Commercial #1

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So our friend Pete Palladino landed a gig performing a live Bud Lite commercial that would air in the Philadelphia area during "Friends," and he asked us to back him. The commercial aired on August 16th, 2001, and we did indeed perform the jingle "live." However, looking at this clip, you can tell how staged the whole thing is. The band and the extras rehearsed for seven hours. We must've played that jingle 40 times or so. Two minutes before airtime, the main crane camera stopped focusing, but fortunately someone banged on it and it started working again. The only thing that went slightly wrong is that you can see one of the extras accidentally tip over one of the empty bottles during the tray shot. At the end of the shoot we were rewarded with one real Bud Lite each.

Commercial #2

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Apparently we were so good at performing corporate jingles that the Bud people wanted us to do another commerial, this time in Nashville, TN. We flew down and shot the commerical on October 18th, 2001. We traveled very lightly and only Bryce brought a real guitar amp. Pete had a little practice amp that he played through. Look closely and you'll notice no gear on stage. Yet we're really playing live again, although the whole thing was still as staged as high school play, only less rehearsed. Still, we had a blast in Nashville. Afterwards we went out with the director and crew and buzzed around a few of the local bars. The highlight of the trip was eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts which Pete had the ingenious idea of heating with the hotel room hair dryer. Really. Check out the video here (1.3mb).