It’s
Spring 1970 and you’re about to finish four years of study at a small liberal
arts college in Pennsylvania. There’s a non-zero chance that very soon you’re
going to get shot, possibly by the Vietcong, possibly by the National Guard.
What do you do? Why, discover the meaning of life and make a Firesign Theatre
album about it, of course!
That’s
what a group of students did for their final project at Haverford College in
Pennsylvania, inviting their friends and professors to participate as if it were the college yearbook, which in fact it was. Lots of
people, professional and non-, tried to make Firesign Theatre albums in the
seventies, and the results were rarely good (speaking as Firesign’s archivist,
trust me, I’ve heard them). This album, though—Rooter, credited to
Founder’s Annex—is damned interesting. The writing/performing team represented
real playwrighting talent, and they leveraged good local acting talent as well.
The result, while often a mess, is always listenable, and has both
laugh-out-loud lines and five-star “wow” moments of psychedelic epiphany.
I
wanted to know more so I tracked down the makers of the album, who provided the
background you’ll read below. I talked with Tom Nickel, Alex Swan, and Scott
Wallace via Zoom on March 28. Steve Newcomb also participated via email.
Full album audio & artwork is available here.
Tom Nickel: Alexis,
Scott and I are the three co-creators, although lots of other people were on it
too. I’m on Orcas Island off the coast of Washington.
Alex Swan: I’m in
Atlanta, Georgia. Here since 1980.
Scott Wallace: I’m
on Vancouver Island. I should say, we’re the three people whose names happen to
be on the back of the LP. You may not be looking at the three people who contributed
the most individually. And there certainly are many other people whose net
contribution overwhelms ours. So yeah, we’re happy to take some responsibility
for this debacle, but there are others who aren’t here…. Tom, why don’t you
talk a little bit about the context of it all? Alex, talk about the writing and
the production stuff, and I’ll talk about the technical side.
Tom Nickel: Well,
the context is, we’re old friends. When people talk about the ’60s, often they
mean the years 1966 through 1970. Those were years that we were at this small
liberal arts, really free, Quaker college outside of Philadelphia. We
experienced those counterculture years together. This record was a capstone for
some of the stuff we were doing. We were really influenced by the new style of
humor that Firesign Theatre introduced. They weren’t the only ones—George
Carlin made his transformation from lounge act to that comedy that didn’t have
to have jokes. We wanted to do that, like a million other people. We would sit
there smoking dope and playing cards and listen to the Firesign Theatre, trading
lines over and over again. There was a time when we could recite the whole canon.
But like I say, we were able to pull a team together, and three of us just started
writing stuff. We hadn’t really done it before. People were good at one side of
it or the other. Each of us will maybe have our own reason for why we did it. The
spring of 1970 when we did this was Cambodia Spring. The world felt like it was
coming apart at the seams then in the same way that it felt like it was coming apart
after 9/11 or 2008—at the time, it was just like, holy shit. And we were
trying to produce this record, that both in some ways captured our experiences,
but also tried to capture maybe a bigger set of experiences between side 1 and
side A. We were able to commandeer university facilities, because people could
just do what they wanted in those days. We stayed up really late at the music
center bringing in people to record all that on analog devices. The three of us
wrote it over the course of a month or so, and then we happened to have a
graduate of Haverford who worked at Columbia Records, and he let us come in
late one night and press 500 copies of the thing. Another friend of ours did
the artwork, and it all just fell together… There’s my context! Take it away,
Swope.
Alex Swan: Yeah,
that’s a good grounding. In terms of content, we knew we had to fill about 50
minutes. We had a premise that we wanted to show this guy, this naive young man,
without much character molded into him, going through the so-called 1969
collegiate life, facing all the problems that we were facing, the draft, and discovering
who we were, in a lot of different facets. We decided to build it around this
guy called Rooter who stumbled in and out of little incidents. I think we delved
into all our most esoteric experiences and thoughts to come up with musical
comedy, to come up with the philosophy we’d been taught. We recruited three or
four of the most significant professors at that college—Philosophy, French
literature, 20th century English and Irish literature, and Divinity—to take on
speaking parts. We built roles for them, and they were really good sports about
it, and they’d come in, stay a couple of hours with all these hippies, and do
their thing. They must have been pretty freaked when they got a copy of the
record at the very end. But we didn’t take advantage of them. We were trying to
throw everything we could think about in there—gender relationships, sports
types, modern theater, movies. Especially movies. We just threw it together and
tried to keep it funny. We had one guy, Steve Newcomb, who was a master
musician who put together all the musical interludes and accompaniment that
went along with it. I think Tom and I probably wrote the majority of it.
Tom Nickel: You
did.
Alex Swan: But
there were a lot of people not only whose voices were heard but whose opinion
and character came out through some of the characters we gave them to read.
There are few regrets. Some of it’s a little cringe-worthy now that we listen
to it fifty years later. But I think some of it is actually pretty prescient
and amusing.
Scott Wallace: This
was a college yearbook. The college had a yearbook called The Record, and
every year it was this black bound book with the words THE RECORD on the
outside of it, and it happened to be about the size of a record album. I think
that was in some respect the context in which this project was undertaken, and
Tom was the yearbook editor, so that gave him and the rest of the team the
liberty to do that shit. Alex mentioned Steve Newcomb as a musician. He was
also the master technician. He handled the acquisition of all the microphones
and recorders. We bought the highest-end recorders we could buy for civilian use
which were Uhers, I think, D900s. And Steve went to New Jersey with an
oscilloscope in order to take the inventory of those products and get two that
were as closely matched as possible, so you couldn’t detect the audio was
recorded on one or the other, which meant we didn’t have to do any post-processing.
We would bring in a whole raft of different people to do their speaking parts,
and for people who were unaccustomed to the idea of a Record as a record,
this was a bit of a dividend because some of these folks were well-beloved. Others
were just characters we knew on campus. But in any case, the technical side
involved not only the recording but the development of the documentation used
to master the recordings. Phil produced an eight-layer paper flowchart of each
of the audio tracks with the timings. We used that to do the production stuff.
And mostly Swope and Tom did the writing, although, as has been mentioned,
other folks were involved as well.
Steve Newcomb: All
recording and re-recording was done on three Uher tape decks purchased for the
purpose. Their eventual owners, including Phil Hart and myself, made a
significant financial contribution to the production. The mixing was done on
the ancient Dynaco pre-amp I had used in a stereo system for many years,
together with some RCA Y-connectors and cables, while overcoming the
significant impedance mismatches simply by boosting the signal. The microphones
were of the relatively newfangled and then-still-expensive condenser type with
solid-state electronics in the mic housing. I borrowed them from the College
through the kindness of Lou Del Giudice. I think they were Sennheisers, or
maybe Neumanns. The mics were the only really professional audio equipment used
in the production. Phil Hart and others did most of the background sound
recording, which was a tedious business involving moving mics, cables, Uher,
and extension cord to various venues.
Scott Wallace:
Steve is very thorough. He’s one of those people for whom there are not too
many details, no matter where he goes. He just sucks them in. When we asked him
about this record, he sent us a six-page synopsis—like, “Oh yeah, I just happened
to have this.”
Alex Swan: He was really
one of the driving forces of the whole thing. We were not the same year—I
believe he was the year after us.
Scott Wallace: He
was smarter than us.
Alex Swan: Smarter
and more proficient, obviously an accomplished musician and technician.
Scott Wallace:
He’s remained a very active academic in the computer world, and I think he’s
retired to an island in the Saint Lawrence.
Phil
Tramdack
Scott Wallace: Phil
Tramdack was a well-known character and speaker.
Tom Nickel: And
singing voice. He did that bit about the Germans and the English having their
famous Christmas celebration together, a story that’s been told many times
since.
Frank
Quinn (left), Tom Nickel
Alex Swan: Frank
Quinn was a personal friend of Dylan Thomas. He taught James Joyce to us, and
Thomas, and a few other people. He was like the Laureate of Haverford at the
time, a very lovely Irish accent. You’ll hear him throughout, here and there…
Tom, you had sideburns like that!?
Tom Nickel:
Whatever.
Philip
Hart (left), Scott Wallace
Alex Swan: That’s Phil
Hart with the headphones and Scotty on the right.
Tom Nickel: He wore
that white shirt and tie to every single session.
Tim Bryson
Alex Swan: Tim
Bryson was really nondescript in terms of the voice of Rooter. We wanted a
schlubby Everyman to go through and be subjected and heartened by all these
things that he was running into.
Steve
Newcombe (foreground left), Frank Quinn (background), Jim Emmons (middle
ground), Alexis Swan (foreground right)
Alex Swan: I was
an American kid with an English father and American mother. I got sent to
school in England when I was seven and stayed there until I was seventeen and
came back to college. I glommed a lot of the posh upper-class stuff, and
actually a pretty bad Cockney accent.
Tom Nickel: I want
to add that not only did Alex have the benefit of growing up in England and
developing a lot of accents, he was the outstanding actor of the entire campus,
not that it was a big campus, for years. He’s quite an accomplished actor, and
won awards and who knows. So he was more than just a great voice, and we were
lucky.
Alex Swan: The
amazing thing was, we were pretty much stoned the entire time we did this, or trying
to be stoned. To actually have pulled off some of this in that condition…
Tom Nickel: All
the production work was done after 10 o’clock at night, too.
Alex Swan: And it
was really weak quality drug.
Tom Nickel: Those
were the old days.
Alex Swan: We got
through it.
Scott Wallace: A
lot of emphysema symptoms.
Tom Nickel: The
Sixties—good times, good music, bad drugs.
Alex Swan: It was
actually a really great communal effort, and there were probably a few people
who didn’t get it or like it.
Tom Nickel: Yeah,
like most of the other people in our class who wanted a more traditional
yearbook. But there you go. It was a divided time. Half the people thought the ’60s
were terrible and half thought it was the cool thing. You could also not even
judge it at all and just say ’68 happened.
Alex Swan: Some
great movies, some great albums.
Tom Nickel: Amazing
assassinations.
Scott Wallace: It
occurs to me that with Rooter, my recollection of Firesign Theatre—all
of these efforts expressed sentiments, meanings and so on that have a context
in civil society that was pretty powerful. But what’s intriguing is not that
the meanings were expressed, but the manner of expressing them bent the meaning.
It required a certain engagement with the creation of the meaning. I think that’s
a part of what lives on in the Firesign Theatre, and our weak and amateur
efforts, what we unwittingly were pursuing, which was the ability to express
things that were literally inexpressible.
Tom Nickel: I just
can’t say enough how Firesign Theatre really was an early marker of people who were
on one side of the new sensibility and people who just didn’t get it at all—“Why
would I even listen to this?” And I think it still exists. That divide is still
there. But man, we loved them so much. For all the things that we were trying
to do, one of them was to do something anywhere near as good as what those guys
did.
Alex Swan: I still
don’t get it.
SIDE
1
Track 1—Welcome to
Haverford
Dean: Aryeh Kosman
Rooter: Tim Bryson
Steve Newcomb: The
background sound was recorded in an office in Founders Hall, I think. The
door-closing was recorded in Steve Barry’s and my suite in Comfort, as I was
trying to do the final edit and found that I lacked the sound of a door
closing.
Track 2—Class
Night
Trumpet: Curt Richardson
Piano, narrator: Steve Newcomb
Soldiers: Steve Miller (?), Alex Swan, Phil Tramdack
Steve Newcomb:
This is a sendup of Class Night performances and Rooter’s non-memory of the
Great War. I did all the keyboard work on the album. Background/audience sounds
were recorded at an actual Class Night performance. I think we borrowed them
from someone else’s recording. The dance scene (with the clomping sounds) was
recorded on the stage in the music building behind Gummere, where most of the
recording was done.
Track 3—Heedless
of Death
Great War
veteran / first laugher: Phil Hart
Track 4—Torture
Bowl
Narrator: Steve Newcomb
Bert Brutal: Mike Humphries
Torturee: Phil Tramdack
Tom Nickel:
Firesign Theatre had a contest bowl game on that first LP, Waiting for the
Electrician. So this was a takeoff on “Beat the Reaper”.
Steve Newcomb:
Mike did the Lawrence-Welkian cheek-pop—“Wolfgang S(pop)undig”—in real time. The
start-torturing whistle is the accidentally-recorded sound of a chair being
dragged across the floor in the studio.
Track 5—Une Poule
de Conne
Politician: Phil Tramdack
Translator: Steve Miller (?)
Steve Newcomb: Editing
sound bites used to be so tedious and kindergartenish that one’s mind had to do
something else just to get through it, so when I was done I found I had learned
the speech (“Messieurs, dames, je vous en prie. Fermez mon sale gal, vous n’êtesque chrétain. Je me demande si il y a un ou une entre vous en ce moment qui comprend tout ce que je dis. Je vous assure, une poule de conne, un ciel du merde, un nombre de petites affaiblances. Je vest autres amis”). I have
repeated this speech from memory to a couple of audiences in France, using my
best Phil Tramdack imitation. That speech always brought the house down,
perhaps because I unforgivably still haven’t learned to speak French. I was
told I had a Polish accent.
Track 6—College
Bowl
Dean: Aryeh Kosman
Quizmaster: Scott Wallace
Bennett Schotz: Himself (but maybe not)
Steve Newcomb: Pseudo-reenactment
of a “College Bowl” show in which the Haverford team lost by considering
questions carefully instead of answering fast, and in the case of one teammate,
falling backward in his chair.
Track 7—Cistern
Child commenters:
Mike Humphries, etc.
Alex Swan: Scotty,
you were responsible for the name “Cistern”.
Scott Wallace: I'm pretty good at the name thing. I’ve got a story I’m working
on with my grandson that involves a witch by the name of Cat6 and a mighty
mouse by the name of Schisandra.
Track 8—In the
Locker Room
Shower-taker: Phil
Tramdack
Steve Newcomb: I
think the tuneless whistler is also Tim Bryson. I seem to recall Tim’s lack of
confidence that he could whistle tunelessly, but I still think this whistling
was perfectly tuneless. I believe the sound effects, including the wet
footsteps, were recorded in the Haverford gym. Consider the logistics of that,
at a time when everything had to be plugged into the wall, and ground fault
interrupters were a fairly recent invention.
Tom Nickel: That
motorcycle you hear is an orange 750 Commando, without pipes.
Alex Swan: Very
appropriate for some reason.
Track 9—Stokesball
Tom Nickel: That
was subversion. That was taking a college lecture hall and turning it into a
sports stadium. We had a violent game that we played in there.
Alex Swan: It was
a Quaker type of Quidditch.
Tom Nickel: Yeah,
we had to break into the place late at night and throw balls around and throw
ourselves at things.
Steve Newcomb: I
never played Stokesball; by the time I might have played it, it was officially
discouraged. I gathered that it was a game designed around Stokes auditorium’s
steep aisles, possibly involving a basketball, and involving tokes as points,
or something like that. As Rooter is toking up, Tommy Nickel’s voice can be
heard laughing and saying “...Wallace...”.
Track 10—Coitus
Interruptus
“Il trouvait son penis...”: Phil Tramdack
Rooter’s roommate: Scott Wallace
Track 11—Darvon
Malingering student: Mike Humphries
Crabs: Phil Hart, etc.
Tom Nickel: Drugs
were so much easier then, not just the illegal drugs, but women could get speed
for their period, they had greenies and reddies, but also Darvon was a nice
little barbiturate.
Scott Wallace:
With Colt 45. I remember the swilling.
Tom Nickel: Beer
was good with it too.
Steve Newcomb: The
source of the Darvon running joke must be something that was experienced by the
Class of 1970 but, as far as I know, not 1971. According to the legend I heard,
the Infirmary was giving Darvon capsules (acetaminophen and propoxyphene HCl, a
potent painkiller and euphoriant) to students with injuries. In those days,
Darvon capsules could readily be disassembled to separate the acetaminophen
from the propoxyphene, making the propoxyphene even more abusable. The easy
availability of propoxyphene led to some creative malingering at the time.
Alex Swan: Phil
playing a crab…that’s another one of our friends showcasing his amazing empathy
with insects. I thought he was funny as hell.
Tom Nickel: They
were a part of life. It was a sociological layer, the crab layer, at that time.
Track 12—Glad to
Be of Service
Done-gooder: Phil Tramdack
Father: Steve Newcomb
Mother: Mike Humphries
Alex Swan: I can’t
remember why we did this bit. I think we were trying to put together a
patchwork that would justify some of the things that would later happen to Rooter.
That’s about all I can think of.
Tom Nickel: Great
answer.
Track 13—Between
the Shrimp and the Meat Course (Part 1)
Rodney: Alex Swan
Richard: Steve Miller
Alex Swan: This
has nothing to do with the plot line, it’s just pure filler—right?
Tom Nickel: Yes
and no. I mean, like I say, there wasn’t comedy like that before, just two
interesting characters talking that way. It was something we could do to fill
time, but it seemed appropriate. I think it’s some of the most entertaining
stuff.
Alex Swan: We had two,
I don’t know, questionably-gendered roommates, and I think we were taking a
poke at them.
Steve Newcomb: The
background sound is the (then brand-new) Haverford Dining Center.
Track 14—The Trial
Whistle-lisper:
Steve Newcomb
Tom Nickel:
Anybody that behaved in non-normative ways was pushing the boundaries of their
institutions, and we were troublemakers. I was called to the Dean several times,
and maybe all three of us were, and for things that would just be kind of
“duh!” now. So maybe part of our thing was like, okay, this Rooter is getting
admitted and he’s going to go through these experiences, but you’re going to be
tried, too. I felt that way. Really quick story—Ram Dass, who was then called
Richard Albert, came to our school. In fact he went up the East coast that Fall
of 1966, and explained the research that he and Timothy Leary were doing in
psychopharmacology, and that night upperclassman just brought the stuff around and
said “You saw Dr. Albert’s lecture. Whaddya think? We’re giving it out.” You
could do that in 1966. By ’67, you couldn’t. It was a real turning point right
there.
Scott Wallace: I
remember very shortly after Albert’s visit buying 100 hits of acid, thinking “Oh,
this is cool.”
Tom Nickel: Yeah,
there was no paranoia. It was just this cool thing that a Harvard guy was doing
research with.
Tom Nickel: It was
distributed in Bayer aspirin tablets. Liquid put into Bayer aspirin tablets are
what he was giving out.
Track 15—The Luck
of the Horny
Him: Alan Morgan
Her: Prudy Crowther
Tom Nickel: Prudy
Crowther was a talented actress at Bryn Mawr, which was the nearby school for
women. She was really good. And Al was just a natural in that.
Track 16—The
Walrus Was Paul
Alex Swan, Steve
Miller, Frank Quinn
Tom Nickel: There
had to be a track built on Beatles quotes—it’s traditional. That’s Frank Quinn
in the Irish voice speaking some of those quotes, too, beautiful Irish brogue.
Track 17—Between
the Shrimp and the Meat Course (Part 2)
Track 18—Isolation
Dean: Aryeh Kosman
Steve Newcomb:
Aryeh taught Philosophy at Haverford, and he complained to me that he would never
say what he says in this bit, but I think the authors would disagree. The
content may be wrong for Aryeh, but the tenor seems right enough to me. Aryeh
was a generous, conciliatory man who reliably made me feel understood.
Track 19—A
Roommate’s Unhappiness
Roommate: Mike
Humphries
Track 20—A
Critical Review
Reviewer: Phil
Tramdack
Track 21—Deep in
the Administration
Computer operator
#2: Steve Newcomb
Steve Newcomb: I
think the background sound is an IBM line printer, card reader, or keypunch
machine. Haverford had an IBM 1620, or at least we had access to one. I also
think I put this bit of master tape in the wrong place. The person whose
computer card is missing was supposed to correspond to the mysterious
non-student Alonzo, so the context here doesn’t work at all. My bad. My method
for sorting bits of audiotape was that I lined them up and hung them on a
towel-rack in our living room in Comfort.
Track 22—Toy Boat
Chorus leader: Tom
Nickel
Tom Nickel: This
the only time I actually appear during the record. I do have the ability of saying
“toy boat” at least five or ten times fast.
Track 23—Alonzo
Voice #1: Steve Miller (?)
Voice #2: Phil Tramdack
Man (“No shit, Sybil”): Steve Newcomb
Steve Newcomb: I’m
pretty sure the background sound is an IBM Selectric typewriter.
Tom Nickel: There’s
some backstory about how maybe Alonzo was a student but he wasn’t really in the
student database. I can’t remember. It was a very weak thread.
Track 24—Rooter the Savant
Doctor: Asok Gangadean
Westfield: Steve Miller
Idiot Savant Rooter: Steve Newcomb
Rooter’s internal voice: Tim Bryson
Dr. Mansfield: Phil Tramdack
Scott Wallace: We
were fixated on idiot savants.
Alex Swan: There
were shiny objects all around us, and we glommed onto some of them and tried to
do them our version of justice. The idiot savant concept was intriguing to us
at that time.
Tom Nickel: Rooter
was an individual going through the processing of that time, and then he came
out a savant with a new name.
Steve Newcomb: Here
we learn that Rooter is several people in one body. Personally, I think we all
are. He’s an idiot savant, a mind-manipulator, and a philosopher who is aware
of the subtle-but-dangerous impact of symbols on reality. The background sound
is Bryn Mawr Hospital. This was a difficult re-recording/edit. You can hear the
added noise and distortion.
SIDE A
Track 25—Mr. Muggins and the Press Gang
Sir: Frank Quinn
Herbert Muggins: Alex Swan
Private Boggs: Steve Miller (?)
Priest: Jim Emmons (?)
Steve Newcomb: Listeners
are reminded that in 1970, the US was engaged in a costly, unpopular war in
Southeast Asia. American males were subject to a national lottery governing whether
they would be compelled to serve in the US military. Numbers were randomly
assigned to each calendar day of the year. If a male’s birthday’s assigned
number was lower than an estimated but uncertain cutoff number, he was very
likely to be drafted into a meat grinder. His military obligation could be “deferred”,
one year at a time, by staying in school. Maybe the war would end before he graduated,
but nobody was placing any bets. By 1970, the war’s toll on American lives was
in the tens of thousands. During the previous year, Haverford College had
packed itself into 16 buses and gone to Washington for a couple of days to participate
in a huge protest. It was sobering to smell the tear gas at the DOJ, and to see
badge-wearing volunteers, including Aryeh Kosman, working to keep order in a
dangerous situation at the very edge of chaos. It was scary, but it was also a
shared citizenship lesson. DC locals—strangers to us—contributed floor space in
their homes for our sleeping bags. The Vietnam era’s draft lottery might have been
different from imperial press gangs, but the intent and results remained the
same as ever. To stay out of the war, one had to be careful not to be “doing
nothing,” as Sir observes with respect to Muggins.
Alex Swan: The
first seven minutes of Side A was basically my honors project. When everybody
else went to Washington to protest Cambodia, Mike Humphries and Frank Quinn and
I were stuck in a cavernous student union area, and I’d written this one-act
play as an honors project, and we performed it. All about this guy—“I wish I could
just have a sign, something meaningful, tell me what’s going on.” And then the priest
coming in, saying “My son, why don’t you try this and try that.” I think the
priest actually was you, Scott.
Scott Wallace: I’m
sure it wasn’t me.
Alex Swan: It’s
not a deus ex machina, it’s a Trojan horse, just thrown in there. It had
something to do with the context, but I think we probably used it because we
were eight or nine minutes short of two sides.
Track 26—Love’s a
Lash
Worser Angel: Richard Miller
Higher Power: Frank Quinn Steve Newcomb: Frank
Quinn’s (Sir’s) song begins by quoting a poem by Thomas Pynchon: “Love’s a lash
/ kisses gall the tongue...” The remainder of the song (“My soft pincer’s slash
/ brings feeling to the numb”) should be credited to one or more of the authors
(Nickel, Swan, Wallace). Rooter’s torturer and worser angel, passionately
voiced by Richard Miller, seems to find virtue in arguing that all is vanity
and futility. Rooter reveals at least one of the purposes of the record: “I
seek to record a voice telling of a short time spent in warmth.” The torturer
deprecates this idea, but he is unexpectedly overruled by a telephone call from
a Higher Power. Frank Quinn lends a voice to Higher Power that, in retrospect,
sounds like a Doctor Who villain.
Scott Wallace: I don’t
remember the name of the underclassman that we lashed to the bench.
Tom Nickel: (laughs) And we’ll leave that one off,
too.
Track
27—Guaranteed for Life
Steve Newcomb: Rooter’s
“cycle” begins. He’s in an allegorical primordial soup, with backdrop sound
effects that include weird talking insects and hooting primates. Rooter, along
with other entities who are “guaranteed for life”, is being “wound up”. I made
the winding-up sound using my limp old clockwork metronome. One of the less-identifiable
backdrop sounds is a Bunsen burner recorded with a moving pair of microphones,
one in each hand. The remainder of Side A is a bit like any college yearbook,
with each item hung from a wispy but pointed skeleton of connective tissue. It’s
a sequence of greeting cards or love letters to Haverford and to our cohort—to
the classes of 1970 and 1971, the faculty, and everyone else.
Tom Nickel: This
whole side is a walk through ideas and history, and one set of ideas would look
at the one before it and say “This is getting us nowhere”, and it gets into
logical positivism. “I think you’re there now.” It’s kind of an idea trip, the
bigger picture—a little medieval theology. Who’s the prime mover? The winding
up, who’s the first mover? What starts it all?
Track 28—Madrigal
Singers: Alex Swan,
Jim Emmons (?)
Alex Swan: This
was just a madrigal. “The sun it rises, leaves the moon surpriséd.” I’m not
sure how we got to there. I think it was just wanting to do something à la
Fairport Convention, like “Fotheringay”. I think Newt wrote the music and I wrote
the lyrics.
Tom Nickel: We
were in a medieval thought mode, so that sound went along with it.
Steve Newcomb: This
piece was recorded in Drinker. The Dining Center sound was underlaid at editing
time.
Track 29—What’s
Happening
Worser Angel: Richard Miller
Hip Sage: Aryeh Kosman Steve Newcomb: What
is Rooter’s destiny, and why?—Richard Miller’s voice asks. Nobody knows, but
everybody has something to say. In Rooter’s internal conversation, Aryeh Kosman’s
voice generally commands a special kind of respect, as indicated by the same Star
Trek-influenced sound effect that established the context for idiot-savant
Rooter’s inner dialog on Side 1.
Tom Nickel: That’s
pure Kafka. That’s what happens in The Castle—when they’re finally giving
out the meaning of life, everybody is asleep and they don’t hear it.
Alex Swan: The
jester wasn’t hot that night.
Track 30—Ora Labora
Liturgical chant & sermon: Alex Swan
Organ: Steve Newcomb
Steve Newcomb: The
chant and sermon were recorded at the First Presbyterian Church, Glassboro, New
Jersey, about an hour away from Haverford. I had a key to the building because
my brother and sister operated a coffee house in the basement. It was
frequented by students at what was then Glassboro State College and is now Rowan
University. During my Haverford years, I sometimes spent evenings playing at
the coffee house below the sanctuary, using ancient Sunday-school upright
pianos to back up other performers, or just playing whatever popped into my
head. The coffee was dreadful, but an attentive audience is pure magic. The
pipe organ was a high-pressure Estey built in Brattleboro, Vermont, probably in
1930 or earlier. The church had acquired the organ at the cost of hauling it
away from another church ($200). It had cost much more to make it work, but
still it was a terrific bargain, and the original direct-current blower
(branded Orgoblo, no kidding) was still working as well as ever. After turning
it on, it took several seconds to reach operating speed. As can be heard in the
recording, the Estey diapason was such a room-filler that it pretty much
drowned out the other two or three ranks, but it did not overpower Alex’s
impassioned speaking voice. In retrospect, I could have done the microphone
placement better. I did a level check on Alex’s speaking voice, but not on his
chanting voice, which turned out to be too soft. I thought that if I closed the
organ’s swell box for the chant, which I did, everything would work out, but it
didn’t, quite. The hymn tune is “Ora Labora” by T. Tertius Noble. In the old
United Presbyterian Hymnal, the hymn appears as “Come Labor On”, and it’s one
of my favorites. Here’s the last verse, which still reliably brings a tear to
my eye:
Come, labor on.
No time for rest, till glows the western sky,
till the long shadow o’er our pathway lie,
and a glad sound comes with the setting sun,
“Well done, well done!”
Alex Swan: “In
every joint and juncture”—that’s an homage to a play I was in in ’68 at the Agassiz
Theatre in Cambridge, where Tim Mayer and Thom Babe wrote a rock-and-roll
version of Everyman with Swallow, an amazing six-piece Cambridge-based
rock and roll band with a blind white singer. It was all written in iambic
pentameter. “In every joint and juncture” was ripping off one line from Thom
Babe’s libretto.
Track 31—Martin
Luther’s Little Bombshell
Martin Luther:
Gerhardt Spiegler
Steve Newcomb:
Martin Luther writes an ecclesiastical bomb and goes to the jings, where he
drops something else.
Tom Nickel: Scott
and I were both philosophy majors. We submitted the record to the entire
philosophy department. They had to listen to the whole thing.
Alex Swan: I
majored in English, literature and language. I wrote a lot. I majored, I always
said, in Lawrence and Joyce, a la Frank Quinn. He was a big influence on a lot
of us. I never followed philosophy the way Scott and Tom did. I was strictly
into words and imagery and they were into deeper thoughts.
Tom Nickel: Yeah,
which is why you carry the record.
Track 32—The Humanist, The Symbolic Logic Machine, and the Worser Angel
Humanist: Marcel Gutwirth
Symbolic Logic Machine: Scott Wallace
Worser Angel: Richard Miller
Tombling: Alex Swan
Steve Newcomb: The
humanist is self-satirizingly played by Marcel Gutwirth. For me, his line
readings are no-fail reminders of a great semester of super-Humanities that he
co-led. I struggled to come up with a sound that might convey the idea of logic
faltering. Logic’s limitations are a favorite Star Trek theme, but I can’t
recall such a limitation ever having been represented by a sound effect.
Alex Swan: The
professor who did Isaac Newton’s voice, all about reason and Moliere and
Voltaire, I’ve never known such an academic who knew every single thing about
Medieval through modern literature, all across the world. We got him in to do
that, and it was sort of beneath him, but he took it with a grain of salt. I
really think all those professors were pleased to be asked to be part of it. I know
this one was because I talked to him about it several years ago before he died.
But we were just casting our net as far and as wide as we could, and trying to
capture everything that was really influencing us and shaping our lives at the
time.
Track 33—A Real Green Banana
Worser Angel: Richard Miller
Hip Sage: Aryeh Kosman
Tom Nickel: That
measurement stuff—we had gotten up to empirical science, and everything that’s
real is what can be measured, and now finally we’re making it into Now, and
body cognition. There’s not an objective world that’s not an ideational world.
It’s in the relation between us and consciousness.
Track 34—Tamper with the Process
Hip Sage: Aryeh Kosman
Audience spokesperson: Phil Tramdack
William Wordsworth: Steve Newcomb
Steve Newcomb: A
cycle begins again, this time with me reading Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up”
in my windiest voice. But my reading suddenly goes fast-forward, just as the
audience requested. The Uher tape decks had features that their designers
probably didn’t intend. When the spring-loaded rubber-rimmed idler wheel that
drove the heavy flywheel/capstan was exposed and disengaged by my finger, the
capstan slowly lost speed and stopped, as demonstrated in the declining sound
effect at the very end of Side 1. The opposite effect was also available: if
the capstan’s pinch roller was similarly pulled away from the capstan, the
take-up reel was free to wind the tape past the playback head with increasing
speed. That’s how I made the remainder of the Wordsworth reading accelerate to
the end.
Track 35—The Myth of Prometheus
Professor:
Gerhardt Spiegler
Steve Newcomb: I
love how Professor Spiegler reads his lines, including his Germanic
pronunciation, “Promethoys.” He sounds like a counselor who’s been stuck with
the task of sharing some bad news, and is doing so gently but without
sweetening it. He evokes four ways that human civilization can be viewed, each
couched in an alternative Prometheus myth. Today I believe the core of human
history, of civilization itself, is the ongoing struggle to preserve its
memories. The Promethean gift marks the beginning of that struggle. The album itself
is an example of preservation of memory. Fifty years ago, we made sounds in
front of microphones. The variable air pressure became variable voltage, and we
captured it in iron oxide on acetate tape, and we took the tape to Capitol
Records where they copied it to mylar tape, and then put it through a lathe and
a cutting head and turned it into grooves cut on lacquer, which they made into
Masters, which they made into Mothers, which they made into Stampers, which a
factory in Long Island used to make 500 copies of the record, which they put in
sleeves, which we sold and which went out into the world. Fifty years later Sandy
Sandhaus and Greg Smalley took one record, converted it to variable voltage
with a turntable, converted the variable voltage to bits, saved the bits on a
hard drive, and sent that data down a wire from their hard drive to another
hard drive, and that data comes down another wire to someone’s computer every
time they watch it on YouTube. So basically Prometheus’s liver is a renewable
resource. It’s meliora doctrina—better learning—to inculcate, in
forthcoming generations, an appreciation for the scope of humanity’s memories and
the challenges of maintaining them, rather than to strive to be doctior—to
encompass more memories than others might. Nobody can remember more than a
little of what needs to be remembered. Nobody can predict whether a memory may
turn out to be important, or when it might be crucial, or why. If we want to hang
onto civilization, we will always need more people who will maintain access to
its memories. Greg and Sandy donated some of their livers to stave off oblivion
a while longer.
Track 36—Question
1
Steve Newcomb: The
love letter closes as love letters often do, with expressions of loyalty,
bondedness, personal transformation, hope, and more.
Alex Swan: I would
venture a guess that we were trying to sound like we knew what we had just been
doing for the last 45 minutes, and wanted to wrap it up in some kind of quizzical
way that implied more than it actually said. You agree, Scott?
Scott Wallace: I would.
Alex Swan: We were
19, 20 and maybe 21 years old. We were blown away by everything that was
happening around us, and we thought we knew it all, and we had insight and we
were experts beyond our age, in terms of parsing that and throwing it together
into something that would actually be interesting and meaningful. I think we
were just trying to go out on some graceful note.
Tom Nickel: We
knew what didn’t work anymore. That was the point. And the world should still
be listening. We got our wake-up call in the ’60s that this scientific
objective measurement was gone. We didn’t quite know what the new thing was
going to be, but it had something to do with social relationships and family. In
1972 Limits to Growth came around. The world’s still trying to pretend
that “No, it’s just science. We can be objective about the world. It’s not
about relationships, it’s not about humanity.” I think we had an inkling of
what we were against, and only a fuzzy idea of what we thought. But nothing
wrong with that.
Scott Wallace: Haverford
had a really beautiful campus, maybe 100 acres. It wasn’t like, “Right over
there is the housing development.” We had a cocoon in which the outer world was
not invisible, but it was not a part of our world. We were really privileged
young people, and that fact was drilled into us. We didn’t understand how illegitimate
that sense of privilege was. But that’s a part, I think, of how this thing got
to be what it is. We’d been trained to believe that if we thought about shit,
we’d probably come up with something interesting.
Tom Nickel: We
produced all this from about February to May 1970, I’d say.
Alex Swan: We had
trouble selling the 500 copies to our classmates.
Tom Nickel: We
gave it to the local underground radio station. We had no clue what else to do.
There wasn’t any other thing at that time.
Scott Wallace: I think
for me individually and probably for others, the most intense part of all this
was working together over a long period of time to create something that we
wanted to create and having it work out. It was a fucking hard thing to do, and
it took a long time, and when we were done, it was fucking good—like, yes and
no, but it was something that we worked together on. We all co-invested. There
was blood and sweat. And that experience—I’m not sure any of us had had that in
college. Generally you’re on your own. You’ve got friends, but you’re not
taking tests together. But this was something that we did together, and it was
epically difficult, and we achieved it. When this came out, it was the last
couple of weeks of the year and everybody was just exploding out in every which
direction. In a sense there was no consummation to this. There was no “And here
it is!” moment, because nobody was standing around waiting to be told anything.
Everybody was flying this way or that. So at least for me, a lot of it had to
do with the intensity of working together, the commitment to do it, and the
reality of having succeeded, to the extent that we were successful.
Alex Swan: Just as
a footnote, the thing I regret most about this is that we did not do women
justice, either in terms of participation or in the way they were referenced
and dealt with in terms of the performance.
Steve Newcomb: Side
A’s voices are 100% male. I’m not sure I ever noticed that before, a fact which
itself seems bizarre. Didn’t our internal conversations include any women? Maybe
we were unable to admit to our female content. Maybe the idea didn’t occur to
us because Haverford’s student body was 100% male. And even though Side 1 has female
characters, their characterizations are not very flattering.
Alex Swan: Looking
back, it would have been nicer had we been friends and colleagues with more
women, as opposed to just temporary boyfriends or hooking up with them from
time to time. I don’t think we tapped the resources that we could have. We
probably relied just on our own four or five of us to push it through, and we
could have been a lot more inclusive. We didn’t know how to relate to women on an
emotional level.
Scott Wallace: I don’t
think we really understood how to react personally with women.
Alex Swan: To
amplify what Scotty was saying—some of us were about to be drafted. Other
people were waiting to know if they would be drafted or if they had some
exemption. And at the same time, we were about to step outside the ivory tower,
and we really didn’t know where we were going or how much freedom we would have
to do what we wanted to do. So it was a real catharsis to get that out and
done. We felt we were doing something extracurricular and outside of the
painted lines, and all that. But I don’t think we realized that it would
actually have some legs. We learned that the class after us, the class of ’71,
loved the record. The class of ’70 wasn’t so hot about it, but the class of ’71
loved it, and digitized it a few years back. Some of their members have been in
touch with us to learn more about it. So it’s nice to know that it had a life
after we finished it.
Tom Nickel: We
thought this was going to be us announcing to the world that we’re these new
media guys. We went up to Cambridge together with different vague intentions,
but new media had something to do with it. We dropped the record off at WBCN, the
underground radio station in Boston at that time, and we did have the pleasure of
driving along Memorial Drive late one night and hearing a guy say “Here’s a
strange cut from a new record by a group calling themselves Founders Annex.” It
didn’t make us rich and famous, but it showed we could do stuff. And we did stay
together and actually got involved in what was then called cable TV. We saw the
future of broadband, right then in the early ’70s, and did continue doing other
things together. We stayed friends all these years.
Album audio & artwork
