33 Ed Commons: producer/director of Red Barn Radio

Ed Commons is the cofounder, producer, director of Red Barn Radio, now in its 23rd season. As of early 2025, Red Barn has had 831 radio episodes and 190 TV episodes.

Ed previously owned Chetwyd Records and House of Commons Films/House of Commons Communications, the first film production company in Kentucky. He was researcher-producer for the University of Kentucky Basketball Museum Project and for the Kentucky Music Museum and Hall of Fame.

In 2018, Ed was awarded the first Legacy Award by AAF Lexington, the American Advertising Federation.

Follow Red Barn Radio on YouTube, Facebook, and/or Twitch:
 
Red Barn Radio
https://redbarnradio.com/

https://www.youtube.com/c/redbarnradiotv/featured

https://www.facebook.com/redbarnradio

https://www.twitch.tv/redbarnradio

Kathie’s note: Ed Commons has been a legend in Lexington forever. He has a fabulous reputation in the advertising-media-film-arts community, and not just in central Kentucky but all over the country and then some. I don’t remember when we met, but it’s been several decades. I’m sure I knew his name before he knew mine. I’ve been fortunate to call him a friend and call him over for Thanksgiving for at least 10 years now? Here’s to 10 or 20 more, Edward!

Writers Rotation intro/outro recorded at Dynamix Productions in Lexington, Kentucky.

Transcript

Ed Commons [00:00:00]:
Hi. I'm Ed Commons. I'm currently the producer/director of Red Barn Radio, and words to me are the basis of an awful lot of what media is about.

INTRO [00:00:09]:
Hi. Welcome to the Writers Rotation podcast. I'm your host, Kathie Stamps. I love words and writing and people and talking. So I'm talking to people who write all kinds of things in different professions. It's a Writers Rotation.

Kathie [00:00:26]:
Ed, how you doing? Hello. How is everything in the world of “roots music, southern style”?

Ed [00:00:34]:
The list just becomes endless. Now in our 23rd season. And I know this is all about writing. But through most of my career, the writing has been provided to me. My talent is not the written word. My talent is taking what is provided to me with words and making it visual and expanding it into a media event.

Kathie [00:00:59]:
Yes.

Ed [00:01:00]:
The sad part is, I'm not good at front-end creative. I can edit or produce the hell out of something that's given to me. So I've always relied on someone else to provide that critical input, what we call writing or words.

Kathie [00:01:15]:
When did you start Red Barn Radio?

Ed [00:01:17]:
Red Barn Radio was founded by Marilyn Myers and myself in 2000, 2001, right in there. We had both taken a job with the Music Museum and Hall of Fame in Renfro Valley. We had done the UK Basketball Museum and the designers from that picked up the contract in Renfro and asked us to come down there and do production and research. And after a time, we started meeting a bunch of people, musicians and so on from Eastern Kentucky, and this was before Kentucky really had the vibrant music scene that it has today. So we started doing some recording of musicians down there in the Coon Creek Girls’ dining room, which was also known as the Little Red Barn. Then we moved to Lexington our first two seasons. We did everything in one studio. The first shows were a nightmare in that we had a stage band, a bluegrass band, a featured artist, a guest artist, Tom Brown was then our voice of Red Barn in the studio, we had a contributing editor, and we had our hosts. Well, that didn't last long, but it was a booking nightmare trying to get all that together.

Kathie [00:02:37]:
And you went through a rebranding because, didn't it start out as bluegrass music?

Ed [00:02:41]:
We were bluegrass, but then as the music in our region progressed, I can remember the first day we had a snare on stage that mimed what the banjo was doing. Whoa, new and old time music. And then all of a sudden we had an early version of, was it Sunday Best who came in? A rock version of Eastern Kentucky music; they've gone on and are very well-known now. And from then on it started to really evolve into where younger musicians were going, not doing away with the history of old time music, but adding their own version of it. Many of the young writers from Eastern Kentucky are writing about their history, which was drug addiction and abuse and families and things that music wasn't used to hearing but was very accurate to what was happening in the Appalachian region, not just Kentucky but all up and down that ridge. And then we started having people coming in from other parts of the country who were using the Appalachian tradition as some of the roots to what their music was about, whether it was country or old-time or however. Now it's gotten to the point where it's very difficult to define what a lot of the music is.

Ed [00:04:10]:
We rebranded to roots music, southern style, because we consider ourselves part of the southern region. But we are really roots. It's like everything else, it's very difficult to define. The guests that we're having are all over the map. A lot of it is Appalachian rock. We've had country bands. One that comes to mind, drove in from Colorado 15 hours, did their number, and they have broken up. Now part of them is in Texas making quite a scene on the country music scene in Texas.

Ed [00:04:50]:
The guitar player from that band is a writer and his own group still working out of Colorado And what does he do for the day, his day job? Works on oil rigs. Really? Yes. We've been lucky to have in recent years guests from Ireland, England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South America. Unbelievable. But I've been very blessed in two stories that happened to me. A couple of years ago, I got an email from a man from Birmingham, England, and he said that he and his wife stay up every Wednesday night, he and the kids, to watch the show. They really love the music. I was really surprised by that interchange.

Ed [00:05:32]:
And then in the same period of time, I got a handwritten note virtually saying the same thing, my family and I watch your show, we love the music, and it was handwritten and it was from Lithuania.

Kathie [00:05:43]:
Wow.

Ed [00:05:44]:
Those kinds of interchanges have affected me more. We're in a room in Lexington, Kentucky. We're there every week, you know, in this production space. You don't really realize the possible impact that you are making to people. And in today's world, worldwide. When we had our guests recently from London, England, I said how did you guys know about us? He said oh, we've been following your show, my buddies and I, for a couple of years.

Kathie [00:06:12]:
That's very cool.

Ed [00:06:14]:
It's just amazing to me that this has evolved organically and I think that's part of the best part of what Red Barn is. We have grown in a very authentic way. We're not overly sold, sadly, and a lot of it is word-of-mouth and people catching on to the point where we really are making a name for ourselves. And the other part of it is our success is not just what we're doing, but that the music company… company, take 2… the music scene in our region and beyond has really evolved around us. We've just lasted long enough to really begin to tap into a wider range of music.

Kathie [00:07:00]:
So cool. So I'm assuming everything from acoustic to how many instruments on stage?

Ed [00:07:08]:
Well, we've had 6 or 7, but the average is 5 for a band. Drum kit. And we've had solo acts, which we really revere. Part of the format of the show with the interviews and so on allows an audience to really see what the guest is about, unlike a lot of other public performances where you get lost in the rush of everything else that's going on. We really concentrate on their roots stories, their family, the instruments that they play, where they learn to play, what their kidhood was like, where they are now, what their goals and aspirations are for their future.

Kathie [00:07:52]:
How has the storytelling in the songs evolved over 20-some years, or have you noticed?

Ed [00:07:57]:
I think it's become a lot more personalized, particularly with the young writers, because they're writing on life experience that they feel, which is a bit different from 10 years ago or 20 years ago, when a lot of songs were constructed: Oh, I'll write a love song, and it's about fill in the blank, and it's very similar to every other love song out there. Young musicians still write love songs, but they're not as overt in the word love. They're more about the relationship aspect of it perhaps, a little bit more introspective. This one musician, Matt Barr, that I mentioned from Colorado, the guy who does oil work, is an incredibly sensitive writer. When you see him, you wouldn't think that that kind of writing and the sensitivity of it would come out of the man, but it's a new world, and he's able to do that and do it very successfully. He's got a record deal in Nashville and new this partner, Dori Jo, is with him. And they have both been on our show in recent times. It’s cool.

Kathie [00:09:05]:
How far in advance do you book artists? And is that streamlined? Is it a nightmare? Is it fun? How does that work?

Ed [00:09:12]:
It's a nightmare. We don't book out as far. Well, Brad manages our booking. Anyone who's listening, RedBarnBooking@gmail.com. At any rate, he manages that. We do not put out a long list of who's coming to the show. It's important to us to keep it very now rather than long term.

Ed [00:09:34]:
One of our products, the livestream, is put up on YouTube and Facebook. It's also on Twitch, and that's archived there. And then we do the syndicated radio show, which goes out to, I don't keep track of all of it, but a lot of places, radio stations online.

Kathie [00:09:53]:
Very cool.

Ed [00:09:54]:
You know, all the social media stuff, Apple Music, Spotify, all that stuff.

Kathie [00:09:58]:
What about the baby Ed? Did you know you were gonna be in show business?

Ed [00:10:02]:
Yeah. At an early age, I was interested in performing. And my first television appearance was when I was in grade school on WBAL Baltimore in a drama thing, and I took piano in that day in those days. And my first recital was in Baltimore at, oh, what is the, at Peabody Institute. And I took lessons for a woman called Miss Ursdot, and she had pince-nez glasses and taught me how to be a proficient piano player.

Kathie [00:10:37]:
Did she beat the back of your hands with a ruler?

Ed [00:10:40]:
She virtually had one, but she didn't. She was a very kind lady. But anyway, I moved on to junior high, bass fiddle. We then had moved to Baltimore, Maryland, then a small town, a farming town, in Illinois called Macomb and that's where I started playing upright bass. And then we moved to the Philadelphia area, junior high and high school. I continued on in music and I was very interested in theater. We had a wonderful auditorium there and I got a lot of experience. So then I went on to Pittsburgh, two years of drama school, and I learned at that point that I loved being on stage and I did a lot of work on stage in those two years, but I became much more interested in lights and sound and directing.

Ed [00:11:29]:
I met the sound director for the theater, came in from Washington from arena stage in Washington D.C. and Marshall Booth and I started working together, formed a recording company and a record label, had that in the early ‘60s in Pittsburgh. Crazy stuff. He was sound man on the original Night of the Living Dead. And then I came to visit my parents who were here in Lexington, Kentucky. My dad was at Spindletop Research before it was part of the university and he was an authority on glazes and glass. One of the last things he worked on was a coating for ceramics that could withstand extreme heat and extreme cold at the same time, which of course went on to be the coating for the Space Shuttle.

Kathie [00:12:18]:
Wow.

Ed [00:12:19]:
Yeah. My dad always wanted me to, “Edward, you could make more money washing bottles in my lab.” Dad, that's great, but that's not where I think I'm going. And they retired and moved to Florida, and I stayed here and began my career here.

Kathie [00:12:35]:
You've had a couple of studios over the years.

Ed [00:12:39]:
Yeah. I started singing in clubs, and couple of years I did that as a vocalist. That was fun. Met a lot of people. Started a rec small record label here in town called Chetwyd and recorded what they now call garage bands. Did a half dozen singles and couple of albums. One, the Pat and Barbara album, Pat Horine and Barbara King. And that album had a lot of local pickers on it that went on to be friends and some actually came to Red Barn in other bands.

Ed [00:13:14]:
And then, I moved into visual stuff. I taught myself filmmaking. My first film was in eighth grade, 8 millimeter, a Roman epic.

Kathie [00:13:27]:
Of course.

Ed [00:13:28]:
And then, anyway, back to Kentucky, started doing some work in film, and I did a couple of commercials. And each assignment that I did, I challenged myself. First, it was all silent, then I added sync sound to the production. And at first, I didn't even know how to edit film. So I hired an editor in Washington D.C., you know, paid a lot of money, looked at what he did. I can do that. I can probably do it as well or better. Got a few toys and started cutting all my own work.

Kathie [00:14:01]:
So you never worked in corporate America wearing a suit, punching a time clock?

Ed [00:14:06]:
Nope. I always walked in and wrecked them. During the early House of Commons years, I did a lot of, we called it industrial, now it's called corporate work. Year and a half of my life was spent with Sperry Univac, and I worked with a producer out of Pittsburgh where I had an office when I was doing audio. So I did a job with him. We traveled all over the country and Canada doing this film for UNIVAC, which brings us back to the writing. What's interesting about those years that most of that corporate work did not come to me as scripts. They came as fragment ideas, then you went out and gathered assets and assembled it, and then the scripts were written afterward to the visuals as that film was done.

Kathie [00:14:53]:
And the script would be written for the voiceover artist?

Ed [00:14:56]:
Yes. Which would be voiceover stuff. And it worked seamlessly.

Kathie [00:15:02]:
Do you think it would work today?

Ed [00:15:04]:
I think it probably does work today. Although, I'm not sure that corporations are as free with money as they used to be without knowing what they're getting. So I think that's changed. A lot of what we do today seems to be driven by capitalism and how it works in the marketplace. I was hired because, evidently I was highly thought of and disciplined in what I did. I was at one point called the most undisciplined, disciplined person that anyone had worked with. When my eye was at the camera, you didn't screw with me. But the rest of the time, it was party time.

Kathie [00:15:46]:
I like that.

Ed [00:15:47]:
I had always learned through my years in dealing with corporate: How is this going to be used? Is it going to be used at corporate meetings? How big would the screen be? It makes a difference on how you compose shots, how quickly you cut the film. If it's on a small screen, you can cut it faster because the eye doesn't have as much to look at and process. But that's all just learning over years. That's why the early big roadshow films on 50 foot, 100 foot screens by today's standard work are a little slow when you see them at home because you have all of that visual to take in and process, and you needed time to do it. So the editors add an extra beat so that you had the time to do it.

Kathie [00:16:35]:
Never thought about that. I never knew that.

Ed [00:16:37]:
Yeah. It's stuff you learn through experience. It's not really taught, perhaps. I don't know.

Kathie [00:16:43]:
Mhmm.

Ed [00:16:44]:
I never had an education in it. The only way I could learn was by watching cinema and seeing as many photographs or anything about the setups. Oh, there's where the key light is. Look how it how it affects me. But I never separated myself from analyzing that and enjoying what the director, how he was forcing the audience to respond or challenging the audience to respond. I was always aware of that and if you want me to cry, man, I'd cry. Here's an example of a cameraman and a director, Rosemary's Baby. The director said set up a shot down the hallway. It was the Ruth Gordon bedroom door shot, and he had it the cameraman had it set perfectly framed in the hallway. Director, whose name I forget (Roman Polanski), went over and looked and said, no no no, move it over.

Ed [00:17:39]:
And he said, I don't understand why you're doing it. He said, come to a screening and I'll let you know why. And when Ruth Gordon peeks out, the whole audience raises from their chairs to the left to try to peek around the corner.

Kathie [00:17:52]:
Wow.

Ed [00:17:53]:
It's how you frame and move things and get the audience to respond subtly to clues that they are given.

Kathie [00:18:01]:
Interactive. Yeah. Wow. Are you a reader? Do you read books?

Ed [00:18:07]:
No. I do not. I really have never been. Most everything that I was involved with moved and spoke and sang and all of that. I think when I was young, I had books, and I certainly did read in school and all that. But the written page was not where my interest lay. It was always in the moving image and in music. You know, there we are.

Kathie [00:18:35]:
Those are also languages.

Ed [00:18:37]:
They are. And as you have been going “I didn't know that,” they are unique languages, and they're best learned through experience. You can learn some of it out of a book, but most of it you learn on the set, what to do, what not to do. You know, James Wong Howe was a brilliant cinematographer in black and white. He did Orson Wells’ film, the famous one.

Kathie [00:19:06]:
Sled. Rosebud.

Ed [00:19:09]:
No.

Kathie [00:19:10]:
What was the name of that movie?

Ed [00:19:11]:
Yeah. That one.

Kathie [00:19:12]:
Hang on. Citizen Kane.

Ed [00:19:13]:
Of course, Citizen Kane. James Wong was interviewed once, and the student asked him, what's the most important light you light on a set on a sound stage. He says, “It's not the first one you light. It's the first one you turn off.” So many people were overlighting in his mind. He had a more noir look, high key on one side, little bit of fill on the other side. It gave it that very European look, which became popular at that time for French cinema and Italian. Mostly French, I think.

Kathie [00:19:54]:
Would there be a difference in lighting for a black and white film and a color film?

Ed [00:20:00]:
Not necessarily, although the film stock did receive the light slightly differently than color negative. Just taking the color out of color negative has a slightly different look if you look at it very critically from desaturating it with, you know, whatever happens. A lot of times we're not as critical today, but the 1930s had a very specific look because the film stock took a lot of light to expose, and then it became more sensitive so they didn't have to use as many lights. And then that was the same with color negative. If you look at, like, The Wizard of Oz, the Technicolor process, there were so many lights in that studio it could have lit the entire town of Burbank that day with the power they consumed. And then it got to the point and Kubrick did this, the Irish film that he did (Barry Lyndon). He had a special lens design that would accept light, and he did, reportedly, the first color scene entirely lighted by candlelight, and it's mystical. Those were all technical achievements that he used artistically and to beautiful effect.

Ed [00:21:18]:
Now with video, you can take your phone and you go in a virtually dark room and get an image. Very different scene today. There's sort of pluses and minuses for every place we've been and where we're going.

Kathie [00:21:35]:
Ba dum pa. Mic drop.

Ed [00:21:35]:
Yeah.

Kathie [00:21:36]:
Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Ed [00:21:39]:
It's been fun. Please cut away at it and just make me brilliant.

Kathie [00:21:43]:
See you. Bye.

OUTRO [00:21:45]:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Writers Rotation. Like and subscribe for more. And remember, writing is a marketable skill. Smiling is a remarkable skill.