Candid travel / behind the scenes · 2:24
Black Diamond
— Japan 1999
The band in transit on its first trip to Japan: no stage, no performance, just the anticipation and the people inside the journey.
Archive video 01
Off to Japan
Complete surviving clip · original 4:3 framing · 1999
Two minutes aboard Japan Airlines with Black Diamond and the people guiding the trip. A candid fragment from the road before the shows began.
- Running time
- 2:24
- Source
- DVD-era MPG
- Presentation
- Full-length web derivative
Benny Doro oral history · 1:24
The memory
behind the tape
Benny remembers the people, the anticipation, and Black Diamond’s first trip to Japan.
Transcript
Lightly edited for punctuation and obvious recognition errors. Uncertain names are marked. Benny’s recording is authoritative.
Here’s a fantastic little clip. This is our first trip to Japan, and this is around 1999.
The fabulous Shelly Berggren is in this video. She was kind of our tour manager at the time. She worked with a lot of great bands. She introduced me to Jerry Miller and Alan [surname unclear], and a whole bunch of great people. She’s a fantastic woman and super talented.
I was lucky to know her, and she really looked after us on this trip because we’d never been on this kind of trip, any of us. We were playing different U.S. bases over there, and her and another guy named Jeff organized the whole thing. We just basically showed up and played and took it all in. There’s a lot of great footage, but this particular…
…time on the plane—the excitement. You can see everybody’s just having a good time. They’re still smoking on the plane. It’s Japan Airlines. I look pretty, pretty wild, being probably 27 around there.
So anyhow, Rick Lee is in the band, Kurt Froelich, and Brett Kerrigan, who went on to play with Honeymoon Suite, was our Peter Criss at the time. Great memories. What a trip. Life-changing stuff. And just a quick thanks to Shelly again for everything she ever did. She was awesome, and she’s still with us.
Archive boundary
Nothing removed.
Nothing invented.
The original 2:24.16 MPG remains preserved unchanged as the archival master. The browser version is a complete H.264/AAC derivative: deinterlaced for modern playback, converted to square-pixel 4:3, and presented without cuts, looping, interpolation, or restoration.