was at a Shaggs level, I would say, where it was almost remarkable how bad it was. He had a very unique sound to him.
I was going to say, with home movies, you usually just get lip-synching or stuff like that, but there’s one that we got called “Jeff’s Bird’s.” It’s this guy going around with a camcorder, and his name’s not Jeff, and you don’t see any birds in the video. I don't know why I was labeled “Jeff’s Bird’s.”
NP: I don’t know, either.
JP: But he finds a rabbit, and he goes up to the rabbit and he starts to sing a song that he made up to it. Just very short, but it has haunted me. It’s stuck with me. It’s become a staple of the show. He sang a song that goes, “Here comes the Easter bunny hopping down the trail, hippity hop. Don’t stop. I’ve got your Easter eggs.” And then he goes, “Alright, I gotta go.” And he hits stop on the camcorder. It just, [chef’s kiss]. It’s so good.
NP: We play it every Easter. We feel like it should be the next Here Comes Peter Cottontail.
JP: Here’s another genre that I love: They used to have these kiosks in malls or Six Flags or something, where you’d go in and have the green screen behind you. You would lip-synch, and they’d have maybe a box full of props and wigs and funny, big, oversized sunglasses that you could wear. People would sing those songs. They’re always the same, but they’re one of a kind. They’re unique. It’s like a thumbprint.
NP: I think the last genre that we explore pretty extensively on our YouTube show are local commercial jingles. These were, again, a lot of times not professional songwriters, but really putting a lot of soul into a commercial for Midwest Hemorrhoid Treatment Center. [Laughs.]
JP: There are some jingles that really are catchy, and they’re really good. We did a little research. I called up one place for, oh, I can’t remember—some dentistry. I was like, “Who did your jingle for that?” And they’re like, “Oh, it’s this guy named Otis.” He’s from Dallas, Texas. We looked up Otis, this son of a bitch. I would say most jingles that you hear are Otis’. I want to write a screenplay about Otis, this guy who was the jingle master—and you know it when you hear it. When you hear an Otis, you know it’s an Otis.
NP: Yeah, Otis Conner is his name, and he is from Dallas. But the thing is, there is some controversy about him too, because we found out that he would resell the same melody. Because there’s no centralized database of jingles [Laughs.], you might have a Dr. Tammy Bailey Dentistry jingle, but it would have the same melody as a Jim’s Carpet Cleaning Service in Des Moines. It’d be the same melody, but just with different lyrics. But they don’t have to know that.
BNB: Do you think there are more video releases from Branson performers, or do they just over-index in the Found Footage collection?
NP: No, I think what we found is that oftentimes, especially in the ’90s, the souvenir of the show was the VHS tape, and sometimes it was the actual performance they had just seen. They were speed-duping them somewhere in a control room. Then, the key thing was you could get it autographed. So most of the Branson videos—and videos we find from cruises, too—are signed by the artist because that was the videotape souvenir.
I think why we find a lot of these is because the last holdouts for VCRs that still use them were essentially old people [and] nursing homes. That’s a key demographic for Branson audiences. So I think in Branson, VHS tapes were viable far into the late ’90s when DVDs had taken over.
JP: There’s one that we watched recently. Like Nick was saying, they crank it out. They record it, and then they make the VHS afterwards, so you can buy it, and they advertise, “You will be in this video!” So there’s this one part—I think it’s right up top. It’s before the performance even starts, where they just pan the entire crowd for about five minutes. They get everybody who’s in the audience. Everybody’s waving at the camera so they can say, “Hey, you were in this video, and you can buy it afterwards.” And it’s just five minutes of silence. They don’t put music over it. They just pan the audience, and you just see people waving at the camera. It’s the craziest thing.
But we really don’t see anything from any other regions. Vegas? We have some Vegas videos, but Branson seems to be the one we see some from. Where’s Shotgun Red from, Nick?
NP: Nashville. Those are from cruises, I think, where he would perform on cruises. So that was another thing where you have a captive audience of a lot of older people. Sell ’em a souvenir VHS tape, and they scooped them up—and then [dropped them] off at thrift stores usually very quickly.
JP: Like Nick said, we have a lot of autographed Branson videos too, because people get them autographed and they’re like, “You really want this? Let’s take it to the Salvation Army.”
We have a Volume 11 show of the Found Footage Festival. For a while, we wanted to tape it in Branson because we got kind of obsessed with Branson last year, and we watched a ton of Branson videos. We’re like, “Oh, maybe in the offseason, maybe in February we could go there and rent a place.” We found one place that was pretty cheap, but our show wasn’t ready at that point. So down the road, we want to do a Branson show badly.
NP: I want to do all the tropes, have a big, patriotic ending where we’re playing patriotic videos, but having a flag unfurl. I want children to play our kids to come out and sing and do a little tap dance with us and make it the full Branson version of the Found Footage Festival. I want to have our YouTube co-host George come out with buck teeth and a big tie like the Baldknobbers.
JP: Maybe we can get a special appearance from Yakov Smirnoff. We got his phone number for that, actually. Our assistant called him and asked if we could rent out his place during the offseason. He said sure, but he wanted like $50,000 for it.
BNB: To take a step back, what do you love about these videos? Why do you do this, do you think?
NP: I think the main appeal for us is that it’s this sort of unvarnished look at our history. It’s the Howard Zinn People’s History of the Videotaped United States. It’s warts and all. I’ve said this before, but the way people remember our cultural history usually is with the American Film Institute’s list, or looking back at Oscar lists, but that’s a very varnished, rose-colored—
JP: That’s the good stuff! [Laughs.]
NP: Yeah. What I think is far more interesting is watching amateurs who had a lot of ambition—questionable talent, but a lot of ambition, really giving it their all and putting it on videotape. You see mistakes. You see trends quicker than you would anywhere else. A lot of mom-and-pop operations got in on VHS when it was the gold rush, after Jane Fonda’s Workout sold 2 million copies. So any half-baked idea or weird concept ended up on a tape because it was market saturation. Everybody had a VCR, and because of that, we never run out of material.
A lot of it is interesting in ways that, with internet culture, it’s not as interesting. Because there’s a self-awareness now, and everybody knows that anything they put online or on their phone may be broadcast to the world. Whereas we found a video called How to Identify Machine-Made Marbles. We found it, but they thought this is only ever going to be bought and watched by marble collectors who want to be able to identify which are hand-blown versus machine-made. So that’s why it’s fun for us, is to take a video that was made for a very specific audience to be watched in a specific context and put it in a theater or a rock club somewhere with a bunch of other weirdos.
JP: Yeah. I would say the main reason at this point is that we’ve been doing this for 20 years. We have no choice. We have to do this. What else? We have 14,000 VHS tapes. I think we have 3,000 DVDs, and what are we going to do with them? We have no choice. We’re stuck with this job forever. But the thrill of it is really the hunt of it all.
BNB: I do think there’s something about the unvarnished aspect, where the ambition and lack of self-awareness meet questionable execution. I think both the Found Footage Festival and Band Name Bureau celebrate that intersection. It’s stuff that I call accidentally transcendent, where people are maybe trying to do something artistically, but they don’t succeed in the way they intended.
JP: Well, I think that that speaks to most people. I have those videos that I made. We had a public-access show in high school. I can’t even watch it anymore. It’s so cringe-inducing, but we were trying to be something. But I like watching the trying. I like knowing what they are going for.
My favorite movie in the world is American Movie. Every time I watch it, I just get inspired. I just want to grab a camera with my friends and go out and make a movie. Because Mark Borchardt had limited resources. I think he’s very talented, but at the time, he was still learning what he was trying to make, and just to watch that process, I don’t know. It’s inspiring to me.
BNB: Mike Schank, RIP. I think Jack Rebney is a good example. He was doing this overwritten, overloaded Winnebago industrial film. But the outtakes, even though they were assembled to show what a dick he was, became meaningful in a way that no one would have expected. That’s fascinating.
NP: In the best videos for us, the pathos comes through. We’ve watched the finished Winnebago video without the swearing in it. It’s a little flowery and goofy, but it’s not nearly as funny as watching the parts that went wrong and the frustration—and it doesn’t hurt that Jack Rebney is just a poet when it comes to swearing. Everybody’s had a bad day at work, but very few people can express it as eloquently as him. So you get this window into this guy who has a short fuse, but a big vocabulary. I think that’s why we love news bloopers too. These people have this veneer of professionalism, and to watch that come crumbling down is so entertaining.
This isn’t what you’re asking, but it made me think of Andy Daly was in a music video. What was that video he was in, Joe, that was based on John and Johnny?
JP: Yeah, it’s based on John and Johnny. What’s that band? They’re a big band, something brothers. Levitt Brothers?
NP: Avett Brothers?
JP: Yeah, that’s who it is.
NP: There’s no way this wasn’t based on John and Johnny. So yeah, we have a home-shopping video a friend of ours found. I think it was a 1986 regional home shopping channel called America’s Value Network.
[The Avett Brothers] must’ve seen the video on our website or on YouTube or something, and they copied the graphics. Then Andy Daly plays basically one of these hosts, John and Johnny, from our home shopping tape in this video called “Slight Figure of Speech.”
BNB: Before we finish, I wanted to ask what I always ask in these interviews. You’re music fans and experts on weird stuff: Do you think it’s better to have a bad name that’s memorable or an innocuous name that doesn’t attract attention?
NP: Look at Joe’s hair. What do you think? [Laughs.]
BNB: Wearing a Cribshitter T-shirt, on top of that.
JP: Right! [Laughs.] I always think of the band Diarrhea Planet. Is it true that they lost a bet and that somebody else named their band that? That’s the legend that I had heard.
BNB: I believe it was the result of trying to come up with a terrible name on purpose.
JP: I always used to listen to that Sirius XM channel XMU, and I think they had some song that was on regular rotation. That’s where I heard of ’em. But I remember the DJ was always complaining about their band name. I think she was embarrassed to say their band name or was just like, “Don’t judge ’em on their band name.” But that said, I remember Diarrhea Planet. I couldn’t remember the Avett Brothers. Remember I called ’em the Levitt Brothers? That’s a mundane name. Avett Brothers, who’s going to remember that? Diarrhea Planet? Any day of the week.
BNB: What do you think, Nick?
NP: Yeah, I mean, my favorite band is Anal Cunt. So you do the math. [Laughs.]
POST-SCRIPTS
Check out the Found Footage Festival 20th Anniversary Show (tickets here):
3/20: Vancouver, BC
3/21-22: Portland, OR
3/23: Seattle, WA
4/17: Grand Rapids, MI
4/18: Ann Arbor, MI
4/19: Hamtramck, MI
5/2-3: Toronto, ON
7/19: Brooklyn, NY
11/8: Lapeer, MI
Don’t forget you can now support this nonsense at Buy Me a Coffee.