|
 | | | | Mar31 Written by:Philip Cody
Tuesday, March 31, 1998 6:00 PM I got into this year's NAMM convention courtesy of Celia Biggs, who works at SONY up here in Eugene. Celia's an attractive, middle-aged woman who lives a couple of houses down from me. She gave me a pass to this NAMM thing, saying how she thought it might help to expand my horizons. In-fucking-deed!! Here's a woman . . . works eight hours a day, stamping out CDs in a sterile environment, telling me that MY horizons needed to expand. I felt like telling her that I had something besides "horizons" that needed expanding . . . but I didn't. I simply accepted her gift with as much graciousness as I could muster, tucked the pass in my pocket and trucked on off, with the intention of tossing it in the trash when I got home.
ED FURILLO! The pass was made out to this guy, Furillo, who was, evidently, going to be too busy getting his "horizons" expanded by the succulent Celia to be representing his Japanese masters in the City of Angels that weekend. Probably told the wife that he was going and, instead, booked a room at the Muddy Creek Motor Lodge, where he and Miz C. will engage in all manner of nasty, analog pleasures, while yours truly slogs his way through aisle after aisle of digitalia in the grunge and heat of La La Land.
Have a nice trip, Ed!
Then, just as I was getting ready to skim it into the trash can, it dawned on me that this little, plastic rectangle might be the key to a whole lot of fun. What if I were to scoot down to LA for a weekend and pretend to be this Furillo guy for a couple of hours? "Hi, I'm Ed Furillo, vice president of sexual harassment at Sony, Eugene. Tickle your ass with a feather?"
So, with a gleam in my eye and mischief in my heart, I called my friend, Spanky Beckwirth, in Van Nuys, arranged for a place to stay, packed my only suit, gassed up the old 4Runner and headed south.
I must tell you that NAMM was everything I thought it would be and . . . less. It took up the whole of the L.A. Convention Center . . . a great big mountain of bullshit under a glass and steel roof . . . a veritable orgy of ass-kissing, back slapping, hype and bad food that seemed to go on and on forever. And that was just the electronics exhibit area . . . a place that I shall, from now on, refer to as Digital Hell. Let me be your Dante for a bit and take you on an abbreviated tour of the highlights (if you can call them that) of my journey.
EMU - In the Belly of the Beast
In the middle of the exhibition floor stood the great, white tent that enshrined the wares of EMU, it's portal guarded by a gorgeous young Amazon. I picked my way through the crowd and stood before her smiling. "Hi, Ed Furillo, vice president of sexual harassment at Sony, Eugene."
A blank stare . . . Silence.
Now, I'm not a bad looking guy. Some of the women I know even think I'm attractive . . . in an odd sort of way . . . but, standing beneath that young woman's gaze, I felt like an ugly, old troll . . . a derelict, seeking alms at the gates of Camelot.
"Bullshit!" I said to myself. Bent but unbroken I went inside.
Within the great tent, things got no better for me. It was a long, dimly lit and claustrophobic space that reminded me of the hold on a Roman galley . . . like in the movie, Ben Hur. Where I expected to see slaves at the oars, I saw, instead, young people connected to little black boxes . . . LEDs flashing in the dim light. The loud music, bad lighting and close quarters made me feel dizzy and nauseous. Staggering, I reached out to steady myself and bumped into a young automaton wearing headphones. I excused myself but he didn't hear, see or feel me. I stumbled out of the tent into the light and spaciousness of the exhibit hall where, after a few moments, I regained my composure. "This adventure is certainly getting off on the wrong foot," I thought. So, I took my leave of EMU, a company named after a large, flightless bird . . . and made a mental note to beat the crap out of my Proteus when I got home.
EVENT - Love Finds Mister Analog
The openness and relative calm of the Event pavilion was a refreshing contrast to the oppressive atmosphere of EMU. The folks at Event were quite pleasant and accommodating . . . and, best of all . . . these guys made speakers and microphones! Here, midst all the digital mayhem, I had found artifacts of my analog reality. The smooth, grey surfaces of the 20/20 "bi-amped" speakers were a substantial reminder of the familiar, everyday world I had left behind.
Then, there were the three sisters. . . Darla, Gina and Layla . . . The Supremes of digital audio adapters. Were inanimate objects ever so beautifully named? Newly aglow with love and good will, I looked down adoringly upon Layla, the youngest of the sisters, lying seductively in her display case and crooned in a low whisper . . . .
Layla . . .
You got me on my knees
Layla . . .
I'm begging of you please
Layla
Darling, won't you ease my worried mind
All was right, once again, in Retro World and, Analog, feeling youthful and replenished, moved on to experience whatever wonders and glories lay ahead.
ENSONIQ - PARIS When It Fizzles
Ensoniq is the home of PARIS, the Pro Audio Recording Integrated System . . . a group of electronic components that, taken together, will provide me with "everything I need to make beautiful music well into the next century."
The basic unit comes bundled three different ways . . . the most expensive of which retails for $3895.00. Then, there are add-on modules for input, output, ADAT, SMPTE and AES/EBU that list for about five hundred bucks a pop. So, I'm looking at almost seven Gs for a top-of-the line unit, dressed out to the nines, that includes everything except a crusty baguette, a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothchild and Catherine Denueve.
Kiss my ass!
For seven thousand bucks I could fly to the real Paris . . . not some half-assed acronym . . . but the city of light and substance, over there in France . . . I could spend at least a month, living in luxury, eating great food, drinking barrels of wine, getting laid three times a week and still have money left over to fix the busted input on my Porta Studio.
Voulez-vous couchez avec moi, mother fucker?
*MIDIMAN - Let's Get Small
The MidiMan booth was a small area devoted to small equipment. The tiny sample of miniature gear that I saw, scattered around the display, seemed of practical utility to both digital and analog applications alike. Also, the boys and girls at MidiMan seemed to have something that a great many of the digital heavyweights lacked . . . a sense of humor! The Midimen and women give us an apparatus called The Flying Cow . . . Fucking wonderful! Drowning in a sea of ponderous acronyms, suffocating in an deluge of alphabet soup, up to my eyeballs in XR16s, DR32s, MF64s and BS Plusses, I washed ashore in the Land of the Flying Cow.
I laughed . . . . . . . . and was saved!
I like small companies. Small companies usually stay afloat by providing a service or thing that nobody has thought of yet . . . or by making or doing what everybody is making or doing, but making or doing it better than anyone else. I'm not exactly sure what a Flying Cow is supposed to do but, in my short visit to NAMM, I didn't see anything remotely similar in appearance, function, or humorous appeal.
MidiMan also makes a digital audio card, called the DMan 2044. I guess nobody's perfect. What caught my attention, however, was the unit's lack of extraneous doo-dads. No expensive boon-doggles here. No digital I/O either. Just four lovely "ins" and four delightful "outs" all in glorious analog.
Maybe there is a God!
CAKEWALK - Help! I've Been Shot!
I was hungry and tired by the time I stumbled into the Cakewalk encampment. The endless bullshit barrage was beginning to wear pretty thin by that time and I was in a foul and hostile mood. I walked up to the lady at the welcome desk and . . . shit! SHE PULLED A GUN ON ME! "Please, don't let me die here, so far from home, amidst all these digital dickheads" I prayed. "Dear God, I'm being gunned down . . . not by some jealous husband, not in a gangsta shootout, but by Cakewalk, a company I've been supporting since back in the DOS days!"
Taking a closer look, I realized that what she was pointing at me wasn't a pistol but a bar code reader. I wasn't being killed. My Ed Furillo identity tag was being scanned! I was being processed like a loaf of bread at the grocery store. In the blink of an eye, I'd gone from being a murder victim to a depersonalized object.
Fear . . . relief . . . rage.
Fear . . . relief . . . rage.
This emotional trinity coursed through my consciousness at the speed of light. I stood there, fists clenched, heart pounding, indifferent to my surroundings. I was beginning to lose it. I wanted to reach out and strangle that . . . . . . . .
Needless to say, I didn't kill anyone at Cakewalk that day. In a matter of minutes my pulse returned to normal , the pounding in my head subsided to a dull ache and I went and found a much needed seat, with my fellow bread loaves, and waited to watch the Cakewalk . . . Pro Audio . . . version 7. . . demonstration.
A few minutes into Tom Swift and his "gee whiz, ain't this shit cool" pitch, I began to lose interest and drifted off. I started thinking about an old girlfriend of mine, back in New York . . . Minda Schwartz from Bayside. Minda had a cheerleader personality and a beautifully proportioned body, stretched on a compact, sinewy frame. Minda, however, didn't like her body. She always used to complain that her tits were too small and I always used to try to reassure her . . . "no, baby, your tits are perfect." But Minda was having none of that and went out and got herself silicon implants. One day she's sporting these sweet, little handfuls of mammary tissue and the next she's got hooters the size of watermelons, that looked like stage props and felt like tupperware serving bowls. I was completely turned off and, from that day, could never really get it up again for dear, sweet, top-heavy Minda.
Cakewalk Pro Audio reminds me a whole lot of Minda Schwartz. Where there was once an attractive MIDI application, beautiful in its naked simplicity, there now exists a program with great big plastic tits, six inch spiked heels, nylon stockings and a garter belt. I know . . . a lot of guys really get stiff for that crap . . . but not me. . . . . . Well, hardly ever! . . .OK . . .Fuck you! . . . so I like big tits and all that Fredrick's of Hollywood stuff, too. . . but, software doesn't raise my woody. Catherine Deneuve, on the other hand . . .
The afternoon's downward spiral into sex and violence left me with a nicotine craving the size of Nebraska. (I choose Nebraska arbitrarily, not for any pejorative reason. Feel free to substitute the state of your choice.) So, I left Cakewalk and the rest of Digital Hell . . . to find a place to have a smoke.
..
..
.
...
Later that day, I ran into an old friend . . . Dan Brown. Dan and I used to write songs together, back when I lived in L.A.. None of the stuff we wrote ever got published . . . and that, as Martha Stewart would say, is a good thing . . . as most of our songs were pathetic shit that didn't deserve to see the light of day. That didn't stop Dan and me, however, from inflicting them on friends, lovers, relatives and innocent bystanders at parties and other social occasions.
Dan was there showing Toro Albanez guitars in the musical instrument hall. I sat down with him for a while and he regaled me with stories of his five kids . . . and how he and Spanky Beckwirth would run into each other, from time to time, and get misty-eyed remembering back when the three of us, Dan, Spanky and I, would play a game that "sorta resembled golf" out at Woodley.
We sat there and talked like that for about fifteen minutes and then . . . it was time for Dan to get back to work and time for me to be moving on.
Lighter of heart and spirit, I spent the rest of that day cruising the aisles of musical instruments in a land thousands of light years removed from the robotic intensity of Digital Hell. It was a land of guitars and saxophones . . . a land of sheet music . . . a land where percussion instruments of every shape, size, and ethnic origin rang out in happy, rhythmic chaos. It was a land of brass and woodwinds. It was . . . ANALOG HEAVEN!!!!!
With the day drawing to a close, I stopped and thought about all those crazy mother fuckers down there in the bowels of Digital Hell, who were so busy sucking each other off . . . virtually, of course . . .they didn't seem to know or care that what they were doing had little or nothing to do with the "making" of music.
And how could they know? Blinded by their success and isolated by their arrogance, they truly lack a means of understanding the wonders and mysteries of musical creation.. Sure, they could capture a musical performance, dick with it in a zillion different ways, bend it to their wills, and process it onto the medium du jour. Yes, they could synthesize a reasonable facsimile of a trumpet . . . but they can't synthesize the heart and soul of a Louis Armstrong to power it. With enough processing power and storage space, they can come up with a Steinway that might sound good enough to fool the great Rubenstein. Rubenstein would know, however, when he sat down to play, that what lay under his hands wasn't broken trees and elephant ivories but a Frankenstein, fashioned of cold, impersonal, electronic bits and pieces, devoid of all the analog intangibles that are so essential to creating music of any kind. I felt like running back down, into that digital black hole and shouting, at the top of my lungs . . . "IT'S THE MUSIC, STUPID!!!!"
But why should they care? It was, after all, a convention of music marketers. There probably wasn't a real musician in the lot. What was I expecting? I expected to have a little fun and I had that. I also had my mind fucked, my heart broken and my eyes opened. That was enough for one day. It was time to go home.
On my way back, I stopped in Medford to see my sister, Grace. When I told Grace that I had been to NAMM she just looked up at me with her sad, grey, analog eyes and said, "I thought you were against the war, dear."
This is Mister Analog, wishing you peace, prosperity and music, music, music.
Copyright - Philip Cody - 1998
================================================
Philip Cody
pcody@zookini.com
================================================
Tags: | | | | | | | |
|
|