Elvis is dead. Which is odd, because I just listened to him singing 'Crying in the Chapel', and you can hear him breathing. Actually, some very moral people thought the fact that you could hear him breathe, was obscene. This was early on in his career, before sex was invented. Shag, at that time, was a dance. Fellatio was a character in one of Shakespeare's plays, and cunnilingus was just a tongue twister. So, Elvis breathing on acetate was considered too intimate. Well, I bet those good people were glad to hear, he's stopped breathing now, the sanctimonious bunch of obsessive fuck ups. It's ironic really. Breath is such a sacred thing. Did not the Lord not breathe upon the waters and give us life? Was the sound of a man breathing into a microphone, while he sang his, soon to be broken, heart out, not an act of creation?
The microphone Elvis was singing into was a Shure 55. Sturdy, chrome like oblong, with grilles on, it looks like a designer grenade. Most of the microphones in circulation at the time were bought from the military as surplus stock. It was through this that the young man from Memphis would explode; coupled with the slap-back echo that would give us the distinctive 'Elvis' sound. Slap-back is a kind of reverb, and reverb is echo. With reverb, generally, there are loads of little reflections of the sound, which can give a feeling of the kind of space, the originator of the sound, is standing in. A lot of reverb makes the source of the sound seem further away, like somebody shouting across a canyon. The voice bounces off the canyon walls. A little echo makes the sound seem closer.
The kind of echo used at Sun Studio under the guidance of Sam Phillips, had Elvis breathing suggestively into the ears of the moral majority. Slap-back echo occurs only once. This echo, rather than having a multitude of repetitions, there is only one, between 30 to 50 milliseconds later. That is very close indeed. It gave the voice of Elvis a particular quality in those early recordings at Sun Studio. So much so, that when he was signed to RCA they did their best to emulate the slap back used by Sam Phillips. I try to capture this feel when I record vocals myself, but can never seem to manage the sense of closeness that Sam Phillips achieved with Elvis.
Now listen, Elvis sings into a microphone, the vibration, slap back and all, is captured on acetate. The vibration escapes, regularly, through radio stations, and reverberates around the world through time and against my inner ear and decades later, here I am, writing about it. Call me slap back if you want, but to be honest, I'm a little late.
This is the butterfly effect. The phenomenon whereby a small change at one place in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere, e.g., a butterfly flapping its wings in Rio de Janeiro might change the weather in Chicago.
This is the memory of movement; the ghost of a butterfly wing; the economy of creation, where nothing is ever wasted and God is cast as Dickens' Scrooge, letting none of the minutia of existence slip away. Perhaps the Lord is so old now, and so driven to distraction with what we're doing to each other down here, that he has to leave little message about what's going on, all over the place. An echo may be nothing but a thousand reminders of what just happened. 'Just write it down' God says to the angels. 'I'll read it later when I figure out why the ungrateful bastards nailed my son to a cross.' I don't know, I really don't but look:
It's a good thing that God, the originator of the Original Sound didn't use slap-back echo, because life would have been very short indeed. Mind you, reverb, for it to occur, needs something that the sound can bounce off. Without this, there is no reverb. You could say, that at the point of creation, there was nothing to bounce off, so no echo. Existence was pure. With the sound becoming denser, turning into matter, we then have reverb. Don't ask me how this happened. It just did, and God did it. Just take my word for it. If this was good enough for the Hebrews and Born Again Christians, when Moses came down from the mountain, about how he (a stone mason) came out of the mountains with two tablets of stone, it should be good enough an explanation for you. After all, I'm not trying to lead you to the Promised Land, just entertain.
And hoping that the Butterfly effect works both ways and someplace Elvis knows somewhere he inspired me to sing the way I do.
Geetan
copyright 2004
