Читать книгу Strange Way to Live - Carl Dixon - Страница 16

In those early days of touring with Alvin Shoes, I would find my voice giving out by mid-week. Something had to change if I was going to keep singing, so I found a singing teacher in my hometown. She kept an ad in the classifieds that said, “Miss Jessie Bradley, vocal instructor.” I went to see her one weekday afternoon in her Edwardian brick house. Miss Jessie herself appeared to be of the same vintage because it was a very old, stooped lady with a smart reddish-brown bobbed wig, be-rouged cheeks, and a circumspect look who greeted me at the door. I stepped around the stacks of old music method books and song sheets as she led me through to the drawing room, where she kept an upright piano.

Jessie put me through my paces with a series of scales and sounding-out exercises and then some kind of a song. I was twenty and this was my first singing lesson. What she decided after these preliminaries was that I had a nice natural voice but I didn’t know how to manage it, and I sure didn’t know anything about technique.

The kindly old vocal coach then proceeded to reveal to me the mysteries of diaphragm breathing, the basics of note placement and “vocal production.” She taught me about the Italian vowel sounds and about warm-up exercises. I heard the word “diphthong” for the first time, and I liked it. I got stronger and more reliable as a singer after one or two classes, but I was still prone to colds and the like until I learned to eat better and get more sleep. Miss Jessie also advised against the use of cough lozenges while singing, a common bit of self-medicating that singers often employed in those days to fight a sore throat from over-singing.

Vocalists then were often ill informed about their instrument. Maybe many still are, although there is so much more information easily available now. In the early years of my career, almost every singer I met was fearful and superstitious. They had to have a certain kind of tea onstage or they would cack out, or else they had to have Hall’s Mentholyptus or Fisherman’s Friend lozenges, or they needed certain incense sticks burning on the stage; there was no end to the tomfoolery. They’d need something to “coat their throat.” There were those who felt that their special style was dependent on having a certain kind of cognac or brandy before the show, and if it weren’t available, they’d squawk and fuss and throw a tantrum. Southern Comfort was seriously talked about as something that would “coat the throat” effectively.

In the Coney Hatch days singers on the circuit discussed the details of Scorpions’ singer Klaus Meine’s lost voice and his vocal nodes surgery as a “this could happen to any one of us” cautionary tale. I was once told by a credulous music fan the tale of one of the supposed up-and-coming singers in a bar band who one fateful night “went for it” and sang full strength on a high C-note, whereupon he promptly “burst the blood vessels in his throat, man” and saw his career come to a premature end. Uh-huh. I still meet singers who have sworn off all dairy products because they fear they cause phlegm in the passages and the dreaded “mucus build-up.” Blechh. Singing is such a beautiful thing. Terms like “mucus build-up” should not infringe on the same domain, should they?

One famous Canadian singer, whose life was on the highway, believed that the special nature of his voice would best survive the rigours of touring if the environment around him was kept quite cold. He insisted that the tour bus temperature be set to near-freezing conditions. This, along with some other interesting ideas, did not endear him to his bandmates as they bundled in ski jackets and froze each night. Gee, that sounds familiar.

A singer I’ve worked with has recently given up smoking after almost fifty years. The reason he persisted all those years? He’s the kind of guy who thinks to an obsessive degree about his musical presentation and is very uptight about how he’s perceived. He kept smoking, against all advice, because he liked the rough, dry sound it gave his singing voice, something he felt he needed to overcome the “sweet” sound of his natural, unharmed air passages. To his mind “sweet” doesn’t rock. To this singer’s amazement, after quitting a fifty-year smoking habit, he found that his voice now remained very rough without the daily application of carcinogens. Miraculous!

All of these misguided measures are in my opinion the result of a sad lack of knowledge. The people who study vocal technique and apply it know that none of these things are necessary to produce good sounds repeatedly. The reason it happens is the same one that’s behind every wrong-headed thing: fear.

Many unschooled singers are convinced that their raw, untrained sound is the key to their presentation. They don’t think they need some hokey, old-fashioned, uptight “teacher” to tell them what to do. What often happens with such singers is that whatever early success they gain can be based on other factors such as being young and pretty, or wild and unrestrained. Of course they’ll believe that the “natural” voice they brought to the party can’t be tampered with. That’s what got them attention in the first place.

On the other hand, when their untrained voice goes raw and hoarse and then cracks and loses the high notes from strain, misuse, and abuse? When it actually causes pain in their throats to make a sound? That’s when they feel embarrassed, exposed, and alone. They’ll start dropping difficult songs from the set or run from the stage in tears mid-song. They’ll blame the soundman for making their voices too quiet or the band for playing too loud. They’ll blame the songwriter for making the song too difficult, or the caterer for making the wrong kind of sandwiches or the management for booking too many shows. Most of all, they’ll tell you, “Nobody understands how difficult it is for a singer! All I’ve got is my voice, which is a fragile instrument, while the musicians just have to move their fingers around! If you think it’s easy, you’re wrong! I’d like to see you try it!”

One ’90s-era singer recently disclosed to me that he called the cops on his partying bandmates down the hall in their hotel because they were keeping him awake. “All I could think was I’m the singer and nobody gives a shit!” You’re probably right about that, friend.

All this argy-bargy goes on simply because the poor singer gets trapped in a few small fears. Their rampant insecurity leads them to make excuses not only for notes muffed but also in anticipation of notes they haven’t muffed yet. I was guilty of that one, for sure. Enter the room sniffing and utter a cautionary “I’ve got a bit of a cold, guys; might be a bit dodgy out there tonight,” and you’ve got a fair imitation of the vexed and wary vocalist. You set up your excuse in advance so that if you mess up, it’s not your fault. And if you don’t mess up? Well, you toughed it out bravely and overcame the odds. Hoorah for me! It’s a bit pathetic, really, but the band usually just buys in to keep the peace.

I was cured of that little habit during the making of the first Coney Hatch album. We were having trouble with a key song, and the label called in legendary producer Jack Richardson to help out. Jack, who’d produced every album by The Guess Who as well as a wide range of acts from Alice Cooper to Poco to the Bay City Rollers, was all business. I was in awe but also intimidated. The first day was spent getting the instrumental bed track to tape. Richardson stood out in the studio and conducted the band with a pencil, waving it about six inches from my nose. Scary. In the record you can hear me start out a hair too fast from nerves and then relax slightly.

Day two was reserved for the lead vocal. I came to the studio that morning kind of nervous and worried. A few of those excuse-in-advance phrases started escaping my lips: “Hi, Jack. Yeah, I’m a little tired today, and my voice feels sorta funny. I’m not sure if I’ll be that great.” I gave a nervous laugh.

Jack took this in for a moment and then boomed, “What is this talk, these ex-cuses? Don’t you know a lead singer is supposed to be strong and powerful, and lead the band with his voice and his energy? Let’s hear no more of this weakness. Come on, get in there and work!”

I was embarrassed and ashamed. I had always aspired to be strong and to be a leader, but fear of looking inadequate had made me aim for smallness to lower people’s expectations. Jack shamed me into recognizing that in myself, and I never forgot the lesson.