The quiet joys of an unplugged weekend
Yes, I am getting old – and so are you.
In the West End just now I passed a busker heading towards his pitch on the London Underground, hauling a trolley on which was stacked more amplification than Black Sabbath would have had fifty years ago. Once established he presumably set up the digital pay station through which passing punters can make payments on their phones. Since there is a £3 minimum and those punters are within range for around two minutes this makes the average busker pound for pound a more expensive entertainment experience than going to see Beyoncé.
I wonder whether it occurs to any of these musicians that in lugging all this gear in pursuit of an occupation which was supposed to be all about travelling light in order to go to the listeners wherever they happened to be, they might just be allowing the amplification tail to wag the entertainment dog. But then I remind myself that for most musicians the key appeal of the job is the opportunities it gives them to grapple with heavy machinery. It’s the electricity that they really love. There’s something reassuringly military about it which appeals to the small boys still present in the fully grown men doing the job.
This struck me as funny because I’ve just spent the weekend in the company of unamplified musicians. On Saturday we went to Opera Holland Park’s production of La Traviata, which managed to be as fortissimo as you could wish without using any more amplification than it takes to deliver a deferential voice to tell you the performance is about to begin. Furthermore here you get a musical experience no longer available in the West End since they began giving microphones to all their performers. When a diva comes towards you while singing the music is clearly emanating from her rather than from a PA way above your head.
The absence of technology has other benefits. On the way back to the tube station after the performance we were overtaken by a young woman racing in the same direction while wheeling a double bass. There’s no breaking down and stowing away for her. She’s out of there and headed back to the suburbs before the singers have had their first bunch of flowers.
Then on Sunday I was the narrator for a performance at the Cadogan Hall by the Jazz Repertory Company. This involved twenty musicians performing works associated with Miles Davis and Gil Evans and here the only amplification was via a single microphone that the soloists could use to replicate the mix of records like “Kind Of Blue” and “Miles Ahead”. The Cadogan Hall was originally a church, which means it’s ideally suited to reproducing the sound of records like these, which were recorded in Columbia’s studio in Manhattan, which also started life as a church.
When I do these shows I like to sit in on the orchestra’s run-through. This, unlike rock band sound checks, which are always held up by some recalcitrant item of kit and expand to fill the time available for them, involves the musical director asking the band to start with bar 43 and play as far as bar 50 until he has satisfied himself the kinks are ironed out. Watching them do this reminds of how much pleasure is to be derived from the insouciance of watching proper professionals do something they do all the time, something which is nonetheless beyond the abilities of mere mortals.
Weekends like this have me wondering whether the drive to increased volume which has soundtracked my life is inevitably a one-way street. Might it be that the increased insistence on noise restrictions and our gathering awareness of hearing damage could result in a move the other way? Not that I would be advocating anything like Portlandia’s Battle Of The Gentle Bands. I simply feel there ought to be a point between the level at which musicians can be heard and the level at which the audience are being bludgeoned into submission around which a civilised society could settle.
I have a vivid childhood memory of queuing around the block for the Jorvik interactive viking exhibit in York, not long after it opened and had been publicised on Blue Peter. There were two girls – students I presume – standing side-by-side with acoustic guitars, entertaining their captive audience with a rendition of Homeward Bound. I had never heard the song before and I had never been so close to a guitar when it was being played. It had a profound impact on me; to the extent that, decades later, I still occasionally think about those girls and what became of them and whether their friendship endured. If they are still with us, then I suppose they would be in their mid-late 60s by now.
There is a marvelous thread on the Steve Hoffman forums that, under the right circumstances, will bring a lump to your throat. It began in 2014 with someone posting a sound recording they had made of a young girl – a hitch-hiker – singing and playing acoustic guitar in a dorm at UC Santa Cruz, where she was crashing for the night. The poster had the presence of mind to grab his reel-to-reel recorder and hold it in front of her while she performed. The songs are covers – some Johnny Cash, some Dylan, and Sam Cooke, but there is something so pure about them. It is a beautiful moment in time, captured and preserved for the ages. On the forums there was a concerted effort to identify the performer. Many names were suggested. Finally, in 2023, she was unmasked as Carol Duke, later of the San Francisco folk-rock group Marvin Gardens. There is speculation that she may have been travelling home for Thanksgiving, though we will never know. Duke passed away in 2014, around the time the search for her began, and so will never be aware of her unexpected legacy or the effort that was invested in tracking her down. I must admit that the day that I clicked on the thread and read that the identity of the mysterious performer had been revealed, I may have had something in my eye. I believe that there are moves afoot to give the recording an official release.
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/1967-homemade-dorm-recording-of-carol-duke-later-of-marvin-gardens.346756/
One of the finest performances we’ve seen I recent years was Rufus Wainwright singing “Oh Holy Night” with no amplification. A few of our favourite folk performers end their sets with completely unplugged performances.