Audio archaeology

Kevin Irwin has been camped in the back of the web office for the last few weeks with a resurrected reel-to-reel tape deck hooked into a computer. Tape is like a Twinkie--leave it in a dusty box for a couple of decades and it will eventually go bad. So beside Kevin is a piece of ad-hoc tech cobbled by Radio Bob out of plywood, tin foil, light bulbs, and a thermostat pried out of an old CPU. Inspired equally by a toy Easy Bake oven and a Clarkson engineering degree, it is used to cook the tapes, stabilizing them just long enough for one last good playback.

String band sketch by Matt Gordon from their 1980 LP Backroad Breakdown.

Some at the station view this exercise in audio archaeology with trepidation. Radio is meant to play, then go away. And given the quality of much that has come to light from the somewhat random library that survived the move to the new station offices more than a decade ago, one could agree. But now and then, the midden heap disgorges a gem--intermittent reinforcement to keep the digger keen to his task. One such for me is a recording from around 1975 of the St. Regis River Valley String Band.

Back in the day, band founders David and Linda Danks lived around the corner from me in Sanfordville, in a farmhouse on Pickle Street. This was a golden time for live music in the area; another band lived downstairs from me, and yet another down the road in the opposite direction. I recall the largest member of the Danks family was a massive and ugly specimen of swine named Captain Gonad. The band limped from gig to gig in a crapulous and ancient GMC school bus, renamed The Fool Bus. The prime venues of the day were bars, beer blasts and Legion halls. Hearing the band today, the sweet old-time tunes are inextricably bound up in my mind with the din of table talk, the clamor of pinball machines, and the pungent funk of half-dried beer, tobacco, and woodstove-scented flannel shirts.

A Shocking Performance

To open a conversation, a usual gambit is to ask what's new. The usual answer is "Not a whole lot." Maybe you saw an amusing movie; maybe you tell the one about the werewolf, the throat singer and the pole dancer. You might have been to a concert where they sounded satisfyingly like their record. On the other hand, you might have been lucky enough to share the room with Bobby McFerrin last night in Potsdam.

I had been looking forward to the show, having heard McFerrin years before, but I had also been working since before dawn--I told my wife to punch me if I started to snore. But nobody, no matter how dozy, can sleep through something which is really new--a program comprised totally of vocal improvisation. Anyone who recalls the forty-minute drum solos of 60s rock remembers how badly such a thing can go wrong. For McFerrin and his twelve accomplices to be so on top of each moment for 90 minutes left me flabbergasted, and more awake than I have been at any time since I touched that bare wire with a socket wrench. In a time when the word genius gets applied to anyone halfway competent, I want a new word for what I saw and heard. To be present while a first-rate mind makes up first-rate work completely on the fly--I can only babble about it. Years from now I will still babble about it.

All in

No one imagined, when it was just an invitation to apply for funding, just how all-consuming the UpNorth Music project would become. 38 full days of recording in eleven communities, more than a hundred individual sessions, at least a thousand hours mixing and producing songs, interviews, broadcast features, podcasts. Designing and rebuilding the production studio, identifying, recruiting and paying artists, finding studio venues, planning a concert tour, mastering a compendium CD set, clearing performance and publication rights--a million details from remote broadcast setup to getting our new logo printed in frosting on a concert reception cake. Enormous big "ups" to production manager Joel Hurd and to project coordinator Jill Breit for all the sweat and blood.

It's all coming to a head tomorrow with the opening concert in the UpNorth Music Series at St. Lawrence University's Gulick Theater, and with the release of the project highlights in the 3-CD set Music Heard UpNorth. I've been working my way through the set with great delight. It sounds like the North Country--talented, inventive, diverse, quirky. The biggest surprise for me was that I thought I knew the musicians of the region, or at least the best of them. But on each CD in the set, there are at least half a dozen artists I had no idea were out there. Fantastic songwriters, monster instrumentalists, voices to make you cry. When NCPR takes on a project, I'm proud to say we go "all in." And the North Country, I'm proud to say, is full of artists who do the same.

If you can't pick up a copy at the concert tomorrow, Music Heard UpNorth will be available within a few days in stores around the region, and online via cdbaby.com. Or you can contact the station to place orders.

Be everywhere now

I don't very often get out to big outdoor concerts, but when we heard that Van Morrison would be opening Bluesfest in Ottawa, his first return to the area in 40-odd years, we bought our tickets the first hour they were offered. Certain music heard at certain times in life just burns itself into the bottom of the brain. Van has a little chunk of grey matter all to himself somewhere to the south of my prefrontal cortex. I've changed in the interim, and no doubt Van has too, but the songs remain fresh as a daisy.

But while my attention was otherwise occupied, the outdoor concert seems to have changed, too. While the audience was always wired up--by the proximity of tens of thousands of co-religionists--now they are also wired up in a more technological sense. We bought our tickets online, where once we would have queued up for hours outside some box office, gabbing with fellow fans. Inside the venue, the pre-concert rain remained unchanged, but many were plugged into iPods under their umbrellas, grooving to unknowable music, and many more were texting their beer orders to friends who drew the short straw for standing in line. Others were calling directions into their cell phones, trying to hook up friends with patches of grass held open for their arrival.

Once fan banners were used to conceal microphones to capture bootleg recordings of favorite artists--now people wave aloft their phones, broadcasting the concert direct to friends at home in streaming video. We were 50 yards from stage with a good view, but people around us were often turned away from the stage to watch the video feed on the big screen. Some were even videoing the video screen--the giant cyberhead of Van eclipsing the little Van laboring onstage. Be Here Now used to be the dictum when Van was last in town. The 21st century version is, apparently, Be Everywhere Now.