Farewell to Brimstone & Treacle (last time I’ll badger you about this damn play, I promise)
First of all, a BIG thank you to everyone who came all the way out to the East End, parked their keisters in the SideMart Theatrical Grocery, and saw Dennis Potter’s Brimstone & Treacle presented by Precisely Peter Productions. It was a difficult show in many ways, but also an extremely artistically rewarding one for me as an independent theatre practitioner. We had a whole bunch of outstanding reviews, I heard many positive comments about our use of music in the piece, and I especially want to shout-out John Shooter, a fearless, wonderful director (and also an extremely gregarious, intelligent, sweet guy) who took so many risks and made lots of great choices in order to help get this unique and thrilling piece of art onto a stage in Toronto. Rare talent and dedication went into it, and everyone on the cast and crew rightfully should be (and I think, is) dead proud of their achievements in contributing to it. If you missed this run, too bad, because I doubt you will ever see the like of it again.
I want to make a couple of observations about this show, the reception it received, and speak a bit more generally about indie theatre in this town. Now that I’ve spent some time outside of the non-stop treadmill of indie theatre production, with a few weeks under my belt of steady work in one place (for a change), I can look back at the hit-and-run nature of my career — as a sound designer first and foremost, and also as a multi-department freelance stage technician — with a bit of objectivity. First of all, theatre as a cultural force in Toronto is absolutely thriving. I’m sure there are more venues and artists presenting amazing, top-shelf work here than almost everywhere else in North America and certainly there are more than anywhere else in Canada. A dizzying quantity of young people like myself are quite eager to enter the scene so they can make really exciting, fresh new art that deserves a hearing.
But we are struggling mighty hard in order to do it. Almost all of us have to take other jobs (plural) in order to subsidize the art we want to make, if we can even find the time. Producing your own theatrical work (that is, putting up the capital investment to hire people, build things, book the space to do it all in, organize and plan around a fiendishly difficult production schedule where NO ONE has open availability, manage public relations and promotion, track expenses and budget) is, to put it bluntly, a total bitch. Then it feels like your livelihood depends on begging anyone and everyone you know to carve time out of their schedule just to check out what you did, which is tough even with tickets priced insultingly cheap compared to the priceless nature of the experience, to say nothing of the actual costs associated with it. If you’re like me, the friends you are closest with are also in a million shows of their own, and getting them to come out is a bit like a chef asking all the other chefs they know to come to the opening of their new restaurant. It’s incredibly intimidating, and you feel sheepish even asking them to show up, because who could really blame them for saying no?
Brimstone was no exception. I believed strongly in the people behind this show (though I’d never worked with any of them before, except for the unbelievably talented costume and set designer Rachel Forbes), and during our time together I went to work on my social networks evangelizing for them and this dark, disturbing play about a family in trouble who are tempted by the Devil incarnate. I relentlessly bugged my hundreds of connected followers and friends on Twitter and Facebook (heaven knows how any of you had the strength remaining to click on this link and read this far), up to and throughout the run of the show, talking it up at every opportunity, and in the end less than ten of these people were sufficiently moved by my noisy hawking to actually come out and see for themselves. Since we had a fairly brief two-week run of performances, that means approximately 0.5 of my engaged, savvy, theatre-going friends came per show. This is not atypical for a small indie production, and I already knew that going in, so it was not a shock — but still something of a disappointment. After all, I worked really hard during the rehearsal process and in my own time to build the sound design to exacting standards, and not even enough people came to pay me for that time or cover the cost of my own equipment (donated to the production, although it wasn’t donated to me). We didn’t cut any corners to get this show on its feet; everyone brought their best to the table and it showed. It was artistically fulfilling, but a financial write-off for our entire production team.
Could it be that people were scared away by the show’s reputation? Perhaps. It was originally banned by BBC-TV for its unflinching portrayal of Pattie, a character with a disability who is sexually assaulted. There are very few issues of our day that cut to the heart of our anxieties more than rape culture, and beyond just being taboo it’s quite naturally not a matter that most people are keen to delve into for entertainment. But I had a few really interesting conversations with John about his goals for this production, and it was not to shock people, but rather to provoke their thoughts and discussions about private, unspokenly shared cultural assumptions when it comes to family matters and people in our midst who fall on hard times. To whom can we turn, when faith and family prove false and untrustworthy? Whose responsibility is it to take care of the unlucky and vulnerable ones? What does it say about our human nature when we desperately try and keep certain things in our past a secret, yet blurt them out at the slightest provocation? If you did happen to catch one of the shows, I’d be happy to hear your comments about our work. If you stayed away (not because you were busy with your own show, but because you were trepidatious about the content) I want to hear about that too. In order for a theatrical project to be a complete success, it should do its best to start a dialogue. And I’d like to see our little effort succeed in that goal, too.
A trippy shootout between four different CD versions of David Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane”
What would happen if you started playing four different versions of the same album simultaneously? Well, they would stay in sync for a few seconds, but then they’d begin to drift apart as they inevitably dropped behind or jumped ahead of one other, thanks to small differences between them that might be imperceptible when you listen to each version on its own in turn. They’d soon slip out of time entirely, and collide in unpleasant, unmusical ways — or would they?
I’ve always been fascinated by the aural collisions that these minute, imprecise, unpredictable variations in timing can produce upon music playback. I encountered a particularly trippy example recently, while I was comparing four different digital releases of David Bowie’s masterful 1973 glam-rock album Aladdin Sane. I’m a big fan of this work, and I have collected a bunch of different versions over the years. It has been released on CD at least four different times: by RCA, by Rykodisc, by EMI, and just last year by Universal Music to celebrate the LP’s 40th anniversary. Just for curiosity’s sake, I decided to compare these, by ripping them to my laptop, and putting them all side-by-side in a digital audio editor.
Aladdin Sane’s unforgettable album cover
I adjusted each one to be relatively the same volume (the 1980s-era RCA disc is quieter than the rest, which is typical of CDs produced back then, so I brought the others down in level a bit to better match it). Then I lined them up at the first downbeat of the opening song, “Watch That Man”. Initially, I had intended to just listen to one at a time, and flip back and forth between each for blind comparison. Accidentally, however, I left them all playing at once. Here’s what it sounded like.
Closer examination reveals just what’s going on. Each time the original analogue tape was played back to make each CD’s digital master, there were fluctuations in its speed. For example, “Watch That Man” runs slower on the RCA compared to the other CDs, but on most of the other tracks, the 40th Anniversary CD is slowest. The ending of “Drive-In Saturday” fades out gradually to silence, and this fade is a couple of seconds shorter on the Rykodisc version. There are other differences, mostly in the amount of silence the engineers placed between some of the tracks on all four CDs. According to my research, CSR in Japan also mastered a fifth variation for the United States, which differs from the more common RCA CDs originally pressed for the European market. I was not able to track one of these down to compare.
The European RCA also has a tiny extra bit of piano at the end of “Let’s Spend the Night Together”, whereas all the other CDs fade out entirely at that point. I appended this little gem to the very end of the file above, after “Lady Grinning Soul” has faded to silence, so you can hear it in isolation (if you make it that far)!
Yesterday, Bob Dylan released a 6-CD box set called The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete, featuring extensive rehearsal and demonstration recordings of The Band backing him up circa late 1967 inside their rented house ‘Big Pink’ in West Saugerties, upstate New York. This is an historic moment for Dylan fans, who have been chasing various actual bootlegs for decades (ever since some of the original recordings were issued by fans on poor-quality white-label vinyl pressings in 1969) to obtain this material. Finally, it has been officially released in its entirety, to rapturous response from Dylanites.
I’m more of a casual Dylan fan, myself (even though I’ve already seen him in concert three times over the past ten years, and will be going to see him again in about a week’s time), and I’ve found myself buying only a few of these big-ticket box sets by other artists. But as I perused the track-listing, and noticed that on the first disc was a cover of Johnny Cash’s song “Belshazzar”, I got excited. This is one of my favourite early Cash songs, a great retelling of the Biblical myth from which the idiom “writing on the wall” derives.
Take a listen:
This is my personal restoration of the song, taking the false start from the beginning (which was recorded a whole tone higher in musical pitch compared to the rest of the song) and pitching it a semitone lower, stitched along with the rest of the song pitched a semitone higher, so that the complete song exists in one key. This is an old trick, famously used by George Martin to assemble The Beatles’ recording of “Strawberry Fields Forever” in 1966. So had Dylan wanted to, he could have issued this very same tape, using contemporary technology to create a master.
imblogrio 