Voices

My career has been a winding road of artistry and entrepreneurship-by-necessity. Fortunately, I've been able to make left-brain choices that closely supported right. Early on, I realized that working from home offered the great advantage of time and convenience and by my junior year in college, I had my first little 2-track tape studio set up in a corner of the bedroom. It was a cool-looking 7" reel-to-reel Sony tape deck with professional-size VU meters whose needles danced to every wave my Shure 565 picked up. Finished in silver and black, I was like a kid with his first bike.

It was a three-head machine, which meant there were three magnetized 1/2" little blocks the tape dragged across, spaced a quarter inch apart. When chosen, the first head erased the previous recording, the second recorded and the third played it back.  This was a big deal, because it meant you could set it to monitor both recording and playback over headphones or speakers. And because the tape was travelling at a fixed 7 1/2" inches per second, the delay from record to playback caused an echo that could then be repeated over and over, until it faded out, replaced by the next sound.

You could sing "Your love is fading" and instantly get FADING, Fading, fading, fading... And brotha, with some mind-altering substance in your brain enhancing that headphone experience, ooooo, time stood still.

I had a flute that sounded like a soaring bird with that echo effect turned on. Vocals could almost be doubled live, which was both thrilling and confusing. It's weird trying to sing something new while the line you sang a second ago still echoes in high fidelity in your ears. Weird and totally cool.

I was playing in a popular local band call the Ramrods at the time and we often drove off in a giant Ford station wagon pulling a trailer full of equipment, going out for a weekend in some distant part of New England. Returning late eve one Sunday, contemplating the classes I was gonna skip in the morning, I arrived to find my front door gone -- replaced with a new one --a bit disorienting -- along with a note from my landlord explaining that my old door had been literally smashed to bits by persons unknown, who had then ransacked and robbed the place.  In their haste, they'd grabbed some loose cash, wrenched a window air conditioner loose, taken a sax in its case and disappeared. I ran straight towards the corner with Sony, which I'd installed in a recessed bookcase so it was flush with the wall. They'd moved right past it, distracted by my more accessible goods – which bounced me back and forth between murderous anger and eye-blinking relief. That memory still evokes the angst of the moment and nostalgia for the simplicity of just laying down a live track in real time and blissfully leaving it at that.