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UPCOMING PERFORMANCESTHIS WEEKEND FEBRUARY Monday Feb 17 Wednesday Feb 19
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Monthly Catch-upThe Polar Vortex appears to be wobbling, like a top near the end of its spin. Wham! it bounces down over us and we're cold as hell, then Wham! it flips back, I don't know, maybe over to the other side of the world, I guess, and it's suddenly March or April here. Now we're back into the deep freeze. Live in NY, CT, NH, or PA? We're booked at a show outside Philadelphia next September, and hope to find additional work in the area and en route. School & library shows, coffeehouses, church groups, museums, house concerts-- this is the easiest way to get us into your area, our expenses have been paid, fees are flexible. You've seen us work, what do you think? Our cat is still on strike. He heard the dog bark once, moved up behind the furnace, and now comes out only twice a day. He perches on top of the hot water heater long enough to eat and be petted and take his medicine, then goes back to his cave. People say "they'll figure it out," but I'm dubious. He's spotted Ivy as feisty, and I think he reads her right. He could clobber her, he weighs half again as much, but he's an old guy, and never clobbers anything but rodents. He did get a bird once, but we told him we didn't like it, bless his heart he said "oh, ok" and never did it again. He still gets drawn by birdsong, we'll see what happens when spring comes, maybe he'll get drawn out.
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Little Ivy |
Something about StorytellingThe English storytelling magazine Fact and Fiction asked me to write something about how we managed to give our last live album, Vampire Princess sound as good a studio-level quality of sound. I got sidetracked into describing how I made my first album, long long ago in the twilight of analog. Nobody will make a storytelling record this way again, maybe nobody's interested any longer. But I’ve got a newsletter to put out, and a deadline, so here it is. Let me know if and where you bog down. Adventures in AnalogWeatherbeard is my only solo album. It was made in a studio, without an audience, on analog equipment, by Spencer Lewis. It was Spencer’s idea, I think, I had about given up. I kind-of knew him in the seventies, when we lived in adjacent counties. He used to come to a little coffeehouse I ran in Cambridge VT, and I knew he played fiddle for the square dances that alternated between more modern numbers (some featuring the legendary Michael Hurley) at Uncle Wallace’s barn dances deep in the woods of Belvedere VT. I ran into Spenser again when I was living in Burlington, sometime in the early eighties. He had moved a hundred miles south into the woods of Barnard, across the road from the guy who ran Rooster Records. (Rooster had put out one of Hurley’s records.) Spencer was fooling around with the recording equipment at Rooster, and was beginning to get his sound right, when the company went bust. He bought the equipment and carted it across the street into his dining room where he made his first solo instrumental recording, “Weeding the Garden.” Contemplative solo background guitar, a little “new age” but in a good way, firmly rooted in unshowy folk styles, heartfelt, not at all plastic; the sound was rich and soulful, enveloping, with a big presence. All the equipment was end-of-an-era analog. Spencer was old school before it was cool. I had tried recording live shows and become aware of some of the difficulties presented by my style of performance, which has always been dynamic and at that time bordered on bombastic. I had been working exclusively unamplified for years, running around bigger and bigger gyms with audiences of 200-500 kids. Big volume is your friend under those circumstances, but it doesn’t sound that great on a record, and I found it hard to dial myself down. I'd tried recording a couple of small shows with invited audiences, but they were a different kind of nightmare, one I’d rather not revisit at this point. I had tried studio recordings too, but: (a) microphones were a challenge, levels were a challenge; (b) I had never really practiced any of these stories by myself, they were developed before audiences in a manner similar to standup comedy, so if I wasn't telling it to somebody-- if nobody was there listening-- I choked. I could only stammer and sweat and walk away; (c) studio time was expensive, and the sense of dollars flying out the window — like a taxi meter— made it hard to concentrate on learning what I needed to know. Spencer turned out to be the perfect guy. We agreed I'd pay for the project rather than by the hour. We did have to revisit the sum, I did end up paying more, but there was no ticking meter during the process, and it was worth every dollar. He's a funky guy, he understood what I was up to, knew what I needed better than I did (not hard, I had no idea.) I will always be grateful for the hours and days we spent together on the project. *** It helped that I came to this project with some successful experiences doing both live radio and multiple-take highly edited single-camera television. Live radio got me used the idea that I don’t have to see an audience for it to be real. I knew it was there and could feel it calling the story out of me. It was a real telling, with the edge of live performance, I could never stop and whine “let’s start over.” I began to get used to working a microphone, playing with the effects of speaking closer and further away. I began to get used to the idea of levels— when the needle bumped up into the red and the radio guy turned white, that was good instant feedback. And yet, real and techical as it was, it had the low stakes of something ephemeral, I could approach it playfully because there was nothing permanent about it, it was gone the next day. Multi-take single-camera television got me used to the idea to doing a story in pieces. I’d been doing a series of performances for VT Public TV- actually it was Vermont ETV at the time-- on Enzo Demaio’s show, Vermont Crossroads. As we developed the process, I would begin by telling the story into the camera several times. That would set the timing. Then bits in close up, long shot and a variety of action cutaways, some with me speaking, some purely illustrative. It always took a us couple of days of shooting (usually a quarter of which was waiting for a replacement for some piece of broken equipment), and unknown hours on the AVID videoeditor (which I had nothing to do with.) TV also gave me a sense for an audience distant in time as well as space. Real people were listening, future people, in the future. After the taxi driver told me“you know who you look like? You look like that guy on TV who tells the folktales,” I could begin to feel that time-shifted audience, and feel connected to it during performance. It helped that I didn’t have to keep things going, other folks were in charge, and were ultimately responsible for the final product. There were times when I would have done things somewhat differently, but some of those times I would have been wrong, and on the whole I enjoyed the ride. *** The big technical issue with audio recording this album was dynamic range. The stories sometimes went from intimate narrative to explosions of sudden high volume: the old lady shrieking “Granny?!” the old man shouting “It’s Farmer Weatherbeard!” the witch screaming “You have betrayed me!” the poor suiter calling out “Rapunzel!” as he blindly flees the tower. Record at the intimate level and the loud parts get ugly distortion. Set the levels for the spikes and the intimate parts are wispy and thin. There were technical fixes, and they'd worked ok for the TV — television speakers were by and large very bad back then, and sound could be sketchy— but Spencer had strong ideas about making things sound good on a good system. He didn’t didn't think the technology we had access to was good enough for our recording. What about limiters and compressors, I said. Limiters, he told me, were capable of handling some high bits, but not the kind of thing I was doing, sudden extreme of volume spikes. We’d still get some distortion at the beginning, and it would sound weird on both sides, as the volume rushed up or down. Compressors, he said, work globally to raise the lows and lower the highs, in order to make a smooth and consistent dynamic range. But, we weren't top forty radio, we didn't want a smooth and consistant range-- sometimes it should be quiet, sometimes loud. And in any case, if we record at a low enough setting so that the spikes wouldn’t distort, then my quiet sections would get weird as the compressor pushed them up beyond the amount of information that was in them. The whole thing would take on a nasty processed sound. (Bear in mind, this is all my memory of his explanation of ancient technology. I wouldn't swear it's accurate, and I have no idea of how it relates to what they do now.) Spencer’s solution was to learn the stories, learn when the spikes were going to come, sit with his fingers on the gain knob as I performed, twist down just before the spike, then back up again when it was safe. We loaded so much magnetic information down onto the master tape during those big hollers that, over time and many rewindings, it bled through to the adjacent layers of tape on the reel, making a kind of echo that came a couple of seconds before and after the spike. Ah, the perils of analog! In some places it was kind-of effective, in others, not. It helped that it occured at very high dramatic moments, when folks hopefully were too absorbed to spare much attention for odd little sonic artifacts. Nobody has ever mentioned it to me. But I heard it getting worse over time (or it bugged me more with time) and when we brought it over to CD a couple of years ago the engineer was mostly able to fix it. Ah the convenience of digital! *** I sat on a stool. Sometimes I closed my eyes. I did not try to tell the whole story at a go. I would do a bit until I felt like I was pooping out, then start up again from a little before that spot. Sometimes I'd stop and listen, do it again, listen again. Much of the editing was for timeing. I had a deep enough sense of what was right from years of performance that I could hear when it needed to be nudged one way or the other by fractions of a second. All that was fixed with razor and tape, that’s how it was done back then. Some bits were better than others, mix and match with razor and tape. I'd tell Spenser, and he'd do it. Very high stakes, sometimes, because there was no backup except of course another performance. (Other engineers bounced the bits from one track to another inside the tape recorder, but analog degrades with each re-recording, and Spenser wanted the master to be the original copy.) I began to distinguish between mistakes. Some of my stammers and quickly fixed mispeakings were easily fixable, some were not. Spenser was helpful in guiding me away from the trap of diction and towards propulsive energy. This insight, and the convincing way he conveyed it, was probably his single most important contribution. Well, it’s all digital now, the original tapes are long gone, and in any case had been corrupted by time. But the album holds up. We went for juice, and I believe we got it.
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FARMER WEATHERBEARDThis old folktale was serialized at the bottom of our last two newsletters. Eventually there'll be a place you can go read the whole thing -- and of course, you can hear me telling it on the record PART ONE • | • PART TWO (conclusion) The old man got a handful of churchyard dirt, put the rabbit on his doorstep, and started sprinkling. And as he did, the rabbit settled back on its haunches and seemed to stretch, and its ears drew in, and its face got flatter, and its whiskers drew in and its eyes got more human, and when he was done, there stood his son. And his son said, “Pop, you got me out of there just in the nick of time. I am now a Master of All Masters, and we don’t have to be poor, ever again. Listen closely, I’ll tell you how it works. “We’re going to go to the fair tomorrow, but I’m not going to look like this, I’m going to look like a giant black horse. You sell me to the highest bidder. That’ll be Farmer Weatherbeard in disguise again, but don’t worry, as long as you remember one thing I’ll be all right. Don’t sell the bridle. I’ll be wearing a fancy bridle in my mouth; if you keep that back I’ll be able to change back, and come back, we can do this as often as we want, we’ll be rich. But if you forget, if you sell that, I’ll be stuck as a horse, you’ll never see me again.” The old man nodded, “I can do that.” Next morning he led a beautiful big black horse to the fair. Everybody wanted to buy it, but the one talking the most money was a tall, powerfully built, sinister looking man with a hood, and a cloak, and a patch over one eye. “I don’t do business out in the street,” he said, “Come on, I’ll buy you dinner.” They went into a restaurant, sat down in a booth. Farmer Weatherbeard ordered dish after dish, glass after glass, bottle after bottle. He kept the old man up hour after hour. The old man’s head was spinning, his eyelids sagging; well after midnight Farmer Weatherbeard brought out the contract. “Sign here.” The old man put his mark at the bottom-- and he sold the bridle. Farmer Weatherbeard ran outside, jumped on the horse. “Now I’ve got you!” And he rode that horse mercilessly hour after hour, beat him and dug his spurs in, top speed, never a pause, never a drink, hour after hour after hour. Well into the next day they came to an inn. Farmer Weatherbeard led the horse to the stables, tied him up backwards into the stall, so his tail was at the manger, and at his head he put a bucket of red hot coals. “There,” he said, “if you’re hungry enough, if you’re thirsty enough, have all you want of that.” And he strode off into the in. Fortunately, there was a stable girl there who hated to see animal treated badly and didn’t care if she got into trouble about it. “I’ll see you get something to drink,” she said, moved the bucket of coals, untied the horse, turned him around, and slipped off the bridle. The horse turned back into the boy again, took to his heels. Farmer Weatherbeard knew the instant the change took place, came running out of the inn-- “I’M AFTER YOU!” The boy was running past a pond. He jumped into the water, turned into a trout, started swimming away. Farmer Weatherbeard jumped in after him, turned into a pike, with rows of sharp teeth, started swimming after the trout. Farmer Weatherbeard broke the surface, turned into a falcon, flew up and around, up and around, looking for the swallow. The swallow turned back into the boy, told the princess everything that had happened. The princess said, “Quick, turn yourself into a ring, I’ll hide you on my finger.” “No, said the boy, “that won’t work. Farmer Weatherbeard will make your father sick, then he’ll come as a doctor and say he needs the ring to make the medicine.” “Well, if that happens,” the princess said, “I’ll say my mother gave me this ring, and that I promised her I’d keep it forever to remember her by.” The boy couldn’t think of anything else to do, he turned himself into a ring, she put him on her finger. And everything happened just as the boy had foretold. The old king got sick. Farmer Weatherbeard came as a doctor. The king sent for the princess. “Daughter, give this man your ring.” “Oh,” said the princess, “I can’t give up this ring. My mother gave me this ring and I promised her I’d never part with it, that I’d keep it to remember her by.” “Daughter,” said the king, “your mother has been dead for years. It’s your father who’s dying now. Give him the ring!” “Oh,” said the princess, turning the ring around and around, “I can’t. It’s stuck on my finger, I can’t get it off.” “I’ll get it off,” said Farmer Weatherbeard. Farmer Weatherbeard came running across the room, changing into a rooster as he ran. The rooster ran into the fireplace, he scratched and peered, scratched and peered, looking for the ring. The ring turned into a fox, and bit off the rooster’s head, and that was THE END of Farmer Weatherbeard! |
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