Traveling Sprinkler (9 page)

N
AN CAME SMILINGLY OVER
with Raymond and I said, “Hi, folks,” and sat them down at the kitchen table. I decanted the sushi onto plates and brought out the little soy sauce saucers so that we could each of us mix our own personal octane mix of wasabi. The best thing about sushi is the wasabi mustard—it clears your head like nothing else. We talked about the chickens for a while, and whether a fresh egg tastes different from an egg you get from the supermarket. Nan said that before she got the bantam rooster a hawk had killed two chickens, but the flyweight bantam is fierce and fearless and he protects them. Then I asked Raymond how his music was going. He said it was going okay. I asked him if he could show me how he made beats and he pulled his MPC beat-making machine from his backpack and we hooked it up to my computer speakers and he cycled through some of the presets and got a chesty kick drum going and made a quick eight-bar loop. It sounded excellent. Nan and I were rocking our heads, looking at each other with our eyebrows slightly raised while Raymond tapped on the rubber pads with his fingers and fiddled with dials.

“So Raymond,” I said, after a while, “what would you suggest I get if I wanted to make music? Should I get one of these MPC things? I can't spend a huge amount of money.”

“What kind of music do you see yourself making?” said Raymond, in a grown-up sort of way.

“Well, I bought a cheap guitar and I really like it”—I pointed at my Gibson Maestro, carelessly propped in a corner of the kitchen—“but really I'd kind of like to make a superfunky dance song that people would have to get up and dance to.”

“There are basically two ways to go,” said Raymond, “real analog hardware or software. I use both. Hardware's nice because you've got actual dials and faders and pads, but it's pricey. Do you have vocals?”

“Yes, I've got some vocals. Vocal fragments.”

“Then you're going to need a good microphone and a USB audio interface. The Saffire 6 is good.”

“His grandparents gave him some money for his education,” Nan explained.

“Thank heaven for grandparents,” I said. “My grandparents bought me a bassoon.”

“A bassoon,” said Raymond. “Do you still play?”

I said I'd sold it a long time ago. “And I have very limited means at the moment.”

“Then you should just go with software. Get Logic. It'll cost you two hundred dollars and it's got tons of instruments.”

“Okay.” I began taking notes. “Logic.”

“Yeah, you can pretty much do any bizarro thing you want with it. It's got a synth called Sculpture that makes glass and wood sounds, and sounds like bouncing marbles.”

“Bouncing marbles,” I said, longingly, writing it down.

Raymond pulled out his computer and showed me a song he'd been working on in Logic. The vocal tracks were blue and the other tracks were green. He touched the A key and showed me how he'd made a white-noise sweep. “There are vocals with these,” he said, “but I've got them muted.”

“Play some of the vocals,” said Nan.

Raymond hesitated. “Mom, as you know, they're a tad explicit.”

“Oh, go ahead,” said Nan. “We don't mind being shocked, do we, Paul?”

“Let me quick listen first,” said Raymond. I handed Nan the pistachio bark while Ray put on his huge studio headphones—they had a spiral cord—and he listened to his lyrics, moving his head to the side with the beat. He hit the space bar to stop the playback and grimaced. “I'm not sure. I'll play you a little bit of the chorus.”

He played the chorus. It was something like “Baby I got some beans in these jeans, I got some beans in these jeans!” There was something else about “crucial fluids.”

I laughed, slightly embarrassed for Nan. “That's good,” I said. “Very catchy. Nice hook. Let's hear more.”

“I've got another song that's less inappropriate.” He hunted in a folder for the file.

“This is wild and spicy,” said Nan, meaning the chocolate.

Ray played us some of the other song. Something about “My shoes don't want to fit and I'm waiting for the late bus. Waiting for the bus in the rain.”

“That's great!” I said, and I meant it.

Nan looked proud.

“What about your songs?” asked Raymond politely.

I reached for my guitar and I strummed a chord. I'd tuned it carefully before dinner. “My singing is no good. I can't do it.”

“Come on, play us something,” said Nan.

I played a D minor chord, alternating with the no-name chord. Then I sang a snatch of the street sweeper song and two verses of the doctor song.

“Whoa,” said Ray. “I heard a little Radiohead action in there.”

“It's derivative and awful,” I said. “It's bad, it's bad. It's no good.”

“No, no, it's good,” said Nan sympathetically.

I put the guitar down. “Eh, I can't sing, but it's fun.” I turned to Ray. “If I get Logic, will you show me some tricks?”

“Sure, anytime,” he said. “I'll show you how to use pitch correction. You can sound almost like Kanye West if you want.”

“I doubt it. Boy, he's got his hands full with Kim Kardashian.” I gathered the plastic trays that the sushi came in. “What about you, Nan? Do you sing?”

She held her hands up. “I only sing Beatles songs.”

“Let's hear one,” I said.

“Oh, I'm out of practice.”

“At least do ‘Blackbird,'” said Raymond.

Nan sang, “Blackbird singing in the dead of night, Take these broken wings and learn to fly.” I felt a strange lump in my throat. She finished and we all sat there.

“Damn!” I said. “Really. Damn.”

“That was really good, Mom,” said Raymond.

Nan wiped something from her eye. “I guess we should be going,” she said. “Thank you for dinner.”

I shook Raymond's hand and pointed at him. “Keep going with those songs,” I told him. “You've got the touch.”

•   •   •

I
SPENT THE MORNING
downloading Logic from Apple, which takes a long time because there are many gigabytes of sampled instruments. I also bought the Beatles doing “Blackbird,” because Nan had sung it so well and I wanted to remember how Paul McCartney did it, also some Kanye West songs and three by Radiohead. I spent two hours watching how-to videos on YouTube and ordering a manual. Logic is not self-explanatory. It's ticklish. It does unexpected things. But, as everyone on YouTube said, once you get into it, it's very powerful. Finally I created an instrumental track and set it to Steinway Hall Piano. Each note of a real Steinway is sampled, i.e., recorded, five or six or seven times at varying volumes and loaded into something called the EXS24 Sampler. I played a B flat chord with my headphones on, using the shift-lock keyboard, which allows you to play using the letter keys of the computer, and I was stunned by how big and true it sounded. I felt like Alfred Brendel playing Mussorgsky's “The Old Castle,” coaxing the licorice goodness out of a vastly expensive instrument. I felt like Maurice Ravel playing “Sad Birds.” But obviously I needed a real keyboard.

I went to the music department at Best Buy and stood there for a while. “Any questions at all?” said the salesman. He was a young, friendly bass player who was going to Berklee College of Music in Boston.

I said I wanted a MIDI keyboard to hook up with Logic.

“What size are you thinking?”

“I guess the traditional eighty-eight keys, because that's the number I'm used to.”

He showed me some eighty-eight-key MIDI keyboards. They cost a fortune.

“Thanks, let me study these,” I said. Two children were plinking loudly and tunelessly on some portable clavichords in a different aisle. Eventually the noise began to get to me, and I went into a small glass-walled room filled with drum sets and maracas where it was quiet. Did I want to spend a vast sum for a full eighty-eight-key keyboard, a real piano-size keyboard, or did I want to get something smaller and less expensive? I decided I didn't need all eighty-eight keys, because honestly I never liked the very low and very high notes on the piano anyway—both extremes are harsh in different ways. I walked back out into the noise.

“On second thought, I think I want something more compact,” I said. The salesman tapped on a box that held the Axiom forty-nine-key keyboard. “I have an Axiom 61 and I love it,” he said. “It's a real workhorse. The classes at Berklee use the Axiom 49 and they've never had any problems.”

So I bought it. I also bought a big book of Prince songs. I almost bought a Blue microphone as well, which had a lovely retro design. It was on display under glass near the cash register, but I restrained myself. The keyboard was enough for now. It had “aftertouch,” something that real wooden pianos don't have. After you play a note, if you press down harder on the key it will detect your increased finger pressure. The keyboard was a hundred times less expensive than a Steinway Hall piano, and it was made of plastic, but it had aftertouch.

•   •   •

H
EY THERE, PEOPLE,
and welcome. This is the Poetry Pebble Tumble, and I'm your host, Paul. Tonight we convene by the light of a small, very round moon that has things to tell us, with a star near it like a pasted-on beauty mark.

I'm smoking a limited-edition Viaje Summerfest cigar. Wow, is it strong. Strong and full of brown tuneful certainty. It's sold with loose weedy leaves poking out the end, which makes it seem exotic until you wrench them off with a turn of the wrist and roast the tip. It's my ganja. Here's to you, Bob Marley, you reconciler of opposites, you peacemaker. “One love.” You said it all in a single phrase.

I'm totally stoned on this Viaje cigar. Man! Why do people need medical marijuana when there are these tightly wrapped cylinders of bliss from Latin America? I could get high thinking about the word “intrinsic.”

Once in music school I was out in a Frisbee field with two friends, a clarinet player and a bassoonist. I was starting to be full of the desire to write poems, and I thought real poets talked about words all the time, so I asked a pretentious question, as poets are permitted to do. I said: Offhand, what's your favorite word? The clarinetist said, I don't know, what's yours?

“Inscrutable,” I said. I gave it a big throat-wiggle of inscrutability when I said it. My two friends said, No, “inscrutable” is not that great. I was stung by their dismissal, but I didn't say so, and when my friend the bassoonist said that “cash” was his favorite word, I said, Oh yeah, cash, legal tender is the night, baby. And when the clarinet player said “kegger,” I said, Oh yeah, “kegger,” that's very good. I'm not going to be a naysayer of other people's pet words. That's not my role. Plus “inscrutable” isn't as good as their two. It would be nice to record the particular clunk that a Frisbee makes when it angles hard into the grass and use it in a rhythm track. Prince uses those great damped piano thumps in “Let's Go Crazy.”

My role is to be here in the side yard when the moon is swimming in the deep end of the sky with the treeshapes near it. It's a full twelve feet deep under the nightpool and there's a moon ring down there, and I'm swimming down toward it and I hear the high vacuumacious sound in my eardrums and I feel the tautness pulling between my toes and I'm thankful that all my thoughts are nonsexual, and that I can sit here with my mouth open and my eyes slitted.

There are only so many nights like this. The middle of summertime, and even though it's late, a cricket like a bartender with a rag in his hand is mopping the surfaces of sound. Just one. The rest of the crickets are silent. Their abdomens are sore and chafed and they don't want to chirp anymore, they want to rest. As do I. Even this one that I'm listening to is getting drowsy. He goes:
chert chert chert
. And then there's a long pause while he sits and lets things droop, wondering if anyone's listening. And then
chert chert chert chert chert.
And then another long pause. Birds by day, crickets by night, singing away.

I'm staring right at the fucking moon and I don't care who knows it. I've heard so many different Logic sounds come from my computer and through my headphones I almost can't stand it. I'm drunk with sound, like the thirteen-year-old Brazilian girl. If I want to write something with marimba I can have marimba. If I want Balinese gamelan there's gamelan. Chinese guzheng zither? It's there. Japanese shakuhachi flute? Sure. There are innumerable kick drums, some real and some synthesized, and as for electric guitar—I've got Twangy Guitar, and New Surf Lead Guitar, and Nice Crunch Guitar, and Dirty Rotor Guitar, and dozens of others. Too much, almost. Everything's beautifully sampled. Debussy would have gone batshit if he'd had Logic on his computer. The history of music would have been completely different.

I
NEED A MICROPHONE, THOUGH.
I need a really good stereo microphone. I spent an hour this morning reading about microphones and hunting around on the B&H website. B&H is an electronics store in New York where expensive purchases scoot around in plastic bins on rollers over your head. I bought a camcorder there once. It's run by Hasidic Jews with hats who know everything. The prices are cheaper on Amazon than at B&H, but that's because Amazon is using its stock price to take over all of retailing and bankrupt the world.

I'm not sure whether I want to get two monophonic hundred-dollar Studio Projects B1 microphones, one for the right track and one for the left, each of which would float in a rubber spiderweb shockmount on a tandem microphone rack, powered by phantom power from a Saffire 6 USB interface, or whether I want a single shotgun stereo microphone by Audio-Technica that was developed for broadcasters to cover the Olympics. The Audio-Technica shotgun costs about seven hundred dollars, which is obscene, but once you enter the B&H world of microphones, it seems like a reasonable price.

“You float like a feather,” sings Radiohead, “In a beautiful world.” I've listened several times to the Radiohead songs, because it was nice of Raymond to say he heard a bit of them in what I sang. I'm not sure I hear it myself, but I was pleased and touched. Sometimes that's what you need, just a quick, casual word of knowledgeable encouragement. Radiohead reminds me a little of the songs in the
Garden State
soundtrack. Now, that's a soundtrack. They were all just songs that Zach Braff liked, so he put them in his movie. And there's that beautiful moment near the beginning where Natalie Portman hands him the headphones and she watches him listen to the song and she smiles her huge, innocent Natalie Portman smile.

If you're a woman and you want to make it in movies, that's what you need: an enormous mouth. Because you're talking. Somewhere above you is a big, sensitive microphone on a boom pole that is listening to what you say. You have to have a really big stretchy Carly Simon mouth with big lips that want to be open all the time. And you want to have teeth that go on forever. You don't just have bicuspids, you have tricuspids and quadricuspids. Look at Julia Roberts or Gwyneth Paltrow. The men, too. Tom Cruise, huge mouth. Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Sinatra—all bigmouthed men. Brad Pitt, fairly big mouth. You don't need to be tall. Natalie Portman is tiny. When she became the black swan she was so terribly thin I worried about her. Her mouth was bigger than ever. And lately, in
No Strings Attached
, she's still beautiful but her hair looks tired and she's perhaps wearing too much eye makeup. Her great moment was when she handed over the headphones and smiled in
Garden State
.

The bad guys in movies have small mouths. Good poets often have small mouths, too, whereas good singers have big mouths. Think of Whitney Houston: small face, big mouth. Good poets often have beards, which make their mouths exceedingly small, sometimes invisible. Robert Browning had a very tiny mouth, I think. Stanley Kunitz, medium-size mouth. It's a completely different approach to utterance. Maybe that's the fundamental difference. I have a small mouth, and it's slightly asymmetrical. Even before I smoked a cigar I talked like a cigar smoker.

What a disgusting habit. I love it.

•   •   •

I
'VE BEEN READING UP
on anemia. I was surprised to learn that blackstrap molasses has more iron than anything except meat—much more iron than collards. Spinach is nothing, forget spinach. Roz doesn't eat meat.

I watched some Logic tutorials by Matt Shadetek, who teaches at a music school in Manhattan called Dubspot, and I learned how to use the chord memorizer. The chord memorizer allows you to play any sort of chord you want by playing a single key, even chords that are so widely spaced that a single pianist couldn't play them. I layered some impressionistic sounds and loaded them in the chord memorizer and recorded a little piece. When I listened to it I realized that the harmony sounded alarmingly like Debussy's “Sunken Cathedral.” I guess that's not too surprising, since it's my favorite piece of music. On top of it, into the computer's tinny microphone, I sang, “Only evil can come of evil. Only evil can come of evil. Only evil can come of evil. Drown it with good.”

My voice was small and scratchy. I like the idea of having a scratchy voice.

Time to take the dog for a walk.

•   •   •

A
T
F
RESH
M
ARKET
I bought a jar of pesto, a shrink-wrapped hunk of Parmesan cheese, and a blue box of cellentani pasta—the spiral kind that holds the pesto best. I thought of writing a dance song in which there would be a sudden silence and then a low voice, like the voice in “Low Rider,” would intone the names of kinds of pasta. “Penne rigate, bum bum bum bum—rigatoni. Penne rigate, bum bum bum bum—rigatoni.” Then: “Cellentani! Cellentani! Cellentani!” I paused in the bulk-food aisle, looking at the plastic canisters of sesame seeds and poppy seeds, and I thought of Roz wanting to eat the sidewalk. I bought a big jug of Brer Rabbit blackstrap molasses, which is in the baking aisle. On the way home I listened to part of a
Sodajerker
podcast interview with Jimmy Webb, who wrote “Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain,” and then I sent Roz a text: “The internet says that blackstrap molasses contains more iron than the Lusitania. I bought a jug of it for you in case you need it. I can drop it by anytime if you're feeling anemic. Love P”

She wrote back, “Thanks, that's good to know.”

Why is it that certain timbres of speaking voice are pleasing and others aren't? Think of Bob Edwards. He was fired from NPR. Why? We don't know. “Hi, I'm Bob Edwards and this is
Morning Edition
.” Every day we were there with the radio on, listening with our coffee and our bagel. It was a glorious thing to listen to Bob Edwards on
Morning Edition
, because he had a little bit of pain and suffering in his voice. There were nicks and dings on his vocal cords. They met and vibrated and did what they needed to do to get the sound of his words out, but they were slightly damaged, and the damage made for interesting whispery overtones. His voice wasn't as damaged as Melanie's, who did the roller-skate song. Not as damaged as Meatloaf's. But it was definitely timeworn, and we loved that.

Bob Edwards talked into a big, expensive studio microphone, and here's the scandal. His microphone, like most in the talk radio business, like most in the music recording business, was a monophonic microphone.

Monophonic sound. What a vile and diseased thing. I've got “mono” voice. Mono! No, we don't want that. We want it in stereo, obviously. For at least forty years we've wanted it in stereo. Ever since I was a kid we've wanted it in stereo. Don't tell me that you're recording voices in mono. That's just plain awful. That's criminal. And yet the sound engineers persist. The singer sings her lungs out and she listens to the take and she wonders why her big chorus sounds so thin on tape when she knows it sounded so full and phat when she sang it. Well, it's obvious. She sounds thin because she's singing into a very fancy, very expensive, very mono microphone. She says, “Phil, can you beef up the sound a little?” So the sound engineer does his usual tricks—he doubles the vocals, or he adds some reverb, or he cranks up the compression. Maybe he runs it through a special filter called an exciter that adds some glitter to the upper end. But he can't change the fundamental fact that he's manipulating a mono signal.

I ordered the seven-hundred-dollar stereo shotgun from B&H. It's time to get serious.