 On a warm, early fall night in 1988, I walked out onto the middle of the ice hockey rink at Madison Square Garden with three guys I had been singing with for a few months. We looked like four cheaply upholstered sofas in our loud flower-print shirts. Our way across the slippery ice was paved with slabs of cardboard. At the end of our cardboard walkway stood a lone microphone on a stand, it’s cord trailing off across the ice. There were about twenty thousand people in the place.
We clustered in a tight semicircle around the mic, took a collective breath and launched into the national anthem. It was sweet, slow, and soulful. The people in the blue seats, the cheap seats at the very top of the Garden, quickly became impatient. They were there for hockey and fisticuffs, not a patriotic serenade from four flouncy-looking nancyboys. They began to boo at us from up there in the blue seats. The players gathered on the ice giggled and smirked. And I was oblivious.
It was my first gig with Rockapella. It was also the first time I’d ever sung on such a big PA system. I had never been amplified like that, and it was an adrenalin rush to put out so little effort and have it sound so enormous, so cavernous. I thought it sounded incredible, even with the half-second delay. I was so enthralled with the enormous sound we made that I didn’t hear the booing or notice the sniggering, gap-toothed players around us.
Coming off the ice, Sean said, “Did you hear that? They booed us!” Our escort, an MSG security guy, said, “Yeah, the blue seats get nasty if the anthem is too slow. They just wanna see the game.” These days, anybody caught giving the raspberries to Francis Scott Key’s ill conceived, triple-meter dirge would get lynched. Contrast this scene with our post 9/11 rendition on Soldier’s Field in Chicago for a Bears game, when the crowd of sixty-five thousand erupted like a gigantic wounded animal as we held out the last note and the players surrounding us wept openly.
Well, that was then, as they say. I had ample opportunity to absorb our ignominy after the hockey game. I went home, turned on the tube, and there we were on one of the stations, featured in the ‘sports bloopers of the week’, complete with close-ups of the helmetless players trying to stifle their laughter, their shoulders shaking, snide remarks by the commentators, and an audio loop of boos and hisses. It was a little embarrassing, but I didn’t care. I had gotten a taste of arena rock, and I was hooked.
Until that night, I had been an acoustic musician. I had played acoustic instruments. I had been taught to sing in the classical style, to project over an orchestra without amplification. Until that night, volume was always a premium. With the all-powerful microphone and a couple hundred thousand watts behind it, volume was no longer a personal issue. This was a new kind of thunder, and I didn’t have to sweat bullets for it. I really liked it.
It took me years to rediscover the charm of acoustic sound. I don’t remember exactly how it came to me. Maybe it was the thrill of recording a tune acoustically in real time; four guys singing together on four mics, no punches, no overdubs, no elaborately layered parts, and having it come out all shiny and simple and beautiful. I think that must have been it. When I made the suggestion at a rehearsal that we drop the mics for a number, maybe an encore, and sing to our audience with no electronics between us, there were a lot of raised eyebrows, well, eight of ‘em, really. I did a bit of a hard sell and the guys reluctantly agreed to try it the following night at the Bottom Line.
When the time came, we left the mics onstage and threaded our way into the middle of the famous oblong room, where we stood surrounded by our audience. As we began our unamplified number, even the usually peripatetic waitresses stopped bustling around. The chronically noisy kitchen ceased its clanging. It felt like everyone in the place was holding their collective breath. As we ended the last note in this stillness, there was a massive exhalation and the scraping of hundreds of chairs as our listeners stood, and we were surrounded, overwhelmed by a surge of emotion for which we were unprepared. The direct contact, the soft immediacy of voices floating unaided through the air proved at least as powerful as the thunder I had fallen in love with years before.
 Add as favorites (37) |  Quote this article on your site | Views: 1182
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. Powered by AkoComment Tweaked Special Edition v.1.4.6
AkoComment © Copyright 2004 by Arthur Konze - www.mamboportal.com
All right reserved |
