|
|
|
There was this one man Steve met when a friend of his took him for a visit. Steve couldn’t remember his friend’s name, but did recall this friend got him kicked out of a radio station one night. Now there’s another story.
Anyway, this was a very nice man, friendly and sort of quite. His speech gentile and his manner almost feminine. Steve could never remember the man’s name, except that it started with a “B” and it was hard for him to pronounce. But years latter he would recognize it when he watched cartoons.
This man lived in a very small, single floor apartment complex that was in a “U” shape. It was painted white and looked old. And it was off of a very quite street that was lined with large and very old Oak trees. In fact, the street is still named “Oak Street” to this very day.
Steve’s friend parked his car right in front of the man’s front door. Steve’s friend knocked on the white door after climbing the three steps that led to the entrance.
There was the sound of music and singing coming from the window next to the door. It got quite after the knock. A few moments later a man opened the door and a smile came across his face as he recognized the face of Steve’s friend. He invited them both into his home. He was very polite and gave the usual greetings as he shook Steve’s hand. His dress was casual and Steve noticed that he wore shoes without any socks. Steve always thought that was very odd. Of-course Steve always had sweaty feet, so socks were just as important as pants, you just didn’t go out in public without them.
As you stepped into the apartment through the front door, you were inside this man’s living room. Everywhere you looked there were real-to-real tape recorders. They were on the floor and on the cabinets and they were even stacked on top of each other. There were large mixers with dozens of knobs that moved up and down, speakers and amplifiers and wires going everywhere from each of the machines all over the room and into his bedroom and kitchen. It looked to Steve like there must have been miles of wire.
Everywhere you looked there were stacks of white boxes with recording tapes in them and they all had dates written on them.
There were dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. But they were stacked neatly and had been rinsed for washing. You could tell this man lived alone and yet there was something about the way the place was kept. It was like a woman lived there. Not at all like one would expect to find in a bachelor’s apartment. The home wasn’t messy. It just looked lived in and it was obvious this man spent his every waking hour on this project. It was more than an obsession. It was more like this was the way he paid his bills.
In the man’s bedroom there were even more recorders with reels of tape in each and every one of them. Some of them were turning and some weren’t. Some of them were turning fast and some of them slow. There were even tape recorders in his kitchen.
How this man ever kept track of what machine was doing what was well beyond anything Steve had ever witnessed or could understand.
At some point the conversation turned to the day’s events and the man turned up the volume on the speakers. Now the sounds coming out of these machines were very funny and nothing like Steve had ever heard. It was if someone had changed the speed of a record. It was like someone had taken a thirty-three-and-a-third-speed record and played it at forty-five-speed record setting. The voices were very fast and kind of high. Other machines had the voices coming out regular, and the man would turn some knobs and push some buttons and the speed would change on the tapes making them go faster.
The man had tapes of just music and tapes of just voices. He would regulate the speed to make the voices faster and then record it. Then he would play back the recording of the fast voice tape at the regular speed and record it at a fast speed to make it even faster and mix that with a tape of regular music behind it. Then he would play a tape at regular speed and record it and stop it and then play a machine at a fast speed and record that. He played with the knobs and buttons and showed Steve and his friend how it was all put together.
I know. This gets all confusing. Which is exactly how Steve felt.
When the man put all of these different tapes together by moving the knobs on the big board, he made the machines in the bedroom play along with the machines in the living room and recorded it. He created a recording of a voice singing a regular song along with voices singing the same song at a faster speed, but at the same tempo as the regular song. And the music was all the same throughout the entire song without skipping a beat. And you could actually understand what the fast voices were saying, even though they were at a faster speed.
Steve’s friend asked and got the man to play a sample tape of what he was working on that day just for Steve. The man went into his bedroom; the bed was neatly made by the way, and stopped some machines and pushed some buttons on some others.
Then he came back into the living room and sat down in front of a large shinny black board that had dozens of knobs all across the middle. The knobs slid up and down the full width of the black panel in groves that had white marks with numbers on the end of each line indicating some kind of measurement.
The man picked up one of the white boxes with dates on them and put the tape inside on the machine directly in front of the big black panel with all the knobs. He pulled the end of the tape through all the levers and wheels and threaded it into an empty real on the other side of the machine.
He sat down in front of the big board and said casually that he hadn’t finished with today’s work, but this was yesterday’s tape and he pushed some buttons and moved some of the knobs on the board. The tape machine started to play.
The man only played a part of the tape, he said he couldn’t play it all because it wasn’t finished yet, but it was great, and it was funny.
It was years later when Steve realized what he had been a part of that afternoon. There was something familiar with the voices he heard on cartoons and some records he heard on the radio. And they were all the same. And there was something about the name on the credits of the cartoons Steve watched. Somehow Steve had heard the name before.
He had been inside the very room were the “Chipmunks” were created. Steve could never recall why it was his friend took him there.
.