OK, a lot of folks are going to get upset with what I’m going to say here, so I’m putting on my flame retardant suit as I write. The other night I was thinking about an event in Carbondale where I was living when I went to SIU in the early 1970s. There was a club called Bonaparte’s Retreat that many local bands, including ours played at. One weekend a rock band played there and it was discovered that their show was being enhanced by additional tape recorded musical instruments being added to the mix. The patrons were outraged and many articles and letters followed in the Daily Egyptian, which was the SIU newspaper. A typical letter read: “I paid to see live music and I heard tapes! I can stay home and listen to tapes!” Everyone was quite upset about this and that particular band never played there again. Then around 1982 or so, my band was sharing the bill with another band on one of the stages at the Tulsa Oklahoma state fair. It wasn’t long before we noticed we were hearing all sorts of instruments and vocal backups that couldn’t have been produced by the limited number of members in the band. As we stood backstage, we realized the keyboard player had a tape recorder hidden under his set up and with his feet, he was punching in all these recorded sounds. I found out later, the people booking the fair also discovered this and that band was not booked for a return date. Now fast forward to 2014 and everywhere I go to hear live music, I’m finding musicians who are using all sorts of electronic devices via foot pedals to create huge band sounds that couldn’t exist on their own. The difference being, today audiences totally accept this and have no problem with it. Has our culture changed that much over the last generation or two? Have our standards for live music taken such a radical turn? A lot of my musician friends are doing this very thing and although they are fine musicians and singers, I think they feel the need to use these enhancements in order to compete with all the other players who are using them. After all, how can you audition for a new venue with just a guitar and a voice, when the guy who played last week sounded like a ten piece band all by himself? At the bottom of my gig announcements there is usually a line that reads-“ No vocal harmonizers, no loops, no auto-tuners, no drum machines. Just real music.” If I can’t perform a song and make it sound good without all those devices , then I won’t perform the song. It’s as simple as that. As I said, I’m probably going to lose some friends or at least ruffle some feathers here, but I feel I have to say this. So let me know what you think.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 14:57:50 +0000
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