So Where Were We?

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I started off the year trying to blog every day.  I made it little over a month and even then I cheated a little.  I was going pretty well and then BAM!  Work hit me in the face.  In all honesty I am only just now kind of getting back to what I think is normal.  Whatever “normal” means anyway.  With all of that behind me at this point I want to get back to doing some writing.  Over the next few weeks I expect to get back to a regular schedule.  Don’t know if I can handle everyday style posting but  I would like to work up to it.  Then again, ‘all good things’ right?

One of the last posts I wrote before signing off for a little while concerned my frustrations with gifted education in Alabama.  To say I was a bit surprised by the amount of feedback I got from that post would be doing a disservice.  I got much more feedback than I was expecting.  The parents of gifted children in Alabama are crying out for help and resources in this state and their pleas are falling on deaf ears.  I want to be more active in the gifted community but I haven’t found a way to do that yet.  My schedule seems to make it difficult but going through the summer and then in to the next school year I hope to find a place that allows me to both help my daughter reach her potential as well as be a part of the bigger community that is working to better gifted education in Alabama.

I have to say, however, that the more I learn about the subject the more disheartened I am becoming.  More than once I have really given thought to moving out of Alabama by any means necessary.  It would not be easy for me to make such a change and financially it seems all but impossible.  I have been weighing that against the opportunities Emily might have somewhere else and the scale keeps tipping both directions.  A move and all the things that would come with it would not be an easy thing to do and only slightly easier to think about.  While no real options are on the table yet they are certainly simmering on the stove.  More thinking, discussions, and soul search has to be done.  If I saw some kind of hope that Alabama would fix its education system I wouldn’t be so concerned but I honestly don’t think it will ever get better.

Anyway, here’s to getting back to blogging.  Hope to see you around.

The Big Easy Express

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Big Easy ExpressAfter watching Sound City ON Saturday I decided it was going to be an all music day on Sunday culminating in, of course, The Grammy’s.  The night before I had noticed that a couple of momentariness / concert films that I was interested in and set the DVR.  The first of these was The Big Easy Express.

The Big Easy Express follow three modern folk/rock bands on the Railroad Revival Tour in 2011.  The bands traveled from Oakland, California to New Orleans, Louisiana playing stops along the way.  The film consists mostly of concert footage with a little big of train life sprinkled in between.  It went on to win a Grammy for best Long Form Music Video the same night I watched it.  Well, I guess actually it would have received the award in a separate ceremony as those awards never make it to the broadcast show.

 Its strange, I would not consider myself someone who typically likes folk or bluegrass and certainly not full-blown country but over the past few years this kind of sound has been growing on me.  I first took notice of Mumford & Sons when they played The Grammy’s with The Avett Brothers and Bob Dylan in 2011.  In particular their song “The Cave” stuck with me and I became an instant fan.  I later started listening to The Avett Brothers.  It was good music when I was feeling kind of relaxed and I enjoy both bands very much.  I still wouldn’t consider myself of folk music guy but I am coming around.  I saw the trailer for this film not too long after I got into Mumford and Sons and was excited to see it.  Of course nothing like that plays around here so eventually I kind of forgot about it.  I spotted it in the listings yesterday, set a timer, and got up this morning early specifically to watch it.

I enjoyed the film.  it was certainly not a behind-the-scenes type of thing with interviews about how the tour was pulled off or anything.  I think the idea that it is a long form music video is fairly apt.  There are plenty of vignettes of each band and wonderful music throughout.  I think what I was most interested in, however, are the sections on the train.  This is where the different band members mix it up and play with each other.  They worked on a few songs, had a few drinks and generally seemed to have a good time.  How awesome would it be to take a cross country trip with a bunch of your friends and just hang out playing music all day?  They mentioned not showing very often though.  I guess I am a guy who likes a shower ever day but other than that, count me in.  Otherwise, this is probably one of those films that if you like the music you will love the film but if you don’t like that genre then this isn’t going to be your thing either.  It looks good, sounds good and is an entertaining watch.

I followed this up with more Mumford & Sons because that just happened to be the next thing on the same channel.  I guess I kind of got lucky that way.  The Road to Red Rocks was released right around the time of their second album, “Babel” and is your basic concert style film with stuff from the band interspersed throughout the film.  I enjoyed this as well, maybe more than Big Easy Express.  I am sure that had to do with me being familiar with the music.  Again, if you are a Mumford & Sons fan then this is certainly worth watching.  Red Rocks looks like an awesome place to see a show by the way.  I’ve never seen a venue quite like it.

Later that evening Mumford & Sons played on The Grammys again and won Album of the Year.  It was a great way to end the evening.

On a side note, this was also the second time I saw The Lumineers play on TV as they had been on SNL a few weeks earlier.  ”Ho Hey” has quickly become a song I can’t get enough of.  Sometimes I find it strange to have this growing affinity for folk/bluegrass.  I suppose age has something to do with it but I wonder if for much of my life I didn’t allow myself to listen to this kind of music.  As though it wasn’t “cool” or something.  I don’t know.  I like what I like.  That’s really all that matters isn’t it?

Sound City

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I am not sure where I first heard about Dave Grohl’s Sound City.  I think maybe I spotted the trailer for the film on the trailers app on my iPad.  Wherever it was, I was immediately intrigued.  Take a look.

I had a hard time getting an angle on how to write about this film.  I made a few attempts but I could not coherently keep it together.  Ultimately I found that my problem was because the movie itself has a few different threads that at times seem contradictory.  That’s where I got into problems. Is the film about Sound City studio’s rise and fall?  Is it about the unique Neve console or is it about the inevitable progression from analog to digital?  I kept trying to come at it from all of these different directions but I kept failing at juggling those themes.  I just could not get them to fit together.  I left the post in draft mode and gave up while thinking I would come back to it later, which I have.  The thing is, the film isn’t really about any of this.  Sound City is about the process of making music.  It is about the people, the tools and the technology that come together along with a little bit of magic to produce something that is greater than the sum of its parts.  It is all part of the bigger story and like a great album, the film comes together to form something wholly different from its components.

If you didn’t get it from the trailer, here is the quick review.  Sound City was a recording studio in the shadow of Hollywood.  It wasn’t clean or the most high tech but what it had was a unique recording console, the Neve 8028, and a somewhat mystical room where drums sounded great.  The studio went on to produce some of the biggest albums in rock history but ultimately fell victim to the tide of progress and when digital hit the studio chose not to change with the times and was left to a less than noble end.

Directed by Dave Grohl, Sound City explores how music is made.  It may seem at first to be about the place or the console but it is about people.  It is always people that come together to makes music.  It is about the musicians, the engineers, and the people at the front desk that create an environment where special things happen.  It is also about loss.  What do we lose when people don’t create things together and does anyone care?

I enjoyed the film quite a bit.  Grohl’s love of both the studio and the console shines through every moment of the film.  I find it interesting what he lingers on and then what he completely skips over.  Fleetwood Mac gets a lot of time in the film as does Rick Springfield.  The hair bands, who may have been the largest genre of music to come out of Sound City, are given very little screen time.  I don’t know what this means but I wonder if Grohl’s personal feelings about that genre are to blame.  It is perfectly fine by me.  I didn’t really need to hear much from Stephen Pearcy from RATT.  The guy is creepy even on the best of days.  Later acts that come through the studio only fare marginally better.  Nirvana is featured for obvious reasons and I would like to see an entire documentary on the making of that record.

The last 30 minutes is an indulgent series of jam sessions with many of the acts that came through Sound City.  At first it seems a little out of place.  Once the story of the studio is over, Dave acquires the board for his studio and we get a bunch of Dave geeking out playing with all of these artists.  Once I understood that the entire film is about making music, this section made complete sense.  In fact, this section punctuates the theme.  Music is always about people.  Here, at the end, that’s what we are left with.  The studio is closed, much of the tools have changed, but the people are still there, still rocking, still enjoying the creative process.

If I have one real criticism it is the appearance of Paul McCartney at the end.  There is a quick moment at the beginning of the film where Grohl talks about The Beatles and how they influenced music and even the creation of Sound City.  Nothing else is mentioned until the very end when McCartney starts playing.  Yeah, it is a little bit of a full circle moment but it felt forced to me.  More along the lines of Grohl wanting to show off how awesome he is that Paul McCartney comes to play at his studio.  Maybe a minor gripe but I would much rather see more of the acts actually featured in the film.  It is Grohl’s first film so I will cut him a little slack.

Sound City is available for download or On-Demand just about anywhere.  I highly recommend it.

Playing with my Knobs

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Mixing BoardMy career path, if it can be called that, has been a strange journey.  Over the past two years I have been forced to learn quite a bit more than I expected about live sound production.  I am still a rank amateur but I am learning every day.  I am finding that I really enjoy this kind of work.  No so much the setup part but the actual running of the show.  At least when everything is working.  It’s not as fun when there are technical problems.  The thing is, I never had any talent for making music.  It’s just not in my DNA.  It should be but somehow it skipped me.  Even though I don’t have any skill for making music, the reproduction of sound has always been something I was interested in.

As a little kid I can remember being fascinated by tape recorders and the ability to say something and have it played back to you.  Maybe that is where it started.  I can remember always wanting to play with my dad’s stereo system and I even remember taking apart one of his speakers once.  I have been taking stuff apart ever since.

I wonder if I had had access to the technology that I have access to today would I have gone into music production?  I feel way too old to try and follow that rabbit very far today.  I still like learning so I will keep at it until such time as I can not.

FBI Warning

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I spent the evening working.  The crazy thing is that this night I got paid to watch a movie.  Not a bad gig if you can get it.  I guess the full disclosure of the situation is that I was the projectionist for a local film series.  It wasn’t at a movie theater, just an auditorium with a projector and DVD player.  Nothing too spectacular but it is good work and I enjoy it.  This night was odd and slightly memorable because of a particular patron but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Once the film got started I kicked back to do some reading.  I have been doing stuff like this long enough that my ears are attuned to listening for irregular sounds even when I am not exactly giving my full attention to the film.  Poor audio tracks, busted speakers, and a myriad of other things stick out to me like a sore thumb.  I won’t say I am good at recognizing subtle problems in tone but I can generally hear when something doesn’t sound right and tonight something definitely sounded bad.  Every so often there was an odd clicking sound coming from the auditorium.  For a while I thought it was in the film.  it was a documentary and some of the soundtrack during certain sections was scratchy by design.  After a few minutes of listening, however, it became obviously that this noise was not part of the film.  The clicks were so random that there is no way they were there on purpose.

Of course this is when the professional in me kicked in and I started trying to find the source of the problem.  My first thought in these situations is that it is a technical problem.  I checked my monitor speakers but the click wasn’t there.  I then checked the auditorium itself.  I was looking for maybe a fire alarm that was malfunctioning.  Sometimes these systems can make noises.  Nothing panned out.  I was about to give up my search and wait until the film was over to do some more system checks when I noticed a patron in the back of the room with a mobile phone.  She was recording the movie.  Well, not the entire movie, just sections.  The noise I was hearing was coming from her phone every time she stopped and restarted the recording!

FBI WarningI suppose her phone would not record continuously so she had to restart it inconstantly   Either that or she only wanted the sections with the famous actors talking.  It was a documentary about slaves who had told their stories many years after the war and the actors were reading the transcripts of those interviews.  I don’t remember the name of the film but it was an HBO production.  So, I guess she just wanted to actor parts and not the rest of the back story.  So strange.

I alerted the management.  They asked me if I had gotten any complaints.  I said “no” and since the movie had already run for an hour they said not to worry about it unless someone else complained.  there were only about maybe a dozen people in the auditorium so it probably wasn’t worth making a big deal.  Again, it wasn’t like this was a major release.  You can probably rent the film for a couple of bucks.  It still annoyed the hell out of me but I let it go.  The film ended without incident and the lady got up and went on her way never looking at me even though she must have seen me looking at her at one point.

I am constantly amazed at how selfish we humans can be.  If I could hear that noise in the booth the other people watching the film surely heard it as well.  Even though they didn’t say anything their experience must have suffered and all because one person felt her need to save parts of the film was more important than everyone else’s desire to enjoy the film.  I complain about people’s behavior in theaters all the time and it just doesn’t get any better.  Thank goodness for the constant increases in home theater technology. As good as it has gotten, nothing can replace the experience of seeing a film in a great theater with a an engaged and respectful audience.

Maybe I should passed on alerting the facility management and turned her into the FBI.  They prosecute that kind of stuff right??