Sore Roots Trip Log--Day 6: Hand-washing technique
Robert & Laura
Sore Roots Trip Log--Day 6: Hand-washing technique
Fri, Apr 13, 2012
When we last saw our heroes, we were getting ready to eat dinner and head on down to the "Student concert." This is where various bands formed by the students on Monday afternoon get up on stage and perform.
Frankly, we weren't entirely looking forward to it, because we figured we'd hear 18 different versions of "I'll Fly Away" (which is a lovely tune the first 10 times you hear it, but it starts to pall a bit after that).
Hoo ha, boy, were we wrong!
There were some 23 bands and each band got to do two songs. The size of the band varied from one (a Scottish auto harper) to approximately 20 (nobody was really sure as there were too many to count in the time they were up there, but it looked like about half the audience took the stage).
Yes, the "Shady Bakers" did do "I'll Fly Away" and there was a version of "Angelina Baker." (This is a traditional tune the bass class played with the fiddle class on Tuesday. From a bass point of view, it goes like this: 1-1-1-1 1-1-1-4 Chorus: 1-1-1-1 1-1-4-1.)
But there were some bands there that popped our eyes so far out of our heads that we had to scrambled round afterwards to put them back in. For folks who only had four days to prepare, some of them were awe-inspiring.
And the stage set-up was amazing. Each instrument and singer was miked and the stage crew managed to arrange each band in about two minutes, which is pretty close to light-speed for setting up microphones (especially when there's eight people with eight different instruments who are also singing).
Not all the songs were traditional bluegrass (one of the first songs was "Yakkity Sax" which Maggie the bass player totally nailed), but they all followed the bluegrass tradition where everybody gets a solo break. And, of course, when you're playing for an audience of musicians EVERY break gets a huge round of applause, even if you missed half the notes, because everybody in the audience knows what you just went through and they're applauding the fact that you didn't drop over dead just to avoid the whole thing.
The emcees did their best to kill time during the two minutes it took each band to set up. Our favorite comment was from the (American) singing teacher: "Sorry I'm late. I stopped to wash my hands." This got a huge laugh, for reasons that we'll now explain:
Above each and every sink on the entire campus (which covers five or ten acres and has a half-dozen giant old stone buildings) there is a laminated poster with the following instructions:
Hand-washing technique
by the Thames Valley Protection Unit of the Health Protective Agency
(poster includes vaguely helpful illustrations)
1. Palm to palm
2. Right palm over left dorsum and left palm over right dorsum
3. Palm to palm fingers interlaced
4. Backs of fingers to opposing palms with fingers interlocked
5. Rotational rubbing of right thumb clasped in left and vice versa
6. Rotational rubbing, backwards and forwards with clasped fingers of right hand in left palm and vice versa
We thought we knew how to wash our hands, but apparently, we were sadly mistaken. English school children at boarding schools are learning how to wash their hands properly. They left this bit out of the Harry Potter books, but we can assure you it was there.
Our friend John the bass player (visit his band's website at:
www.the309s.com) had an amazing outfit for his scratch band of about ten people. It started with the pork pie hat, made its way through a black suit with string tie and ended up at two-toned spectator shoes.
Two of the bands we liked the best:
- "GrABBA Handful of Fiddle" who did an astonishing folk version of an ABBA song ("Take a Chance on Me") which had the additional advantage of Jules on the bass and everybody else was keeping up with him, so they were all pretty snappy.
- "Immerglass Uber-man" with a style best described as "punk bluegrass on meth" with an amazing number of notes per second and a bass line that was more head-banging heavy metal than traditional country. These guys were playing so fast that they didn't get any applause for their breaks, because by the time the audience realized it was over, the next soloist was halfway through his 400-note break.
Both of these bands featured young people, so we're happy that the future of Bluegrass and traditional music is in proper hands.
Of course, if you do the math you'll realize that 23 bands at two songs apiece equals a bunch of time, and sure enough, even though the stage crew humped their way through the set-up, the concert lasted five hours. (They're releasing a two-CD disk of the concert, and the sound engineer said he was hoping that after he cut out the applause and intros and random talking that he could get it down to "only" three hours of music.)
We weren't tempted to skip out (although it was 11:30 at night) because we might miss another great band. We did get some video of it, which we'll share once we get to some kind of decent Internet connection (although Laura thinks we ought to get proper signed releases and permission from everybody involved; Robert is more of the "if somebody complains, we'll take it down" school of thought).
7:30 am
We weren't the only people staggering around campus this morning feeling brown around the edges. A thick Seattle fog covered everything and the breakfast line consisted of about five people.
Talking to people, we discover that what we've been having for breakfast isn't so much traditional British food as it is traditional British school food. John the bassist swears that he never has "spaghetti rings" for breakfast. He also says that at least the British don't put maple syrup on pancakes (and then Robert tells him that we do have chocolate-covered bacon!).
9:05 am
General Assembly
Our last assembly (yay!) where we learn an important new word: wheelie bins. These are trash cans on wheels, but "wheelie bins" makes taking out the trash sound way more fun. "Could you be a dear and drop this in the wheelie bin?"
Also, it seems that somebody forgot where they left their mandolin last night. We expect that wasn't the only thing he forgot…
A teacher who's been at Sore Fingers for five times gets a present, consisting of a toilet seat covered in guitar chord diagrams. We wish him the best of luck getting through TSA security. ("Are these bomb diagrams, boy? Why you carrying a toilet seat BACK to the U.S.? Ain't we got good enough toilet seats for your butt?")
11:00 am
In bass class, we get a picture of all of us, so that five years we now, we can all look at it and say, "Who's that?" and "Look how much hair I used to have!" We also gritch about how nobody respects bass players and how hard we work. Then we tell banjo jokes ("What's the difference between a banjo and an onion? Nobody cries when you cut up a banjo.").
Also, important tip for dealing with bass players (especially double-bass players): don't ever pick up their instruments without permission. Seems there are 325 bad ways to pick up a bass, and one right way and since some of them cost 2,000 quid (or more than 140 stone) bass players get prickly when you do that. Robert has managed to work his way through 214 of the bad ways to pick up a bass, but it was a loaner, and started out with a huge gouge in it, so it probably wasn't damaged any further.
12:50 pm
Lunch is traditional fish and chips! Yay! In America, we would call this fried fish and french fries, because we're huge fans of alliteration and calling things by their correct names.
Once again, our lunch mates want us to know that "Our food is not really this bad." We're guessing that when the British apologize for their food, it must be pretty mediocre, as they don't have a reputation for fine cuisine.
Still the "fish and chips" is pretty good (well, the fish is, anyway, the chips taste like they came off the old block).
Robert talks to another bass player over lunch (we're our favorite company). Turns out she's a music therapist and she thinks it's amazingly cool and noble that we go visit a nursing home once a month to play for the folks there. We do it partly to have someplace to play and partly to get experience playing in front of tough audiences. There is no audience tougher than an Alzheimer's ward--you have to earn their attention and work hard to keep it.
2:00 pm
The bass class is participating in "massed bands" where the banjos and fiddles and guitars and basses are all getting together to play something (probably "Angelina Baker"). Laura's autoharp class is having each person get up and do something. Because Robert's borrowed bass needs to end up in that classroom anyway, we decide to do one of our old-people songs when it's Laura's turn.
But first, we sit politely through the other 15 people playing.
Here's an important performance tip, should you find yourself singing or playing or even just speaking to a group of people: do NOT start out by saying, "This will probably come out rubbish, because I haven't really rehearsed it and I'm not sure if I'll remember it all, but here goes."
It does not gain you the sympathy of the audience. It makes the audience cringe ("Geez, if THEY don't like what they're going to do, what makes them think I'll care for it?").
The first 10 of the 15 people give some version or other of that speech (which turns out to be surprisingly accurate). Then it gets to those of us who have enough sense not to apologize and takes a turn for the pretty good. Our song goes well (even though Robert can only play about five notes on the stand-up bass, the song only needs five bass notes, so it works out nicely) and we're right after somebody not as good as us, and right before somebody much better than us.
4:30 pm
Laura is snoozing, catching up on the sleep we didn't get last night while waiting for the laundry to finish. We're guessing that our ritzy hotel in Edinburgh doesn't have DIY laundry facilities, so we're taking advantage of the washer/dryer here to get things clean before we go get them dirty again.
The bass class has pooled our money (we put in a Poverty Act note) to buy something nice for our American bass teacher. Fortunately, she's fond of scarves, which fit into suitcases nicely, and--oh look, textiles is one of the big industries in this area.
Maggie's sorting it all out and is off to shoot a sheep, or whatever needs to be done to arrange to get a scarf. We've convinced the teacher that there's an Official Photo shoot at 5:00 pm in the bass room, so we can surprise her with whatever Maggie picks out. (Here's a tip: bass players lie like rugs. Don't trust them.)
This evening there's a concert by the teachers (or "Tutors" as they call them here, not to be confused with the "Tudors," who are pretty much all dead). We're not sure if we'll stay for the entire thing, but we're going to take a wild guess that everybody else is as knackered as we are and it'll probably end early.
Tomorrow: On the Road again (well, technically, "On the Rail" again).
Robert & Laura
Sore Roots Tour