TROUBLE FORTE
Here's the latest bit on my current favorite theme, audible (audio) history in microcosm.
On the macro scale, audio history (historical sound) is more and more obviously the biggest revolution ever in historical civilization since, maybe, the invention of printing or, earlier on, the written document. In micro, audio history is mostly fun and games but always with what we must call a Larger Significance.
Just recently, I was approached-if that is the word for a loud and commanding phone call-by the local First Lady of Do Good in our small Connecticut town. She is famous for grabbing everybody within reach for every imaginable sort of public-spirited project--all of them extremely useful and none of them popular because, of course, they take time and effort. Here, like everywhere else, we are mostly miserable skunks when it comes to performing public works. All but a handful of us will do our best to keep from getting involved. We need a gadfly, then, and we have one.
It's her métier and always has been.
Her husband's family is one of the oldest and always dominant; they practically ran the town and indeed once owned large parts of its land. They still are active in everything and benevolently feel that, along with two or three other old families, they are the town and, accordingly, must assume many of its responsibilities. Nobody disagrees. Highly educated people but also plain New England dirt farmers, all at the same time. An admirable breed! A phone call from that source is a royal command.
When she called me and I answered, the phone jumped. She is loud. "Ed Canby!" she proclaimed.
"The Cornwall Historical Society needs help, and I know that you are the ideal man for it." ("No-No!" I screamed internally.) "Could you do some work for them?" Now, this organization is no Smithsonian. We are a really small town, even if 100 miles from The Big City, whose wealthy have already invaded us with local extensions of their New York apartments for weekends. The Historical Society once occupied the tiny balcony of the auditorium in our town hail, for lack of any other space to house its several yards of exhibits, more or less.
(This, alas, ruined the acoustics of what had been an excellent small concert hall, though never so intended.) Then one of the old town residents left a house on the quiet main street, once farm, to the Society. Last time I was there, quite some time back, the house was scarcely changed from ancient farm days, with a redolent 19th-century smell of old quilts, wood stoves, and kerosene (coal oil to you) and with nearby barns for horses and cows and chickens. Inside was a collection of odds and ends, flea-market style farm tools, railroad parts, old faded signs, handmade nails, ancient clothing, and so on--also lots of faded photos. No doubt in the closets there were fat manila files of letters and documents, assorted and probably uncatalogued. Work in progress. A real rural museum. What in heaven's name could I do in such a place? All this went through my head in seconds.
Good Lord, I've only been around here some 65 years-an out-of-towner, even a New Yorker-and how could I cope with such a mustiness of strictly local lore? "Oh," said the loud voice, "we have some recordings, some tapes. And we knew you were just the person to help us! Aren't you a-what is that thing, an audition engineer? No, I don't mean that, do I? Audibility? Well, some word like that. Anyhow, I know you are an expert on hi-fi." That was a term she knew. Her children's and grandchildren's houses are full of it, not to mention their pickup trucks and off-road vehicles. Plus a Walkman for every pair of ears. Okay then, if not audio, hi-fi.
A very tiny gleam began to show in the far corner of one of my eyes, the one just operated on for cataracts.
Tapes? What tapes? She really didn't know what tapes.
(Not for her to fuss over petty details.) But these were tapes of old Cornwall residents-all about what they remembered. And nobody could play them anymore. What they needed were cassettes, so they could use them like a library for anybody in town. Everybody knows about cassettes. Could I make cassettes? Well, I could make cassettes, after a fashion-depending, of course, on the source, unidentified. Yes, she knew they were on flat reels. Size? Speed? Tracks? These matters were blanks. At this point, I do have two elderly cassette machines, neither working properly. One was the very first high-level "hi-fi" cassette machine ever put on the market, if I am right-the Advent. It lacked all sorts of now-needed features, like a 'phone output to hear what is going on and a pair of meters for its two channels (it has that higher-of–two signals single meter, a system I have always disliked for any recording purpose whatever, cheap or expensive). The Advent motor runs continuously and noisily on a.c., which shows how old it is, and all its controls are nonstandard, as per today. No fault for the original! And both its recording Channels still work. But the sound quality is really not up to what I needed, as it happened. The other machine was an excellent JVC battery/a.c. pro portable, later vintage. But one recording channel was dead or, rather, kept dying and reviving. Two-head, so when it died, you never knew.
So, I was intrigued but, with another operation looming uncertainly (surgical again), I had to refuse and managed to tell the lady so. She thanked me ever so much, and loudly-the phone positively jangled. She is not accustomed to being turned down.
Next day, I began to feel a creeping bit of conscience. This was, after all, right in my own interest. And it was a thing I just might be able to do, and perhaps nobody else around. Oughtn't I at least to it a brief try-just a give sample? When I called, the lady almost jumped out of the phone at me, and in minutes her car drove up my driveway and there was a tape in hand. Triumph! (For her.) In response, I grinned with a sickly pallor. No doubt there were 259 other tapes piled up in a closet in that old farmhouse. But at least I would see what I could do with one of them.
Two whole days later, I delivered not one, but two cassette copies of that tape, as a sample for the Historical Society. One was on two tracks, out of the Advent in mono mode. Not very good: It couldn't take the enormous peaks, but more of this in a moment.
The other was only one track, and thus one ear via headphones. Much better sound, but I could not get onto the second track. I understand they were delighted, but I surely wasn't. I may not be an audio engineer, but I tend to get thoroughly involved and do my best, at any length, when I use what equipment I have on hand. The JVC pro portable is going to have to be fixed-but I do not trust the nearest local repair shops, a dozen miles away in a small city. This isn't the kind of equipment they normally see, after all. So it's back to New York and an authorized shop. I knew I had let myself in for trouble.
But also, I'll have to admit, for a lot of fun. I enjoyed every moment of this crazy, zany tape, amateurish to the point of the preposterous. I roared with laughter at numerous incredible places, and I got to love the old people who tried so hard to express themselves for undying (audio) history. But first I had to find how to play it. No information whatsoever-just tape, on a 7-inch reel. I doubt if the interviewer, way back in 1969, even knew what a "track" was or what speed she used.
She pushed "On" and stuck the mike out in the direction (generally speaking) of the old people who, I suspect, had never seen a mike before nor knew what it was.
Have you ever tried to identify the track and speed info on an unknown tape? It can be surprisingly difficult if you must be sure. I put this tape on my big reel-to-reel Teac and found, at least, that it ran 7 1/2 ips, which was rather surprising, much common reel-to-reel being at 3 3/4. So I could at least play it. But was it full-track, two-track, four-track, recorded one way, both ways, on one or both stereo channels-mono or stereo? On an amateur tape, this is often very unclear, what with wildly jumping levels, long silences, differing segments on different parts of the tape, and so on. Suffice it to say that, with two-track and four track playback choice, I finally deduced that the good lady interviewer had a real oldie machine-two-track mono at 7 1/2 ips, the format pioneered by the very earliest portable, the Ampex 600. The lady evidently didn't know about the second track, the other way back. She used only one track.
That had to be split to feed the two cassette tracks, and do I hate making up cables for that! My Advent had a mono switch, to combine two incoming channels, but the later JVC portable did not. By the time it was designed, there was no longer any interest in mono recording via a two-channel machine. Why bother? So in the end, I'm going to have to get out the soldering iron and make up an improvised two input 'Y" from one source track on the Teac to two on the cassette. I knew I'd get myself tangled up in this project.
We'', in conclusion, you must accept my written description of some really spicy audio history. Just shows what unexpected things can turn up in any sort of historical document.
This tape was marked "Mr. and Mrs.
Charles Parent, Torrington, Connecticut, 1966." Nothing more. You start it from the beginning-right speed, track, volume (more or less)-and you hear about five minutes of vague clunks and rumbles, nothing more than a loud bang (some switch?), and a stentorian voice, peaking horrendously (I grabbed the Teac volume control), announces an interview with Mr. and Mrs. Charles P., who will now announce their names. Then the same voice, at a lower level, says, "Go ahead, Mr. Parent." Silence. Finally, a very faint male voice in the background says doubtfully, "What'll I do now? Whatchou want me to do?" "Just tell them your name," says Ms. Interviewer at enormous volume.
"Wha....Wazzat?" says the faint voice.
"Just say your name for the people." (What people??) "You want my name?" even more faintly. Then suddenly, "CHARLES PARENT," practically bursting my eardrums-an overload blast such as you cannot imagine! Then, again very faint, "Wuz zat all right? Did I do it right?" All oblivious to the mike and proper mike distance. As in my own earlier "people" recordings, folks in those days simply had no idea of a microphone's workings, to the point where they kept making asides and side comments directly into the mike, as though it didn't hear.
Then they would make a set speech as though turning it on-and another side comment like, "Was that all right?" before you had a chance to touch your controls.
These two old people, the Charles Parents, were in their 90s and, it quickly became apparent, almost totally deaf. This meant that the interviewer, after her stentorian questions, would have to lean over and repeat them in the old folks' ears, which she did, followed mostly by non sequiturs. Mr.
Parent just couldn't hear, or maybe the mind didn't connect.
"Now, Mr. Parent, how about that sawmill up in the pines-did you work there?" "Yeah, heh-heh [he had a charming chuckle], them cheeses went into a lot of boxes...." "But Mr.
Parent, the sawmill in the pines...?" "Oh, the Corn'll poines? I think there was a sawmill up thar. Yeah, old man Marsh and John C'houn [Calhoun] build it." "Did you help?" "Yeah, them cheeses-pineapples, I think they wuz. Dunno who made 'em...." Then, five minutes later, suddenly the old guy would speak right out: "Sure, I helped build that sawmill (this being around 1870), lumber at one end, gristmill in the middle, and a cider mill out back." His brain sort of caught up slowly. I found him really delightful and learned that, in the 19th century, the local accent here was utterly unlike that of today, and very much like those of far northern Vermont, as of a later date. Is that history? His wife, Mrs. Parent, was clearer in mind and, it seemed, better educated.
In her half, she came forward to the mike resolutely and stated, ever so clearly, "My name is Sophie Liner, and I am 95 years old. I was born in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, in 1871. I had three sisters [names given] and three brothers, and I went to the Puffington School." Wow-imagine it! This lady was born six years before the tinfoil phonograph was invented, and here she was talking straight to me in my own house. Don't tell me audio history isn't important.
= = = =