“I know you think I suffer from overexposure in the media,” Eddie Garcia said to me.
“Yes,” I said, “but to be fair, for a while I had you confused with Andy Garcia.”
True, Garcia is everywhere: on the airwaves at WFDD, where he spends his days; on social media, which he aptly wields to push his side project 1970s Film Stock; performing on any stage he can talk his way onto; chatting casually at virtually every event I’ve ever attended inside Winston-Salem city limits.
But this project — an original score for the Coen Brothers film No Country for Old Men — may be the perfect confluence of Garcia’s weird guitar work, his fascination with the audio/visual medium and the RiverRun Film Festival, with which he’s long been associated.
“I wanted to get this experience of writing a score,” Garcia said. “And No Country doesn’t really have a soundtrack, so to speak, just a subtle droning that’s barely mixed in.”
The first 20 minutes, he says, lays out the vocabulary for the entire piece: An empty, frozen landscape. The hitman strangles the cop and commits another gruesome murder. The first car chase. Once he got the chord — something bleak, with the insinuation of danger behind it — it started to flow.
“C-sharp minor with a low G-sharp drone,” Garcia said. “For the chase scenes I was thinking about Escape From New York, even though there’s no proper chase scene in that movie. Driving, but sinister.”
On stage, he’ll switch between Jazzmaster guitars with different tunings, and a 6-string bass. He has one guitar just for Woody Harrelson’s cameo in the film, which he says is so abrupt and incongruous that it demands a departure from the form.
He’s written most of it out — “way more than I would for a Film Stock show,” he said — and he’s got a cheat sheet just in case he loses his way. He’s not quite figured out where he’ll stand on the stage, how he’ll switch instruments on the fly, if he’s going to play through the credits or not.
But you don’t spend as many hours in the public eye as Garcia does without learning how to work on the fly.
Eddie Garcia will perform his live score for No Country for Old Men on Saturday at 7 p.m. in the Hanesbrands Theatre in Winston-Salem.
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