Concert Review: Crash Test Dummies at the Fitzgerald

The concert was billed as the "Crash Test Dummies: God Shuffled His Feet 25th Anniversary Tour." A better person would have known what that meant, but I was mostly a first Crash Test Dummies album fan. The tour started in St. Paul with the core band of Brad Roberts, Ellen Reid, Dan Roberts, Mitch Dorge, Stuart Cameron, and Eric Paulson.

Local bar solo act, Paul Metsa, was the opener. He was as surprised to be there on the Fitz stage as we were to see him there. He didn’t even manage to get the performance up on his webpage retroactively. He had moments of ok-ness and talked way more than he played, which was an odd choice since he seemed to believe he was getting a lucky showcase that night and should have used the time to demonstrate his musicianship. Ending with a patronizing version of the Star Spangled Banner was pure Toby Keith schmaltz. He was, apparently, desperate to get audience attention.

The FOH guy, as usual, was near deaf. As usual, from the start it was obvious he’d never heard an actual record and imagined that we were all just dying to hear kick drum and bass solos; especially that all-captivating territory between 15Hz and 80Hz. (Or maybe his own hearing is so damaged he needed those frequencies boosted 10-20dB to compensate.) As the night went on, the sound goof became more hearing-impaired and eventually it was difficult to even sense the existence of the vocals unless all three of the band’s singers were really wailing. That was particularly disappointing because I don’t often get to hear a singer with Brad Roberts’ mic and vocal technique. If there was ever a band that deserved to have the vocals upfront and on point, Crash Test Dummies are it.

During the many quiet moments and, especially, when the musicians except Stuart Cameron (acoustic guitar) were absent, Roberts really knocked it out of the park. “Heart of Stone” was so incredible that my wife and I simultaneously and spontaneously turned to each other and said “that was worth the price of the trip, hotel, and concert tickets.” Of course the lyrics are close to our own story, "And so now we are old, both our stories are told and we wait for the end. If you're first to go I will follow you, know that my heart will not mend. And I wish I owned a heart of stone.” Trust me, it does not read as emotionally powerful as it sounded with Roberts’ incredible voice.

As hard as he tried, the FOH goof did not destroy the evening. The musicianship was solid and the spare arrangements allowed many of the high points to fight their way through the sound system incompetence. There were few moments where the lyrics were decipherable, but when those words were either heard or memorized the whole point of this philosophical, insightful band was proven to be true. If there was a Crash Test Dummies’ song that someone didn’t hear Friday night, it was a really obscure one. I held my breath hoping to hear Superman’s Song, but not expecting it if this was really supposed to be the God Shuffled His Feet 25th Anniversary Tour. They played Superman as the end of the regular set and the last song of the encore was "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" Go Figure.

There were many moments that were worth the trip to St. Paul, the hotel hassle, and even the downtown St. Paul parking hassle. It takes a lot to overcome those obstacles, but Crash Test Dummies pulled it off.

An Acoustic Guitar Experiment

One of many irritants about getting old has been circulation issues. I sleep with at least one half of my body tingling from lack of circulation regardless of which side I sleep on, bed softness or hardness (although, hard is better), sleep position (although after being married for 51 years I am “trained” not to sleep on my back), pills, or anything else I’ve tried. Playing guitar is one more place where my poor technique has turned into a minor medical issue. Like many non-classical guitarists, I “rest” my right arm on the edge of the lower bout. For 50-some years, that hasn’t been a problem for anything but the limitations in speed and technique it causes (which are substantial, I know, Scott). This last couple of years, it has begun to cause another problem. After a few minutes of playing or practice, my wrist, hand, and fingers begin to tingle and will eventually get numb feeling from the lack of circulation caused by that pressure on the edge on the blood vessels of my inner arm.

A few months back, I saw Brian Stewart—music store owner and guitar builder/technician extraordinaire—working on an arm rest for one of his customers. I wondered if that device might help with my circulation problem? So, I built one.

Saturday morning at the TreeStrings morning jam, I tried it out. For the most part, it worked pretty well. Brian and I talked about his design verses mine and we had some other ideas as to how this might become an actual product (which he really doesn’t want to build) and I thought about some of those changes while I played this morning. I wish I’d taken a picture of my original design, if for no other reason than to show the evolution of the idea and because I thought the original piece was really pretty. It did cover more of the top than necessary and was heavier than necessary, too. To keep from having to split another piece of walnut to start from scratch, I decided to hack away at my original piece. Might have been a mistake.  

When I got back home, I took that first attempt down to my basement shop and started carving it down to about half of the original width. I smoothed out the bandsaw cuts, sanded the piece back to a beautiful gunstock satin, and tried it again. This time it wasn’t nearly as comfortable as my original design and that was a huge disappointment. So, I reshaped the top side, losing about 1/3 of the total thickness and creating a little more of a flat spot on top while keeping the soft edge I’d originally designed. I refinished that work and reattached the piece. For the initial experiments, I’m using fairly weak double-sided tape to hold the piece in place, but when I decide I’m happy with it I’ll use something more aggressive.

One of the things I did not expect to happen was for the guitar’s tone and output to change for the better. If you look at that guitar-playing picture (at the top of this essay), you’ll notice that the arm damps a fair portion of the guitar top (especially true when the player is wearing long sleeve anything). I play a very small Composite Acoustics Cargo travel guitar and I’d never really thought much about how much of the guitar’s top I was sacrificing with my playing technique (I know, Scott). After listening the “with and not-with” sound of the guitar, I was interested in the concept on a whole different level. I would guess the overall volume is close to 3dBSPL louder with the arm rest in place and it is substantially more full and brighter, too. In retrospect, all of that makes perfect sense, but I hadn’t thought about it until the evidence was right there in my arms.

I will be playing with this concept a lot more in the future. For now, I’m enjoying being able to practice guitar for several hours without numbness and that irritating feeling (or lack of) that comes with circulation problems.

The Amazing Terry Kath

I remembered Terry being amazing, but this is an incredible reminder of how badass Chicago was when Kath ran the show. I saw Chicago in Amarillo around 1972, the James Gang was the into band. I put away my guitar for a couple of years after seeing what Terry did with the same instrument I owned. 

Technology Is Gonna Do What?

The telephone has been around almost 150 years, since 1870. By 1879, telephone service subscribers began to be identified by their phone numbers, not by their names and by 1918 a million telephones were in service just in the USA. In 1962, Telestar, the first communications satellite was launched. In 1973, the beginning of the end of telephone communications arrived when Martin Cooper developed the first handheld mobile telephone. The first analog cell phone system went into service in Japan in 1979. In the 1990’s, cell phones began the switch to digital and there are hundreds of millions of people now frustrated by the awful sound of low-fidelity (at best an 8bit/8kHz sample rate, 200-3.2kHz bandwidth, 64kbs data compression) digital cell phone conversations and miscommunication created by lousy digital connections.

In fact, according to an Atlantic Magazine article "Don't Hate the Phone Call, Hate the Phone" a whole generation, Millennials, have been diagnosed with a “kind of telephoniphobia” regarding voice telephone communications. Now that half of Americans under 35 use cell phones exclusively, “the intrinsic unreliability of the cellular network has become internalized as a property of telephony.” It isn’t. It’s a property of fuckin’ cell phones and I absolutely hate the damn things. I hate getting calls from people on their cell phones. I hate calling people who I know will answer my call on their cell phone. Between the distortion, the Auto-Tune-like Mr. Roboto voices, and the forced long pauses while we try to determine if there is still a usable connection (on their side) I just assume that at least 3/4 of the things that were said were misunderstood or not heard at all.

I have stopped listening to audio fidelity complaints from people who tolerate cell phones. This is not an anti-digital rant. I love digital data storage and have been perfectly happy with digital audio for music since the early 1980’s. However, the fact that cell phone users don’t even insist on full duplex communications capability from their crap-stick phone providers is evidence enough to me that they are not serious audiophiles of any sort. If you don’t know the difference between half and full duplex, I particularly like this comment and response for an answer: “GSM operates in duplex (separate frequencies for transmit and receive), the mobile station does not transmit and receive at the same time. That's called half-duplex. It's done to save bandwidth and battery power, and to make cell phone conversations more difficult.” While I’m sure the real reason cell phone providers don’t deliver full duplex is because it would be technically slightly more demanding and marginally more expensive, I’m entertained by the assumption that “it's done to . . . make cell phone conversations more difficult.” No matter why it’s done, it sure as hell makes conversations more difficult, less convenient, less entertaining, less personal, and less pleasant.

This afternoon, I tried to have a conversation with my brother who lives in Phoenix and this statement from that Atlantic Magazine article on why people hate phone calls rang true, “On the infrastructural level, mobile phones operate on cellular networks, which route calls between between transceivers distributed across a service area. These networks are wireless, obviously, which means that signal strength, traffic, and interference can make calls difficult or impossible. Together, these factors have made phone calls synonymous with unreliability. Failures to connect, weak signals that staccato sentences into bursts of signal and silence, and the frequency of dropped calls all help us find excuses not to initiate or accept a phone call.”

It’s not just “weak signals” that are the problem. Grossly misnamed “communications companies” have jammed so much data into so little bandwidth that signal strength is just one of many factors that creates an incoherent telephone call. My brother, for example, said he had “five bars” of signal strength, but our conversation was mostly a collection of Mr. Roboto vocoder noises, weird electronic bird song tweeting and screeches, and long pauses where neither of us were able to get anything across the satellite signal path. After a bit, we gave up and went back to email to carry on our “conversation.”  A few moments later, my daughter called. We both have “land line” phone systems; hers is provided by her telephone company and mine is through the internet and an Ooma Telo system. We had a pleasant 1/2 hour conversation; with each of us laughing at the other’s jokes and stories made even more personal by being able to hear the laughter while we continued the stories. No weird noises, no Auto-Tuned Kayne West sound effects, no forced pauses waiting for the phone system to reboot itself and reconnect us; just a normal telephone conversation. The kind we used to have every time we picked up a telephone that was wired to the fuckin’ wall; 75 years ago.

The fact that the quality of telephone data transmission is lousy allows cell phone manufacturers to dumb-down the whole signal path. The microphones, the “speaker,” and the analog electronics connecting those transducers to the crappy data transmission system are all degraded. Why connected a decent micro-condenser microphone to an 8bit/8kHz sample rate, 200-3.2kHz bandwidth, 64kbs data compression system? It doesn’t make sense to waste a decent transducer on a crappy ADC system. Likewise, at the receiving end why connect a half-decent speaker to a low-fidelity DAC? So, they don’t. You clearly don’t notice or care. Some of you low-life weirdoes even listen to music on your phone, out of that godawful speaker!

Cell phones have rendered over-the-wire conversations pointless and painful. They are helping us all grow apart. “Can you hear me now?” is not a question of coverage and hasn’t been for at least a decade. Now, it’s a question of did you understand that simple question through the hash of garbled transmission, Star Bores sound effects, and cut-out segments of the phrase? I’ve said this before, “I can, in a few moments, tell if a caller is on a cellphone because the quality is miserable. Always. My guess is if you can tolerate that level of distortion in a voice conversation you aren’t that discerning in any aspect of audio. So, while I’m not surprised that music is being listened to on actual speakers by an audience of 12%-and-shrinking I’m also not impressed by your musical tastes. Your opinion of audio quality is just going to make me laugh, so don’t waste either of our time.” It’s still true, but now I also don’t think you care much about communicating with your fellow human beings.

Movie Review: Bohemian Rhapsody

As a rule, I not only don’t do movie reviews but I don’t buy movies. I had a small (probably 15 tapes) VHS collection that I tossed when we moved to Red Wing in 2014. I have about that many DVDs, most of which my wife inherited from her father and some motorcycle DVDs that were sent to me to review when I wrote for Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly magazine. I kept most of the review DVDs because I couldn’t find anyone to give them to. Mostly, I’m happy to watch a movie once and forget about it.

Bohemian Rhapsody may prove to be an exception.

Before you get driven away from seeing Bohemian Rhapsody by the bullshit reviews—most of which apparently wanted long scenes of gay erotica, lots of orgies, and other soap opera gibberish—try to imagine that the band (and, most likely, Freddie) wanted a movie about their musical lives and the music. That is the movie they made and they have good reason to be proud of the outcome. (Brian May and Roger Taylor are listed as “Executive Music Producers) Also, remember that when the band was in its prime most of the reviewers, media rags, and television nitwits hated Queen and Queen’s music, including Bohemian Rhapsody. They were wrong then and they are wrong now, but at least they are consistent. Take everything Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Rotten Tomatoes, the Guardian, and the rest of the wannabe rock critics with a block of highly diluted salt. A typical comment from that crowd was this bit of drivel by a Pitchfork reviewer, "The film also manages to rob Mercury of nearly all his queer pleasures." Another way to say that would be that the film manages to keep its eye on the musical ball rather than Freddy Mercury's balls.

Likewise, the movie spends a little time portraying the media obscessing on Mercury’s sex life, even during band media events intended to promote their music and touring. Nobody dislikes having their image accurately held up for ridicule and nobody deserves that more than the entertainment jackals.

Rami Malek nailed Freddy Mercury perfectly and bozos like sore loser Sacha Baron Cohen are just jealous that not only did he not get the part but the members of Queen thought Cohen’s take on Mercury was pure bullshit. The movie covers more territory in 2 1/4 hours than we have a right to expect from a pop music movie. All four of the character actors who played the band’s members knocked their parts out of the park. Brian May must have felt like he was watching a 30 year old mirror Gwilym Lee had him down so perfectly. Honestly, before a recent documentary about Queen and this movie, I didn’t know squat about Roger Taylor or John Deacon, but Ben Hardy and Joseph Mazzello nailed the characters I saw in the BBC documentary and all of the scenes I’ve seen of Queen on stage.

Watching the actors in the recording studio reminded me of how much I love that world. The freedom, creativity, sounds, energy, control, fun make the recording studio one of the few places on the planet that some of us every get to be who we are; the best of who we are. Taking time away from the performances, the recording studio experience, to spend it on Mercury’s gay high life would have ruined the movie for me. Watching the band on stage, backstage, and on the road reminded me of why people get into pop music in the first place.

Movies are snapshots, at best. They are not rambling 1,000 page tomes on history, society, and sociology. Screenplay authors often have to condense moments that you and I might think are important to something that, to us, may not resemble the story we’ve heard. Often, the story we’ve heard has been distorted and doesn’t even slightly resemble the truth. Movies are not Ken Burns PBS documentaries that can go on for hours in a series of segments. 135 minutes is pushing the boundaries of movie length and if you would have rather had less of Queen’s Live Aid performance or any of the music this movie was supposed to be about and more gay bar scenes, you probably were never a Queen fan. This a movie for fans of the band’s music, but probably not a tell-all semi-porno if that’s what you’re hoping for.