7.

“She had rings on her fingers and bells on her shoes!

[Da!, be-ah boo dah dee-ah doo DAH] And I knew without asking she was into the blues

[Da!, da-dee a bah dee-da bah-DAH] She wore scarlet begonias, tucked into her curls I knew right away she was not like other girls, other girls...”

Ten past seven and the sound of the Dead roared to life in a flash of pure sweet desire, bass at +5 of +5 possible sonic boosts in my truck—unadulterated joy—and the 50th anniversary concert live @ Soldier's Field hit me, six months after the fact, hard like a mallet in the chest. My chest reverberated like one of Mickey Hart's gongs. Had I never heard this song before? I had grown up to them, The Grateful Dead, heard their music covered by a thousand different bands in a thousand different ways, but now, for some reason, it seemed new. More real, more relatable, a song I was singing, a song my life sang to me. I saw myself standing there, blithely, in Grosvenor Square, I saw my own hand writing out the lyrics to the song again and again. For come to think of it, I knew the feeling only too well. That moment—you know it just as I do—when someone wild and wondrous enters your life for the first time. Halfway to the gig, and the music bode well for me, singing with the Dead; it was already a good night.

As I sang, I thought, “to all the fierce and wonderful women I shall ever meet, who wear scarlet begonias in their sweet-smelling hair like a badge of honor, I am humbled by you. To all the men,” I thought, “who have managed to find their own stride in a world of fear and insecurity, to these honest men, my wise and charming fellows about whom this song might also bear witness, I salute you. I honor and revel in your future friendships. To the old people, who move slower but are no less quick, to the children, whose insight is not cut with a mistrust born from years of hurt, and to the thinkers and dreamers, the weird ones, the outsiders, I bow before you. To the 70,000 and more souls who I can hear now, cheering on this record, chanting No Our Love Shall Not Fade Away!, I thank you for your hearts. To my Terrapin Nation, my human nation, to all my relations—aho mitakuye oyasin!—I stand in solidarity with you and savor the time in which I may do so.”

“Well, I ain't always right but I've never been wrong Seldom turns out the way it does in a song... Once in a while, you get shown the light In the strangest of places if you look at it right” Crack! sounded a tree branch before me, and a great oak limb fell out of the sky ahead onto the road. “Holy blues,” I thought. “This tune is so good I'm tearing down the woods around me. This is some potent shit.” And I sped on, skirting the fallen branch, through the dark lightless New Hampshire hills, east on 140, past New Durham and all the other lightless little towns scattered thereabouts, getting lost, making course corrections, winding my way ever downward, finally, to Rochester, NH. The night was cool and I was running sound for my buddy's band. By the time I pulled up to the joint, everything was grooving high.

Up to the top floor, band's all here, all seven or eight of us, intros all round, how you doing. Nice folks, I thought. Gear's all set up. They eat dinner, I set up my mic, get some levels. Sound check. Nice board. Mackie, hot shit. 21 channels, one certainly will not do. I'm givin' directions; sound checking a band is kinda like herding cats. I'm working mad knobs. Boom, baby! Mains, monitors, bassey-bass, drummey-drums. Sounds good. Folks are showing up. Showtime.

The band I'm working for, Woodland Protocol, is a band. They sound, mostly, like a pretty decent band. The room is pretty open and woody. Lots of bouncy spots, maybe not ideal but not too bad. I sit in a little crow's nest off to the side of the stage, in front of the left channel. Not a good place to hear anything besides loudness. So, as the evening starts up, I start a mad little dance that keeps up for the next three hours—at the board, fiddle with knobs; middle of the dance floor, stop and listen; back of the house; stop and listen, then sprint back to the board before some mic or other starts a feedback loop that threatens to pull us all in with it. Mean time, I throw my horns together, start jumping in on this tune and that tune, “filling in the cracks,” as one hip cat would later term it that night.

Now I say running sound is like herding cats. What I mean, more like, is it's sifting through a big bucket of water trying to find the oxygen bits. Now I knew, going in, that a great stage sound was in there, somewhere. What I didn't know was that three guitars, bass, four vocals, bongos, kick, snare, overhead, random percussion, my horns and multiple monitors later, trying to squeeze out the best sound I could (and keep the crash cymbals from bleeding into everything else) was gonna be hard. Like, a Flying Wallendas kind feat if ever there was one. And so a couple tunes in, you know I'd done my job and gotten a pretty good mix going. They played some blues: I grabbed my horn and wailed down with 'em. Folks were cheering. I was feeling pretty good. Not so hard, really, right? But then, for my first curveball of the evening, the Basspocalypse hit.

“Man, I can't hear my bass at all,” said the guy playing bass, to me. “What?!” I shouted back at him, my voice drowned in an ocean of bass sitting in my little lookout. “Me either,” said the drummer. Okay, I thought, well he's certainly coming through loud and clear, so maybe they just need more monitor. I turn up the bass in the speaker directly next to them. Head shaking: no different. I turn it up again, more. Still nothing. I crank it. “Meh,” says the hand signal back. The floor is shaking. Without time to work on anything else, the band launches into another song. I run to the center of the floor and listen.

Thump-ba-thump-woof-da-daa-dum-bang-pow! says the bass to my brain, and my gut, and my spleen, etc.. You could say it was LOUD bass, and you wouldn't be wrong. But mostly it was the kind of bass that you feel rather than hear: the Rumble-Boom that happens sub-100hz or so. I look around, at the other patrons. Some are scowling. One guy with a bandana is gesturing rudely to the bartender and pointing at the stage. I can see the bartender can't hear a word the guy's saying, and so he just goes about his business. I start to think, man, funny how the slightest little thing can really just take over the whole s—WHUUMPA THUMP BUMP POW BOP BABOOM says the bass, only now just beginning to shake its moneymaker for us all, the patrons of this divey club and me, and now suddenly, halfway through the first set, I find myself, panicked, trying to figure out how to keep a gang war from erupting on the spot.

I look at the stage, wincing against the onslaught. The bass player is grinning broadly; I guess (correctly) that he can hear himself now. I hadn't thought this much low-end was possible out of the guy's little amp. I'm impressed and horrified simultaneously. I start to run back to the sound board, when some other guy grabs my shoulder. “Hey, you're running sound, right?!” He screams into my bleeding ear-socket. “I think the bass might be UP A LITTLE HIGH!!!!!” “Gee mister, ya think?” I reply in my head. To him I just nod, and turn, diving for the bass slider. I turn it down. No change. Weird. I take down the trim on his channel. Nothing. I'm sweating now. Finally, in desperation, I kill the trim completely and mute the bass channel. NOTHING. And that's when it hits me. The bass player has gone off the res. He's cranked his own amp up to elefen and there's nothing—NOTHING—I can do to turn it down; he's already out of the main mix completely. All I can do, short of shooting off a flare [I mean into him or his amp], is wait. And oh boy, they're just warming up for this one.

I stuff earplugs in my head. It helps. I look at the band; they seem happy, if nothing else. I turn and look at the crowd. No one is dancing. In fact it's starting to look like the scene from the Blue Brothers movie where they play the theme from Rawhide (I like this reference btw). I'm in trouble and I know it. I can't possibly turn the rest of the band up enough to compete (a common sound-dude mistake), so I listen, agonizingly, wishing for some chicken-wire, or a riot shield, or at least a smoke grenade so I could make good my escape, wondering how I could have left my pepper spray in my car. Finally, slowly...grindingly...with all the inertia of a trainwreck in heat, the song comes to a close. I take a deep breath.

Here comes that same guy trying to remind me again that I should really think about turning down the bass or something but there's NO TIME and I dive past him, onto the stage, and politely, looking the jovial bassist dead in the eyes, say, “I need you to turn down your amp. By about 90%, ideally.” There's a pause. Evidently, he's just gotten things the way he liked them and the thought of surrendering his sound to some young upstart sax-goof in a scarf is almost too much. I offer a winning smile. “Okay...” he says. “But I really need to hear myself play or else what's the point?” I nod to him: I understand exactly how much it sucks to play and not hear a note you're making. I level with him. “One player to another,” I say, “what sounds good up here sounds kinda like a minotaur playing a sousaphone at a nuclear test site down there. No fooling.” I point to the crowd of irate bars-men and -women below. “I promise you I'll crank the bass like a rave at Stanley Clarke's house in the monitors if you'll just trust me enough to let me control your sound in the mains. I got good ears, bro.” Or at least I used to, I'm thinking, and suddenly, he complies. I see the knob on his axe go way. down. and as promised, I rock it in all the monitors and wait.

Short version of the story is that by turning up the bass in the monitors to make the rhythm section happy, while turning him down in the house mix, I've created a hissy mess that's irritating the rhythm guitarist and one singer. Meanwhile the other singer can't hear herself well in her mix—I should add that three of the members of this motley creu are in fact using in-ear minotaurs, I mean monitors, while the remainder are leaning heavily on a couple of traditional monitors to hear what's going on. “Why does the bass player not have a monitor plugged into his brainpan,” I mutter, tinkering with the Mackie. The crowd is getting bored and ancy, they need something (like music) to fill the void of their boredom, and so, resignedly, I signal the band to give it another go. I grit my teeth.

...and exhale. The bass is much better. Actually, if anything, it's too light now. Go figure. I boost it up, listen, boost the vocals, listen, turn down the overhead condenser mic, listen more. Midway through the song, an Aerosmith cover, I see the telltale sign of the bass player shaking his head, and I hear the bass start to creep up again. Doom-badoom-dat becomes whumph-umph-whapppf and I think, “on no, please, come on, I was so nice...!” but then suddenly, I grin. It is, for me at least, something of a sinister kind of grin. I am the sound man, here. I must make these mortals understand that they answer to my whim. I make a hard jab for the low frequency EQ, cutoff some of that nasty sub-100hz Rumble-Boom, turn down the trim on the bass, and boost the high end of his EQ channel a touch. I will sculpt this madman's tone if it finishes me off, I say. Ha-HA! “Parry and riposte, bassman!” I say, though I cannot really hear myself, nor anyone else, me. And the mix, for what it is, is restored again.

Da Vinci, I am not. More like Jackson Pollock, actually. But, I reason, for now at least, I have saved Woodland Protocol's sonic bacon. And also, it's time for a beer.

“Hey, sounds better,” affirms the gentleman I spoke with earlier, apparently the in-house rep for Concerned Barsmen For Better Bass; Neighborhood Basswatch; Boozers Against Rumble-Boom. “Thanks,” I say. “Makes the whole sax thing feel like a walk in the park, really.” “Oh, that was YOU playing sax?” he exclaims, shocked. “Holy jeez, you rocked, kid. Bartender, get my friend the saxman here whatever he wants. Sorry dude, didn't know you were in the band and running sound too. Damn.” “Thanks, man,” I say, “I appreciate it. Yeah, actually it's an interesting challenge. But it seems to be going pretty well now, actually.” He looks at me. “Yeah, I saw them here a couple weeks ago, you musta been sick that gig. How long did you say you'd been playing with them? Couple years or something?” “No, I just met them. I know the guitar player but this is the first gig I've had with them.” He looks at me and attempts to clarify. “This month, you mean.” “No, no,” I say, “I literally just met them an hour ago. I had no idea what they were going to play or how they were going to play it. I'm kinda just making all this up. I also am not really a sound guy.”

The guy looks at me again, doesn't say anything. Finally he just says, “bartender, get this guy another round when he's done with this one. Put it on my tab.” And he toasts me and walks away.

Fair enough, I think. Cheers, man. Thanks again.

The band takes a break and I go back to the stage. Talk happens between the group, heatedly. More problems. Basically it's like an electric game of sound-Clue. At least every person on the stage cannot hear another person, in a different monitor, involving a different instrument, and everyone suspects their fellows as being the culprit. The female vocalist needs more acoustic guitar. The acoustic guitar needs more kick drum. The electric guitar needs less kick drum and more beer. Absolutely everyone needs more cowbell.

Zing.

We agree to swap out the bass amp for a guitar amp, angle it so it faces the bass player and drummer, and I turn down the bass in the monitors and quit killing the rhythm guitarist's ears with static. For the moment, all is calm. I'm happily spinning intermission music with somebody's iPod; I'm reminded, as at so many gigs, that I can't always get what I want, and so I decide to grab my beer and take a stroll about the room. Take in some sights, pretend I don't know anything about music...hang out, as it were.

I talk to a group of young-ish folks at one table. You might call them my peers without any great stretch of the imagination. I raise my pint glass. “Salud,” I say. “Yeeeeeaahh cheers!” They exclaim, whole-heartedly. “Um, so yeah, what's that weird leather vest thing you're wearing?” asks one girl. She's looking at me like I just stepped off the set of a low-budget BDSM film and threw on a button-down shirt. “Oh, it's my sax harness,” I explain. “It holds das sax.” She looks mildly relieved. Then, to clarify, I say, “And I didn't just step off the set of a low-budget BDSM film and throw on this shirt.” “Yeah, I wasn't sure,” she says.

The next table has more young-ish people. I toast them too. One of them recognizes me. “Shit, you're that dude who was playing flute before!” “Yep.” “OARMEGHERD YAZZ FLUUUUUUTTEE!!!!” He exclaims, apparently very sincerely. “Yo we got Ron Burgundy up in here yeeeah!” I smile. “Yes, I do enjoy me some yazz flute from time to time,” I confirm. And then just for fun I add, “but really, I'm not prepared.” “Ooooh shiiiit!” says the dude who saw the movie Anchorman with Will Farrell and never let go.

I check a mental box for Friday. Everywhere I go, there are two reactions—and almost exclusively two—that people have when they see me play flute. Everybody over 45 immediately asks me for Aqualung, and everybody else starts in on the Anchorman scene where Will Farrell's character plays jazz flute like a deranged 70's flute...guy. Little wonder Hubert Laws turned down the invite to overdub that scene. The fate of all us roving flautists has been reduced—or perhaps elevated—to one pivotal moment in the hearts and minds of the world, one singular connection by which they might know flute playing, be it jazz, blues, or anything else. Honestly, it doesn't bother me much anymore. Almost always I just humor people. But it sure is funny to see it happen literally every time I pull the thing out.

Aside: by the way (not that you care a whit, gentle reader), the other strange thing about flute playing that people do—and this is true worldwide, mind you—is that when they raise their hands in a mock gesture of playing flute (air flute, right), they always have both hands facing THE SAME SIDE, inwards towards them. Check this out sometime, it's nuts. I've seen it a million times. Every time, whoever is pretending to play the flute will have both their hands facing the same way. How could anyone play flute like this and where did this odd gesture get its roots? The world may never know.

Finally, I arrive at another table occupied by a couple of couples, the two dudes and one dame mostly drinking and talking sportsing things, and another rather bored-looking woman who I somehow begin talking to. We talk about me. She wants to know how my night's going, how I'm able to play with a band I've never met, what I do for a real job. I tell her I play music, sharpen and sell knives, and drive around in my truck listening to music, mostly. I tell her that my truck's name is Lulla. She wants to know how old I am. I tell her I'll be 29 in a couple weeks. She's surprised: I look older. It's an odd combination of factors, I tell her, including stage presence, the boots, the scruffy beard, and a general air of not giving a fuck (remember my post from a while ago? Well I'm still not giving one/any, and it actually seems to be working. Imagine that. A life lived without expectation or pretense. Huh.) She laughs. She likes this approach. We toast. Beer is mostly handy, I have discovered, for doing this with strangers, thereby establishing an esoteric connection, and much less useful, even, for imbibing, oneself. Next she wants to know where my wife is. I tell her we've not yet met, that she's probably living in eastern Europe somewhere, that it wouldn't surprise me if she were a gypsy or a dowager or a photojournalist-ballerina covering the latest news from the front (of the Ballet Russes etc.). She laughs and asks about my ring. Class ring, I clarify. Wrong hand. I hold up my naked left hand as proof. Oh, she says. Yep, single, I say. Unattached and for now unattachable. She laughs again. She likes me, she says. I'm brightening her evening. I'm genuine. That's great, I say. I thank her for her brightness. She says she's going to try and find the craziest chick at this bar and tell her that the sax player has a crush on her, then watch me try and get out of that awkward situation. I tell her I'm the Houdini of escaping awkwardness, that at our core we have a lot more in common than we think, and that I could probably have the crazy chick up and dancing before she even knew what hit her. I explain, briefly, my take on life. That we're born into strange bodies that do strange things, that we lead lives of alternating purpose and confusion, press towards light and love and shy away from pain and hurt, do stuff with one another and ourselves, and then we go. We don't really ask for this. We just get to make the very best of it and it's amazing and weird at the same time. So, I offer, why not go with it? It's like the moment when you first wake up, I say. You don't remember anything and then suddenly it all comes back. 'Oh yeah, that was just a dream, not my real life. THIS though, this is definitely real and makes way more sense.' She grasps the irony and appreciates the tone with which it is delivered, and she laughs, looking at her man, seated next to me, still talking sportsing. She shakes her head. She tells me I'm an incredibly talented individual, that she's staying for the sole reason of hearing me play onstage again. She says I'm unique, and definitely weird; she asks me if I'd like a back-hug. I smile and accept graciously. I am unsure, at this juncture, exactly what a back-hug entails. Presently, however, she turns me around, and presses against me, hugging me, standing bar-spoon style, her arms around my chest. I am taken aback. She is very genuine, herself.

At exactly this moment the bass player runs up to tell me they're going to start the next set. He sees me being reverse spoon-hugged by a woman I've only just met, immediately behind a fellow who is obviously her date, sees both of us smiling, pauses for a moment, turns around, turns back, and gestures to the stage, so awkwardly I begin to laugh. “Gotta go,” I say. “Break a leg,” she says. “Thanks for the back-hug. That was wonderful.” “No problem.” She smiles at me. I grab my beer. We toast again.

Second set starts. Bass is great. Drums are great. Everyone can hear themselves and, seemingly, everyone else. For a brief moment, maybe several songs, everything is perfect. The levels are balanced. All is in balance, neither too loud, nor too quiet, in tune, clean, and warm. I ascend and descend the stage, horns in hand, and as I play, I see simultaneously, there on the dance floor, my honest yazz-flute aficionados, my honest back-hug donor, and my honest sound-conscious bar patron all dancing at once, together, cheering for us, moving together and cheering for the moment, for the hell of it. I look at the band. They cheer, too. Everything is going swimmingly. And then, abruptly, I am given my newest challenge: the Feedback-Loop Monkey Wrench From Hell.

SsssssiiiiiirrrriiiinnngggggnnnnnhhHH!!! screeches one of the ten or eleven mics up on stage. Piercingly. Hot like a pizza-burn on the roof of your mouth only in my ears. I swan-dive offstage, back to the Mackie. Shit. WHICHONEISIT?! I scramble about the board, trying to form a plan. I can't kill the mains, or the abrupt shock of “music!” and then “no music!” will kill the entire vibe. I'll also look like an idiot, and probably not get any more back-hugs tonight, or ever (seriously, when has this ever happened to me before?). I hedge my bets, cutting off each mic in turn, replacing it, nope, not it, not it, shit, this is bad, what am I going to do now shit, not it, not—there! And I kill the vocalist's mic completely. The ring is gone, but now so is the vocalist. I slowly return the level back to where it was and sssssiiiiinnnnnnnnnhhhH it's back. Damn it. What the hell changed? I ask, to everyone and no one. I kill the mic again. I can tell the poor singer is totally thrown. She's so nice, why did it have to be her mic? I wonder. But no time for that now. Now, I must find a way to fix her level so ssssssssssssiiirrrnnnniiigggnnh screams another mic. Oh, shit. Really, another one?

Really.

Now the other singer's mic is going. Or, was it the room mic hanging over the drums? The crash cymbals? The direction of the mics vs the monitors behind them? The distance the vocalists were now holding their microphones from their mouths, which is to say none? Should that even matter? Why can't I figure this out? Why I no sound smart?!

And so, for an agonizing, oh, say, nine minutes or so, I battle with this Mackie rat-bastard, a kind of sonic kung-fu, a terrible dance of clockwise and counter-clockwise, of vertical sliders and mute/unmute/solos, my flute on the table, now long forgotten, and still the band plays on, only instead of no one being present as was the case with the Bruce Hornsby song, here EVERYONE is still around, and they're dancing, but they're confused. Yes, the music is still loud and good, but somehow—they know not why—from time to time it is more loud and less good, respectively, and as I soldier on, defiantly, slowly they soldier on themselves, right out the door. We're down a good dozen or so redshirts, it would seem. Finally, the dance floor lies abandoned, a sonic graveyard. A place where sound goes to wither and die. I finish my beer. Somewhere in this mix, I remind myself, is the perfect balance. I mean we literally just had it like nine minutes ago. WTF.

Finally I come to a suspicious, resigned ceasefire with the Mackie. Entrenched as we both were, our war of attrition had found an uneasy truce: and, somewhat iconically, we begin to sing Christmas carols to one another even as the bombs are going off in the distance. An apt metaphor, for the Balance, however shakily, has been restored. I grab my sax and jump up in time for the last tune of the set. People are back to cheering, now. And so once more we take a set break.

This one does not include exotic platonic kama sutra poses, unfortunately. Gone is my strange companion, and her entourage. Gone too are the young-ish folk who so eagerly anticipated my funky transverse airstream. It is, by comparison, a lonely break. Mostly I mess around with knobs, tweaking the EQ, trying to isolate the feedback culprit. The squeaks are gone for now, but I know they lie in wait for me, lurking, getting ready to strike. The thought of more sound board trouble descends on me like a thunderhead. Boom.

Sigh.

Finally it's time to play, again. The band starts up. The vocals are too low. I raise them. They hold steady. The signal's clipping; the band is louder than they were. I lower the mains a touch to compensate. We're in the green. And...wait. Actually, jeez. This doesn't sound that bad. I look up at the stage. The guitarist, my buddy, is giving me something like the “get your ass up here to play” signal. Well, he's looking at me, sort of, for a second. I figure it's good enough, anyway. And so we roll on into Black Magic Woman.

It's during this tune that I notice something cool begin to happen. The band relaxes. The drums drum more drummily. The singers sing more songily, and somehow everything takes on a slightly less rushed, less stressed quality. It's very subtle, and indeed, were you not onstage in the midst of it all, you perhaps may not have noticed it. But somehow, there in the middle of a fine Santana-solo, something else happened to us. Improvisation. We went off-script. The band grooved with no place in particular to groove to. The sax and the guitar strike up a deal: they will play, over and around and through one another, soloing until either they run out of strength to do it or they start melting faces off the people now clamoring and cheering in the audience. Suddenly, with a spontaneity that can really only be called something like art, the music is back. Perhaps it never really left. And without even caring anymore exactly quite how we might sound, I raised the bell of my sax up to the mic and wailed away.

We play. And it sounds alright. We play some more and it sounds pretty good. I look at my new band, these fine folks I've never met before in my life. They're digging it. I look at the fine folks in the audience and on the dance floor, boogying down: they're definitely digging it. And so, without really trying to let go, I find that I too dig the new sound. Sure it's a little rough around the edges. Sure it's a little wild and throws you some trick shots from time to time. Keeps you on your toes, right. But look. What's really happening is that there's a bunch of people up here on this raised platform, they all have some kind of vibrating thing that makes noise, and they're all basically vibrating their things together, in a way that becomes something else. And for maybe a few good songs in there, we became a band in the finest sense, vibrating together, letting our sounds work over and around and through, so that there came something new, something that I could never and the drums and voice and bass and guitars could simply never do, alone. Together, we were a new thing. And together, at least for a couple minutes in there, everyone who heard us was new, as well.

It might not have been a sold-out crowd of 70,000 lifelong fans, lit with a kaleidoscope light show you could see from space, but baby, right about then, who among us really cared?

“The wind in the willow's playing, 'Tea for Two' The sky was yellow and the sun was blue Strangers stopping strangers, just to shake their hand Everybody is playing in the heart of gold band, heart of gold band...!” The Dead gave us music without pretense, they gave us honest music. And it made us bright. Without being super-cool, without being super-sexy or super-hip. They wrote and played what was in their hearts. In doing so, they showed us the way to another kind of life, and beckoned anyone with ears to hear along for the ride. They wrote the sound that defined generations of honest people's lives, honest freaks and honest lovers, all of us, and it remains the quality of GENUINENESS in their art that will shine through unto time immemorial. As for me, when someone labels me the Genuine Article, well I can scarce think of a finer or more beautiful compliment that has ever been given. Because it's not the stage, it's not the fans, it's not the money, the lights, not even the Mackie, but the simple gift of veritas that stays with us. Truth hits hard.

What else is there?