Honorable Andrew Young and... Pink Hair Curlers??

Clip number two features the Honorable Andrew Young, former Atlanta Mayor and former US Ambassador. I had been working on this film for years and wondering when would I really ever have enough material to make the story work. When I finally got Pat and Andy on tape I said OK, done.





Ambassador Young in person is wise and warm, with a slight mischievous streak that never comes across in TV interviews. For the interviews taped in 2008 at Crawford Post Production - where I've worked for 24 years now - he was often quite funny, and I'm happy he let his hair down while the cameras rolled.

The second part of the clip has audio from some of the earliest Alley Pat cassette tapes, and was recorded by Mike Cooper a decade or more earlier than many of my later tapes. So Pat's voice is slightly younger and higher pitched here. The WERD graphic in the background is from an old Broadcasting Magazine Yearbook from the collection of longtime DJ and broadcast historian (and friend since high school) Brock Whaley.

Here's another clip:




Now we are getting into the psychology of Pat's benign insult humor... how people expect it from him and he happily obliges. The business in this flower shop ad - where he observes that funerals and weddings are synonymous - is a good example of how his old shows were just relentlessly whacked-out.

For ALLEY PAT: THE MUSIC IS RECORDED I needed to put some strong and funny stuff up front, because a lot of these film festival panels have ten dozen long films to wade through, and you gotta hook them fast. Or so I imagine.

Luckily I have about 20 hours of old Alley Pat recordings, so it was no problem to find the 40 minutes worth of "strong and funny" to fill the film. I could really do another documentary, a Part II, with what's on the cutting room floor. And no, I am not.

Creeping up in the background is a breezy bass & xylophone track by the Modern Jazz Quartet... a track I like so much it ended up in the film repeatedly.

Check back often, more clips coming.