We're Burning Up Tape, Godammit!

I have a dim recollection of a family trip to Michigan, listening to Sheryl Crow’s “Hard to Make a Stand” on the Aiwa Walkman my aunt bought me for Christmas that year. As the song segued into the outro, I heard a voice! A voice where there shouldn’t be a voice! I rewound the tape 5 or 6 times, turning up the volume to try to make out the words. Finally, there it was: a faint, “c’mon boys.” After discovering it, I probably listened to it another six or seven times so I could actually hear Sheryl enjoying herself in the studio. In a word, I was shocked at how ‘real’ that toss off was.

Whether intentional or unintentional, stray studio blemishes wind their way onto the master tapes of our favorite and unfavorite recordings. Rarely reproduced live (and almost always viewed as inauthentic if they are), these studio quirks serve as a matter of proof that musicians are not robots – they actually record these songs! None of these are a necessary part of the bare song structure, but become instantiations (to borrow again from Gracyk) of the recording process.

Perhaps the most prevalent “studio authentication” present on recordings is the ‘count off,’ before starting a song. Wilco’s “It’s Just That Simple,” “When the Roses Bloom Again,” and “The Thanks I Get” all employ the count off, as do, well, other artists I’m sure. Billy Joel cuts the crap and incorporates the count off right into “Matter of Trust.”

Another common authentication is the pre-song chatter, between the artists, engineers or producers. Ani Difranco and the Old 97’s start “Imperfectly” and “Victoria,” respectively, with the query, “ya rollin’”? Fastball and Everclear include the ejaculations “We’re burning up tape, godammit!” and “Play the fucking song!” on “Freeloader Freddy” and “Bad Connection.” Elliott Smith’s “In the Lost and Found,” contains nearly a minute of studio clutter before the piano starts. The only studio chatter I think is really worth a damn is the first track on Ryan Adam’s breakthrough, Heartbreaker, “Argument With David Rawlings,” which segues into the ‘real’ opening track “To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High).”

Scroll through your own music libraries to find numerous coughs, hacks, ‘c’mons’ and other sundry instantiations. Arguably, Jandek’s entire catalog pre-1994 is one giant studio blunder, and it is telling that his CD reissues painstakingly remove all microphone bumps, coughs, and motorcycle drive-bys.

Each of these studio moments caught on tape could have easily been edited out on the masters. The inclusion of banter, count offs, and other studio occurrences lend each of the songs a “genuine” quality that seem to say this really happened. The aesthetic quality they lend to the final product is a sense of immediacy, if not intimacy. Interesting, because there really is no other way for the song to be recorded than for at least one musician and one piece of equipment; the tracks thus occasionally urge the listener (or at least this one) to respond, I know this really happened, assholes.

Two of the Wilco songs mentioned, as well as the Everclear and Fastball tracks, are b-sides – a term that is becoming obsolete in favor of ‘bonus track.’ In any event, the banter and count offs also seem to signify a certain ‘unfinished’ quality. Arguably, the effort of preserving these instantiations was probably no more than removing them to appropriately ‘finalize’ the product.

Do these instantiations then further bolster the authenticity of a recording? Would removing them be more of an embellishment of reality than leaving them in when they could have been removed? Will Lassie save Timmy from the well? Tune into tomorrow’s episode, when we explore the authenticity and contemporary purpose of another gem, the b-side.