It’s been just under 8 months since the release of United Breaks Guitars and with the release of UBG 3 I’ve kept my promise to write, record and make 3 videos about my customer experience with United Airlines. My goal in committing to this project was to place the videos on YouTube and attain 1 million hits in one year with the 3 videos combined.  This stopped being about compensation when the airline flatly refused to consider the matter and once the first video was released the rest I committed to telling the rest of the story which is why I refused United’s attempt at compensation when it came 7 months after my “threat” to do the videos. I always knew the three songs would be written and recorded, and one way or another three videos would be uploaded, but I could never have imagined what would happen next.

On the production side I’ve been blessed with great musician and film industry friends who, on all three songs, volunteered their time and talent to make each one a memorable and engaging piece of art. A special shout out goes to Scott Ferguson of Ferguson Music Productions who co-produced the music with me and Curve Productions (Lara Cassidy, Steve Richard, and Chris Pauley) who shot, edited and produced some very high quality videos. When I say all three videos were produced for under $2500.00 it’s misleading since commercial rates to achieve the same quality would have cost over $100,000 so the real story with UBG is how people have banded together to make a statement about something to which we can all relate.

United Breaks Guitars Song 3 brings closure to my personal experience with United. Every good story has a beginning, middle and an end and UBG 3 does its part to round things out nicely. Song 1 gave a narrative of the facts and UBG 2 examined my relationship with a certain Customer Service Rep and how the United policies were keeping us from being “Best Buddies”. Song 3 wraps things up by acknowledging that this experience has been a career booster for me, that I wish United well in the changes they say are coming but that I continue to receive emails and hear stories that would suggest there’s more work to be done.

Musically, I wanted UBG 3 to be a high energy fun song that made the statement that I wasn’t alone in the success of the series and that the UBG was really “everyone’s victory” for the small guy against huge impersonal corporations. I’ve been called “the Everyman” many times since July and so I chose a Bluegrass feel for the song and wrote a chorus that only works if others sing along with me. Bluegrass is the perfect “roots” music that accomplishes my intention.

To pull-off a convincing Bluegrass track I needed world class Bluegrass players and they certainly showed themselves on this song. Jamie Gatti and Scott Ferguson round out the solid rhythm section and there are some magical performances on fiddle and mandolin by Canadian Bluegrass legend Ray Legere (on stage in the video playing himself). I also wanted to hear dobro on this track and the world’s best and only name that comes to mind on that instrument is Jerry Douglas from Nashville (in addition to an outstanding solo career Jerry plays in Alison Krauss’ band (Union Station). I took a chance and emailed Jerry’s manager about the idea and was thrilled when he replied saying Jerry would be happy to take part and, not only that, but Jerry would be in the video if we could figure a way to shoot his part in Nashville. I love all the UBG songs but I have to say UBG 3 is my favourite in terms of the musical performances. To have some of the worlds highest profile musicians contribute to a song of mine was another career highlight. This one is rockin’!

We shot the final installment in one day this early January at the Waverley Legion. The idea was to reintroduce the ensemble cast from the other two videos in a rollicking live setting with plenty of funny bits thrown in. This being the trilogy’s finale we wanted to leave the viewer with a few chuckles, feeling like they were seeing something new while at the same time saying goodbye to old friends. I think this video does that.

We went with Hillbillies this time, as opposed lederhosened Germans or Amigos. Chris Iannetti was back along with Jimmie Inch and Tim Feswick made his film debut when Mike Hiltz was unable to make the shoot date. Julian Marentette did double duty as a live performance hillbilly and disgruntled customer.

The baggage handlers are back again. Charlie Palmer and Phil Salterio, whom I volunteer with at the Waverley Fire Department, did another “bang-up” job as did Christine Buiteman when she gives us a tap-dance-flurry as the final word from United’s customer service department.

We had another wonderful day making this video and when you step back and look at what was accomplished in the last 8 months with the first two videos it’s been truly incredible. I had hoped that creating these videos might make a big corporation rethink how they think of each and every customer but could never have imagined the potential hidden inside a music video and a few social media tools. Corporations of all kinds around the world now feel compelled, in part because of United Breaks Guitars, to build in a better model for customer care into their businesses. I’m proud to have been a part of it but the real credit goes to the millions of people around the world who took the time to laugh and tell a friend. The power behind the United Breaks Guitars Trilogy lies in the numbers of people from countries far and wide who are laughing with me. Enjoy this video and if you like it, tell everyone you know.

Cheers, Dave

CREDITS

Audio:

• Banjo rolls “Ozarks” establishing shot – Jason Comeau 
• Vocals – Dave Carroll 
• Background vocals – Jimmie Inch & Tim Feswick 
• Acoustic guitar – Jamie Robinson 
• Drums – Scott Ferguson 
• Bass – Jamie Gatti 
• Mandolin/Fiddle – Ray Legere 
• Dobro – Jerry Douglas

Cast:

• Dave Carroll – Dave Carroll
• Ray Legere (Fiddler): Himself
• Mountain Men – Chris Iannetti, Jimmy Inch, Tim Feswick
• Mountain Man (live performance drummer)and Disgruntled Customer– Julian Marentette
• Baggage handlers – Charlie Palmer & Phil Salterio
• Customer service lady/tap dancer– Christine Buiteman
• Flight Attendants – Paula Robbins , Karen Murdoch
• Customer Service Guy – Todd Murchie
• Dobro Player – Jerry Douglas
• Extra’s: Too many to list but thanks for putting in the long day

Crew:

• Director Lara Cassidy
• Director of Photography – Steve Richard
• 1st Assistant Camera – Mike Snyder (Westsidefilms)
• 2nd Assistant Camera – Erin Veeneman
• DIT – trainee – Luke Adamski
• 2nd Unit Director of Photography (Nashville) – Jim Spitler
• Camera – Interview footage – Joshua Young
• Camera – Behind the scenes video & Stills – Brent McCombs
• Lighting director / Gaffer / Key grip – Todd Murchie
• Assistant Grip – trainee – Brandon Ferguson
• 1st AD – Jesse Muson
• AD trainees- Patrick King, Colin Tanner, Patrick Langille
• Make-up – Annemarie Cassidy
• Hair – Brian Hart
• Art Director – Barb Richard
• Set decorator – Shannon O’Halloran
• Wardrobe – Barb Richard
• Background Casting –Chris Pauley / Erin Hennessey
• Background Casting Assistant – Karen Rostek
• PlaybackOperator – Clark Porter
• Craft Services – Sharon Carroll, Max Carroll, Andrea  Dann
• Set Trainees – Alicia Jacques, David Fulde, Chance Chapadeau, Riley Turner, Bianca Marini, Vicki Donkin
• Producer – Lara Cassidy
• Shoot Supervisor – Chris Pauley
• Off-line Editor – Lara Cassidy
• On-line Editor – Steve Richard
• Foley Mix – Chris Pauley

Special Thanks To:

• My wife Jill and son Flynn for your understanding and support
• My brother Don feedback and input
• My parents, Max and Sharon, for the same
• Brent Sansom for his advice and business savvy
• Janice Garden
• Jerry Douglas
• Thor Henrickson and The Centre for Arts and Technolog
• Jeremy Harty of Digiboyz – Technical Consultant
• Johanna Harrison – Web Diva

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P45E0uGVyeg

Follow the links below for clips from Dave's appearance on January 14th, 2010's episode of "The View."

Highlights: http://theview.abc.go.com/video/david-carroll

Exit Interview: http://theview.abc.go.com/video/exit-interview-dave-carroll

The Top 10 Everything of 2009

TIME charts the highs and lows of the past year in 50 wide-ranging lists

By Dan Fletcher

The Top 10 Viral Videos of 2009 #7. United Breaks Guitars

Fuming about mishandled baggage? Singing's the best revenge. When Canadian country singer Dave Carroll found his $3,500 guitar smashed after a 2008 United flight, he tried to navigate the company's layers of bureaucracy, only to see his $1,200 claim get denied because he didn't file through the proper channels.

So in July, Carroll made a music video to chronicle the absurdity, with a scathing refrain: "Should have flown with someone else or gone by car/ 'Cause United breaks guitars." The video was quickly seen by millions and  "struck a chord" (United's words) with the airline's P.R. department, getting Carroll compensation at last. But the twist? Carroll kept flying United, only to have the company lose one of his bags during an October trip to Colorado. Fortunately, Carroll already had a sequel all queued up.

http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,59392900001_1950326,00.html

Dave Carroll is honoured to announce that he is nominated for the 2010 East Coast Music Award for Entertainer of the Year.

“I am grateful to receive the recognition from my peers and nomination for Entertainer of the Year. As 2009 comes to a close this nomination is truly a highlight of the most exciting and significant year of my career to date.

The phenomenal global success of United Breaks Guitars would not have been possible without such a supportive and dedicated cast of volunteers, friends, family and fans.

I was lucky to have such talented players contribute their craft to the recording. Thank you to all the crew at Curve Productions in Halifax, including Director Lara Cassidy, Director of Photography Steve Richard and Chris Pauely; as well as Producer Scott Ferguson.

Special thanks must go out to the over 6.3 million YouTube viewers, who made UBG so popular (from China, to Africa, North & South America and Australia and beyond).”

This is Dave’s third ECMA Nomination as a solo musician.

Previously with Sons of Maxwell, the band Dave co-fronts with his brother Don, they received five ECMA nominations and two wins: the 2006 ECMA for Country Recording of the Year (Sunday Morning) and the 2002 ECMA for Roots Traditional Recording of the Year (Among The Living).

The 2010 East Coast Music Awards Gala will be held on March 7th in Sydney, Nova Scotia.

2010 ECMA Entertainer of the Year Nominees:

Classified

Dave Carroll

David Myles

Gypsophilia

In-Flight Safety

Joel Plaskett

The Divorcees

Full list 2010 ECMA Nominees & Categories:

http://www.ecma.ca/news.as p?section=19&id=92

NEW YORK TIMES - BUSINESS SECTION

United Airlines learned its lesson the hard way that David Carroll was not just another customer.

After baggage handlers at United broke his guitar last summer and the airline refused to pay for the $1,200 repair, Mr. Carroll, a Canadian singer, created a music video titled “United Breaks Guitars” that has been viewed more than 5.8 million times. United executives met with him and promised to do better.

So how was Mr. Carroll’s most recent flight on United?

This Everyman symbol of the aggrieved traveler was treated, well, like just another customer. United lost his bag.

In an interview, Mr. Carroll said that for more than an hour on Sunday, he was told he could not leave the international baggage claim area at Denver International Airport, where he had flown from Saskatchewan. He said he had been told to stay because his bag was delayed, not lost, and he had to be there to claim it when it came down the conveyor belt.

“I’m the only person pacing around this room,” Mr. Carroll said, recalling how he was caught between an order from United staff members to stay and collect his bag, and a federal customs official telling him he had to leave the baggage claim area. The bag never showed.

A United Airlines spokeswoman, Robin Urbanski, said, “We will fully investigate what regretfully happened.”

Mr. Carroll’s life has taken more surprising routes than his luggage. He enjoyed modest popularity as a singer-songwriter in Canada until his video, which has made him a sought-after speaker on customer service.

His father-in-law, Brent Sansom, has become his business adviser to help him sort requests.

This latest episode provided him with fresh material for his most recent performance, which was why he was flying on United — to speak to a group of customer service executives on Tuesday (though without his best shoes and “United Breaks Guitars” CDs that were in his still missing suitcase).

When Mr. Carroll asked members of the audience if they ever had a similar problem, he saw a sea of hands.

“It crosses all income levels and languages and geographies,” he said. “We all don’t like feeling disrespected or insignificant.”

Greg Gianforte, the founder and chief executive of RightNow, a customer service software company, and the person who organized the meeting, said he was sorry to hear what happened to Mr. Carroll, even if it made for a livelier meeting.

“We were thrilled to have Dave come here,” Mr. Gianforte said. “But since United was the only carrier he could take from Canada to Colorado Springs, in a certain sense, we’re responsible.”

Mr. Carroll was reunited with his bag on Wednesday morning.

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/08/21/colby-cosh-a-man-and-his-guitar-vs-united-airlines.aspx

On Tuesday, Haligonian musician Dave Carroll released the sequel to his celebrated internet hit United Breaks Guitars. It goes by the title United Breaks Guitars: Song 2. Not too imaginative, but unless you're a baggage handler for United Airlines, you probably know the old saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

In March of last year, Carroll and other United passengers on a plane in Chicago watched in horror as handlers on the tarmac treated musical instruments like rugby balls; their immediate complaints were turned aside by United staff stuck intractably in "Not my problem" mode, and when Carroll reached Omaha, where his band Sons of Maxwell had a gig, he found that his $3,500 Taylor guitar had been smashed inside its travelling case. After a long and nightmarish jaunt through a claims system much more badly broken than Carroll's axe, he received final word from an otherwise friendly customer-service rep that he had missed a "standard 24-hour timeframe" for formally reporting damage to baggage. So he promised her that he would be writing and recording a trilogy of songs about the incident. The first tune, uploaded to YouTube with a cheeky low-budget video, was recently viewed for the five millionth time.

The success of United Breaks Guitars is being upheld as an example of the global village in action -- a sign of how the new social media have endowed consumers with unprecedented power in our constant struggle to hold corporations accountable and win civilized treatment for ourselves. This is, I think, unquestionably true; but there are nuances to the story.

United could not have anticipated that it was picking a fight with someone who had a lot of viral-marketing strengths. Carroll's efforts wouldn't have gone anywhere if he weren't incredibly persistent, nor would his song have become an iTunes hit if he didn't have an excellent country-pop voice (far nicer than that of many stars in the genre), an affable personality that enabled him to declare image war on a publicly-traded company without seeming to harbour one ounce of bitterness, and a gift for writing a catchy chorus that, God willing, United employees will be hearing people hum until somebody finally invents teleportation. Both United Breaks Guitars and its sequel are much less contrived, and much more listenable, than you might expect if you haven't heard them.

So while Carroll's strategy was remarkably successful, it's not available to those of us who aren't moderately expert singer-songwriters. The damage to the United brand may have run well into the millions of dollars by now, but one suspects the chance they took by saying "Tough luck" to Carroll is one they can still probably take thousands of times over without hazard. And at the same time, the power of social media is available to United, too, and offers them some protection that corporations didn't have 20 or 30 years ago.

Some readers may not be old enough to recall the problems that companies would occasionally have, in the days before search engines, with bizarre conspiratorial whisper campaigns. So-and-So Inc.'s logo proves that they are in league with the devil; Tasty Beverage Co.'s products contain ingredients that sterilize black people. Weird, unfounded stories like this could circulate for years without coming to the attention of a CEO. Nowadays, word of an unfavourable weblog entry or an online urban legend -- let alone an actual documented problem like Carroll's -- can be discovered within hours, allowing the wheels to be set in motion for a response.

And United has availed itself of the opportunity. On our Posted web-site Tuesday, company representative Robin Urbanski, who has followed Carroll's first United Breaks Guitars video hither and yon across the net in a most heroic fashion, was just five hours behind the breaking news of UBG2. Her response is exemplary in its corporateness, claiming that "These videos have struck a chord with us here at United" (see, they have a cute sense of humour about destroying property!), promising vaguely that the company will do better at "respond[ing] to special situations," and insisting that 99.95% of United's bags "are delivered on-time and without incident."

Presumably, that last part means "without incident that United is aware of"; any frequent traveller has suffered loss of or damage to inexpensive items that weren't worth raising a stink about. But then, it's hard to know whether United is worse or better than any other airline in this regard. They just happen to be the outfit that pissed off the wrong guy.

National Post
ColbyCosh@gmail.com

"United Breaks Guitars : Song 2"

Dave Carroll’s Airline Mishap Goes Viral in “United Breaks Guitars”