Playback is a Bitch

Last night in East Harlem a woman was sitting in her automated wheelchair, outside of a Duane Reade.  It was hard not to look-- she was beautiful-- ageless and drawn from illness.  She was breathing from a mouth device that looked at first glance like a sort of kazoo.  I hesitated, but had to ask... she motioned her head with difficulty, toward the door... so weak, thin as a young child, she could barely manage the armrest controls.  I held the door... it was an ordeal for her to just enter. She thanked me, barely speaking...  using the mouthpiece... absolutely no breath of self-pity or bitterness, she went forward... 

Me, the useless sympathy-soaked sponge of human compassion... Jesus, I asked, what sort of punishment is this for a human being-- what payback? As though there is any rationale for suffering-- for the homeless veterans, for the woman incinerated in a chocolate factory, for the souls crushed in last week's tornadoes, for my friend whose brain tumor has stripped her of her postural dignity, her grace. 

People used to console me when my sister repeatedly forged and narrated to our disadvantage... don't worry, she'll get her payback. But she doesn't.  Life doesn't work this way... childhood cancers, neuro-muscular diseases... they continue to ravage the good and the bad.  Beloved wives are hit by drunk drivers,  children fall from cliffs and brave men drown in cold seas.  

I find myself struggling often with the occupational annoyances of most career musicians-- tinnitus, compromised audio issues.  Few of us trust ourselves completely in the studio, mixing.  Many bravely step out on stage and turn their amplifiers up without consideration. It's not intentional, but there's a certain competitive performance headspace volume which comes with the territory, despite the advice of sound engineers.  

Last night I watched Woodstock: The Director's Cut... a longer version of the original which I had not seen for at least 40 years?  It's become sort of a cliché to my generation... a landmark, a cultural monument to a time that seems further and further away than ever.  I keep thinking the way I heard music back then was different from the way it sounds now.  I play vinyl records occasionally... my headphones only underscore the sense that my ears are not created equal.  Not that I would have done things differently...

Alvin Lee was incredible.  I forgot how great... having had the opportunity to travel with him in the early 80's... I could only remember how privileged I was to sit in his dressing room while he messed around on his red Gibson 335, casually churning out jaw-dropping ideas and phrases.  He was fairly quiet otherwise.  And Hendrix, of course-- that improvisational ending of Purple Haze as though he gave up on his band and just played.  You feel him move from 'stage-guitarist' into inspiration and truth.  

But the innocence-- the vibe, of course... and most of all-- the lack of branding... no corporate sponsorship or signage except messages on T-shirts and flags.  At the end of the film there's a reeling-off of musicians who have passed... and then of words-- things that have since lost their meaning-- integrity, compassion, kindness, etc... equality... 

I have friends that work at the recently fallen banks.  In the Woodstock days financial CEOs made a reasonable salary.  Greed was not the religion of corporate culture.  There was economic inequality but nothing like that of today.  There's a website that lists the payment received by each artist at the festival.  It's staggeringly modest. 

No performers at Woodstock had earpieces or pitch correction; some of the bands were awful.  Something musicians know-- the audience is often hearing something completely different.  Stage volume is deceptive.  If you played in dive bars, you never heard yourself sing. Someone had to play it back-- and it was rare that anyone recorded live performances.  It required equipment and planning, like these festivals.  Stephen Stills... in those days-- well, he was just so damn good, no matter what he became. 

The pandemic musical intermission encouraged me to rethink musical priorities.  Recently I rediscovered a singer I'd heard almost by accident in a Washington, D.C. club long ago-- Eva Cassidy.  Yes, she was doing covers, but her guitar playing was excellent, and her voice-- well, up there with anyone.  I was riveted.  It was reassuring to listen to her performance which was so fortunately captured with little fanfare and alteration by some angel in 1996.  It's humbling-- nearly perfect.  Eva passed away just months after the recording. Unfortunately, there's now a pop-up message on every YouTube video reminding the listener that a new album has been released adding strings and orchestration to these magical tracks.  Schmaltz it up, why don't you?  Okay... it's a real orchestra, but doubtful she would have approved; unfortunately, we can't speak for the dead.  Legacies and family members sell these people out.  The likes of me cannot save them.  Most often there is no Director's cut. 

I am a huge Clifford Brown fan.  He, too, died way too young; I have most all of his recorded material and among them my least favorite is the one with strings. I'm opinionated and stubborn, but why, I ask? And who will profit from this girl's brilliantly pristine performances now?  I don't know.  Current engineers can create nearly anything out of sound waves and a computer; they can even fool a dog or a whale. For the rest of us, playback, when we actually get to hear it, can be a bitch. 

Noise of Summer

Summer mornings, rather than waking abruptly,  I occasionally slide from sleep into a sort of continuum of awareness.  Maybe it's the open window-- the way muffled night sounds blend into day noise-- a sense of nostalgia in the warm breeze, the birdsong-- but sometimes I forget where I am, what phase of life I am coasting into-- a sort of soft landing… as though I am steering through a dream, and for seconds feel I can time travel.  I often think of my Mom-- she is somewhere between life and death, between awareness and dementia-- and I miss her voice, her quiet singing and those kitchen sounds that are part of all of our personal geography.  During these moments, I can bring her back-- I can bring myself back… I listen for familiar clues, for music.

Most people these days reach for their phone, upon waking-- the way we used to reach for our lover, check the alarm, calculate how we could prolong morning bed-time-- before children, responsibility, reality called us into our day.  For some of my friends, waking brings the hard landing of depression, of regret-- we are no longer who we were, we are no longer lying with our great loves, no longer waiting for our babies and toddlers to jump on us with their laughter and their affection-- our puppies and kittens have aged and passed on.  Here we are with our past-prime selves, reconciling our agenda with
another remembered present… bringing the sounds of the day into focus.

Friday afternoon I went to have my hearing checked.  I am on Obamacare-enforced medicaid, like many of the income-challenged in this city, and while they relentlessly remind us to visit our healthcare facilities, they generally cover very few reasonable remedies.  Reluctantly I agreed to see the audiologist, having abused my ears for a lifetime, played ten thousand loud rock and roll gigs swimming in decibel-rich oceans, weathered a virtual hurricane of guitarists who have heard little above 4,000 Hz since their teenage years.  Many of them nevertheless lay it on for the rest of us, like a thin audio sandwich slathered in ketchup and mayonnaise so the main ingredients are virtually indistinguishable.

Not that I am innocent; volume was definitely my substance of choice, I confess to the ENT specialist who made me earplugs 10 years ago when a European tour left a permanent souvenir in my ears.  I remember how as a young player I'd melt into Marshall stacks and absorb the aural loops and acrobatics of stage audio.  I'd imagine riding a rough massive sound wave which rose and curled and brought me breathless to some new beach of musical denouement... but like all great drugs and unprotected sex-- there's a price and I am paying it.  My Dad survived five years of combat with some wounds and scars; his hearing loss was low on the macho-hero list of complaints; there is no purple heart for inner-ear damage.

In the city, there is a constant subtle roar; some neighborhoods are louder, but few are completely free of this-- motors, traffic, air conditioning, underground sounds, airplanes and helicopters-- the cumulative buzz of voices-- a rush, like wind-- even in the quiet patches.  There is very little silence, and when there is-- in these dead audio moments, I am aware of the rushing in my ears which crescendos to a whistling in the hours after loud gigs.  Yes, I now use my earplugs-- my protective devices which are a little too little, a little too late… but they take the edge off, and they don't really ruin the experience.  Some of my peers lament their hearing loss chronically.  They miss their old acuity and the way music sounded.  For me, I chalk it up-- I'm alive... I can put headphones on at medium-volume and still indulge.  There is perpetual noise in my life.  I ride subways, I walk the streets, I leave my windows open and hear the living sound of urban energy, like a blend of grey-waves.

What surprised me Friday is how little my hearing parameters seemed to have changed, despite the tinnitus.  I can understand speech, and apparently the new normal is significantly less acute than it was years ago.  Look around.  Scarcely anyone in the city is not wearing earbuds or some kind of headphones.  Speak to anyone on the street and they first remove their device.  On subway platforms musicians are playing to a vastly diminished audience; most everyone has their own portable entertainment in their phone.  But the ambient noise level-- when trains pass, especially dual trains-- exceeds most normal phone volumes.  No wonder we are an increasingly deaf culture.

Like the old Luddite I am, still without a cellphone, I am hyper-aware of the constant public phone-use.   Everyone in the street is talking-- earbuds in, microphones on-- looking straight ahead, and having a conversation-- on buses, trains… in elevators, at the gym… everyone is talking at once.  It's loud, as well.   I often wonder if lovers ever have those late night phone-in-the-closet dialogues when they sleep apart-- where listening is the focused activity.  No visual-- nothing but waiting for the voice on the receiver telling you what you want to hear.  It was everything-- the whispering, the confessions… the sound-on-sound intimacy.  We exchanged our first words of love in the dark, this way, so many of us.  It felt important and sexy-- listening.  It was all we had, and we invested in it.  Anyone could pick up another extension and eavesdrop, but it still felt so private and safe.  With all the texting and face timing, I don't think voice-to-voice communication is the same.

The face of the city has changed so drastically.  Many of my friends spend time on sites that post old photos of New York.  They look important and great to us, these images.  What people don't often speak about is how the sounds of the city have changed-- how not just the music has changed-- but how the way we hear music is different.  We are in our own little worlds, listening to our personal downloads-- watching clips, sampling songs-- texting and sharing… but essentially we are solitary. We are missing that version of conversation-- whispering, lying in bed in the morning with the street sounds seeping through windows, the stereo on… looking up at the ceiling, sharing our dreams and plans… inventing dialogue-- a version of love that relied less on visuals and more on what we said and how we said it.

So while I function with a soft roar in my ears-- a whistling and ringing and rushing I can never remove, I realize it is the memory of things I heard that I value more than the actual sound.  Like a painting of the moment-- a cinematic recreation rather than a digital accuracy, or like old photographs where not everything is in sharp focus, but the image is somehow present, and important.  I will take my audio memories any day, vintage as they are, faded and fingerprinted with static and ambience, blurred like dreams and weighted with longing and love; I am still listening.  

Ship Song, 2013

Message 3 on my voicemail today informed me that an email was sent without the anticipated 'attachment'.  Sometimes I imagine if I had a business card, it would say ‘Ironist’.  But on Sundays I try to live my life spontaneously, to unravel each moment without a pre-conceived agenda.  So the ‘lack of attachment’ comment had extra resonance.  The thing is, I am over-attached.  I have too many friends—not the facebook kind-- the kind that call you first to say  I-just-fucked-my ex-husband or my-biopsy-came-back abnormal.   Or some nights it’s I’m really down, or I took too many vicodin and I’m drinking, or I’m losing my hearing.  Seriously.  I can’t hear out of my left ear.  

And I listen.  Sometimes it requires humor, a philosophical discussion of whether we’d prefer blindness or deafness, ad absurdum.  Sometimes it’s exchanging heartwreck, disarming the potential emotional murderer, elaborating the downside of suicide, alternating between Plato’s wisdom and Rihanna’s.  The thing is, I love my friends.  Most of them.  I love the ladies who confess things to me at the gym (some of them) and my upstairs neighbor’s old photographs.  I look, I listen, I deliberate, I care.  I feel sad and I miss people. It hurts when they move away, when they are miserable, when they smash their guitar or their car, when their daughters are using, when their Moms die, when they say things that no one else says. 

I have learned to let them come and go--- not to hold them in a room or expect them to remember my birthday (well…. most of them).  When I feel love is not passionate and exclusive I leave.  I try to time-defuse my own emotional emergencies and besides, no one leaves their phone on at night except my crazy love-obsessed kids.  I can pour my aching bloody heart into an email and know it will be read with a Starbucks on an iphone, not unfolded and handled by candlelight in a dark room, in solitude.  The soundtrack could be that annoying ‘Fun’ or some soppy Josh Groban or whiny Rufus Wainwright or Call me Mr. Flintstone I can make your bed rock  with a Nicki-Minaj-sized butt in front of him on line. Out of my control.  Like all my ‘attachments’.

The fact is, I seemed always to be the person in the room who got selected, the one psychos stopped in the street for directions, for money, for solace or company… for an ear, a hotdog…  It is genetic, this thing.  My Mom had all kinds of annoying ‘friends’ in the supermarket, on the block, at the gas station.  But she seemed to be able to turn and shrug pretty consistently.  Her bills were paid, she had no clue how to qualify for a mortgage or what social security really was.  I, on the other hand, feel a sort of hole whenever one of my friends hangs up or walks away.  It’s a hole that eventually fills in, but it’s a hole.  I miss things.  I miss things I did, nights I laughed and nights I cried.  I miss feeling like I wouldn’t trade anything with anyone, I miss really loud guitars and Marshall stacks without worrying about my poor distressed ears, I miss throwing off my clothes and jumping into a fountain at night, standing up in a convertible at 70 mph, running barefoot, the feeling of zipless sex in an elevator. 

My friend who was a bona-fide rockstar was robbed in December.  Some cheap thugs broke in and took her stuff.  Of course there’s insurance, but they took her maybe worthless old non-vintage 1990’s synthesizer and she misses it.  Her whole song catalogue belonged to this thing, and it hurts like a lost dog.  Why can’t people understand these things?  When I tell my kids to ‘let it go’ I know how much I miss that first kick of the baby inside you, and my own ultra-internalized drama-queen teenage sickness.  So is it the insecurity of the lifestyle I’ve chosen? The fact that I never know for certain whether we’ll make the monthly insurance payment, the maintenance… that things can disappear so easily, they seem not transient and cheap but more valuable?

My son is texting, listening to Nas, ordering a slice, checking his calendar--- connecting, literally… but I am the one standing still with ten thousand strings and wires.  Worrying, missing. 

And on the other hand, I wander unstirred by art galleries, thumb unmoved through new novels, yawn at the fashion-week runway shows, and find the only nudity really upsetting is that of the Emperor.  The Grammies were musical Girl Scout cookies.  Even the shenanigans and spectacles feel silly, overdressed.  Jack White looked stupid and pasty and I wonder if he is missing the first White Stripes gig when his wife or sister or ex-girlfriend or whatever she was looked fat and awkward and nervous. 

Adele is not even fat, Justin Timberlake looked like a dumb Ken-doll version of himself, and maybe it is my shitty TV or my tinnitus, but everyone sounds shrill and thin and pageanty.  There is television-- -the shows, the news, the new generation Law and Orders-- scripted reality, and unscripted unreality.    Everything has a soundtrack; every song has a video, a visual, a red-carpet-worthy costume….isn’t the music alone ever enough?

Maybe I am just old.  I remember my Mom, my guest onstage at some massive 1970’s rockstar concert, asking one of the band members ‘Don’t you boys know any songs?’

Still, I go to the gym and I listen to stories; I tell my own and sometimes I scarcely recognize these people who have told me intimate things they haven’t even told their shrink.  Or other times, I go home and cry for them and write a song they will never hear.  My catalogue--- the endless unalphabetized people who have touched me, and still touch me, and wreck me, and make my life nearly unmanageable like a hoarder.  Rich men amass money… and they spend it; we emotional harvesters absorb moments and spend them carelessly.  I’ve always had this fascination/fear of the sea.  Not like a surfer, but like a stranded Robert Louis Stevenson character.  Since the hurricane, I’ve listened with great interest to the victims that cannot tear themselves from their ruined houses, from future peril, because their attachment to the sea is ironically related to the threat.  After all, we are chronically attached, terminally connected, some of us standing alone on some familiar shore feeling all the ships of our lives recede into some emotional horizon where our past and future endlessly flirt but never meet.  Few of their passengers ever think to turn around to wave, and if they do, we’re much too far to see.