Rock Music Therapy

[Just to keep the turntable spinning a bit longer…]

A call came into the studio one morning from a guy named Gil. So many years have come and gone since then that I can’t recall which high school he was connected with, but I think he was in “humanities,” and he told me he enjoyed “Celebration Rock.” Could we meet sometime and talk about an idea?  Sure. I was always open to program possibilities, maybe at least a theme for a show.

I invited Gil to the WBBL studio, and he brought a file of hit and album song lyrics, mostly written down as he listened carefully to the records. (What a gift it was for us lyric-oriented folk…to have the lyrics printed on the record jacket or on an album insert. But much of the time, we had to listen closely and write what we [thought] we heard!)  I thought maybe Gil was going to offer to write a show for me, but he had a higher intention. Because of Gil’s work with teenagers, and his many experiences of hearing them voice their feelings, concerns, and “issues,”  — and because he loved music and was able to make connections between current song lyrics and those adolescent voices he heard in school — Gil had gathered some  lyrics and wanted to share them with me. I think it was to kind of “proof read” the lyrics he had heard, but also to test out an idea: that those songs could be used in one-on-one or group sessions with teenagers in crisis.

Again, the memory is fuzzy here, but it seems to me that we met a couple more times, and Gil and I discussed the idea of “rock music therapy” now and then over the next couple of years. It all led to my going to speak to his high school humanities class about rock poetry and music, one of the few times I took the “Celebration Rock” program into a “secular” setting. At the same time, Gil moved into a more in depth study of music therapy with youth in a professional setting, though I’m not able to be more specific than that all these years later.

The main thing is that he was a caring adult who had learned to listen to both his students and his music, and he pursued that connection with a tireless passion to use that music to help youth cope with their often rocky adolescence. His approach helped me sharpen my own use of lyrics as I interpreted song poetry through my radio programs, keeping in mind the life situations of younger listeners who might find solace or challenge in the ever-present music soundtrack of their lives.

I have this regret as I look back on Gil’s contributions to our listening and interpreting: why in heaven’s name did we not do a show together about music as therapy? When music tells our stories, or the stories of people we may know, or expresses feelings that we find foreign or all-too-familiar, can that connection bring healing or understanding, comfort, or even salvation?

Songs of joy or songs “sung blue” fill the airwaves and the internet today.

Who’s really listening? I mean, really listening!

[With thanks to Gil Cumbia]

Don’t Worry; We Can Edit That

[Another in the continuing series of “Celebration Rock” blogs that keep the recurring dream alive…]

Like many other amateur audiophiles, I have loaded the freeware “Audacity” onto my computer, just to play with. I might get into podcasting or something; you never know. Plus, it might be fun in my retirement to re-edit some of my favorite Celebration Rock programs, to see what they might sound like without those dated references to “records,” “Northern Ireland’s troubles,” or male-dominated God language.

Audacity is pretty user-friendly, people tell me. And since I’m almost an expert at video editing with Pinnacle’s Studio Plus, one would think this audio editing/mixing thing would be half the effort that video is. We’ll see.

What occurs to me as I look forward to learning something new, is what audio editing used to be like,  in the days of razor blades and splicing tape. From the first “Showcase” program on to the last of the long-running “Celebration Rock” series two decades later, I tried my best to make the hour-long show seem live. If I had my script, record list, and recording equipment all in order, it was very possible that from the opening song to the closing theme the tape would roll for exactly sixty minutes, and I could put a label  on it (“Master Tape — Do Not Erase”) and call it a day — or a night, depending. But stuff happens.

I might have mis-cued the cut I wanted to play from an album, or maybe the turntable (remember those?) would still be set at 45 r.p.m. as the l.p. started to spin. “Ooops” moments often led to more profane expletives, not “on air,” of course; I was careful about that. But the mistakes had to be edited out. Or, I’d throw the wrong switch, push the right button at the wrong time, or just plain screw up what I had meant to say. Sometimes things were going so badly that I’d have to stop that tape and start from the beginning.

But if the miscues were minor and the timing was close to 60:00, I’d make a quick adjustment and know that when the show was over, I could grab a wax pencil, a razor blade, and some splicing tape, cut away the mistake,  and the listener would never know.

The process was low tech, to be sure. I’d find the offending audio, sometimes having marked the place on the reel by putting a piece of paper in the reel as the tape wound past the error. I’d manually move the tape slowly over the playback head to locate the beginning of the edit point, mark that place with the wax pencil, find the end of the bad audio, mark that, and then place the tape in an edit block, a precisely machined metal tape holder with a diagonal slot where a razor blade would slice through the tape. The length of tape to be cut out might be a quarter of an inch; or, several feet. Specially made adhesive tape would join the remaining audio tape at the splice.

Again, if the splice were a good one, no one would know that anything had been excised. In fact, some splices were so good, I was more proud of the edits than my script, an admission not easily made.

I got good at it. Lots of practice, you see. I could edit the “s” off most plurals to make ’em singular. I could edit every “uh” from ad-libbed comments. I could polish up guest interviews, editing for time and clarity, but also saving some nervous guests from sounding inarticulate. (“Geez, it’s…it’s a tough question,” the guest might say. On tape it might sound like, “Jesus…it’s a tough question.”  Don’t worry; we can edit that.)

Usually I taped interviews days or weeks away from the show’s production. As I listened to the interviews, I’d begin to rearrange the content to fit the final shape of the program’s flow. Again, this sounds so primitive now, but there were many times when I would have cut the interview tape (quite literally)  into many separate lengths, several feet long, and would have draped those pieces all over the studio, before splicing them back together in the order I thought most useful for the program.

More than one visitor to the studio during those days must have thought the whole thing was crazy. But that’s the way it we did it  before the process became digital, and editing became a matter of mouse clicks. Compared to the “old days,” the digital process is much more precise, certainly faster, and probably still a satisfying art. Sometimes fun, sometimes a pain.  But far less tactile than those “hand-made” edits.

By the way, in the process of dubbing old CR reels to CD, I still have to keep a razor blade and splicing tape handy. You never know when one of those 30 year-old edits will come loose as the tape plays or rewinds. Whether it’s an “ooops” moment or a “damn” still depends on circumstances. It may sound silly, but I still get some satisfaction out of the process.

Now, if only we could edit life itself. Cut out the bad parts and pretend they never happened. Wait. That may be what confession, grace, and forgiveness are all about. God’s wax pencil.