The Flood's First YouTube
#132 / Flood Time Capsule: 2008
YouTube was only three years old when The Flood brought its first homemade video to that online platform 14 years ago this week.
It came about because in the late summer of 2008, band manager Pamela Bowen bought a little digital camera called a FlipVideo, which could produce quick film clips that could be easily uploaded to the Internet.
(Well, it didn’t make the uploads as easy as the then-new iPhone would, but at that point we were still almost a year away from our first smartphone.)
Pamela gave the Flip its first good tryout at the band's next gig, an early October show down at Huntington's Harris Riverfront Park:
That’s when the bands was hired to entertain passengers waiting to board The Belle of Cincinnati, a large excursion boat chartered for a Hospice of Huntington fund-raising dinner cruise.
The weather was perfect, and a lot of people who weren’t actually going on the cruise came down just to be with the band.
This was still five months before 15-year-old Jacob Scarr officially joined the bunch, but at weekend and after-school events, “Youngblood,” as we called him, was regularly sitting in, and Jacob’s family and friends were among those down by the riverside that pleasant evening.
Also featured in the video are shots of The Flood's new bandstands, which fiddlin’ Joe Dobbs had recommended, proclaiming the name of the band, and, in smaller type, the motto that Joe's son, Dale, first proposed back in 2001: “West Virginia’s most eclectic string band.”
Of course, bandstands are meant to hold sheet music, but since most of these guys couldn't read music, we used them for other “literature” such as a Downbeat magazine, a Playboy and a useful manual called, “How to Play Guitar.”
More Videos
The YouTube video that Pamela shot that day still has an active life on YouTube; in its first 11 years it had nearly 10,000 views.
And of course, there have been a bunch more Flood films since then, which you can view on the website’s “Our Videos” page, clickable here.
The Flip was a great little video camera. Especially after coming off those big, clumsy video cameras we all bought a few years before. I bought a Flip. Redundant now, of course. And only after a few years.
Now of course we're all videographers with our Smart phones. We were only talking yesterday about our early days in our first band (The Buffalo Band - not sure why "Buffalo "as we were all young teenagers from Liverpool!. We'd never even seen a cow in real life!).
We were saying we have no footage of us playing in the mid-60's. Nothing. Whereas nowadays we'd have tons of video footage and images.
For better or worse the Smart phone has been a game changer.
Great video by the way... ;-)