Episode 2 – The Blues Festival

SCENE: A BLUES FESTIVAL, LATE AFTERNOON. THE FRONT-OF-HOUSE TENT. HEAT SHIMMER OFF THE FIELD. UNDER EVERYTHING, A LOW ELECTRICAL HUM. DISTANT SOUNDCHECK — A KICK DRUM, THUMB-TESTED.

FIDOMAN: You hear that?

UNCLE SZLAVIK: I hear forty thousand people who paid nine dollars to park in a cow pasture.

FIDOMAN: The hum. Underneath the kick.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: (chewing) It is a festival, Fido. Everything hums. The beer tent hums. The generator hums. My knees hum.

FIDOMAN: That's not knees. That's fifty hertz. It's a ground loop — someone powered the stage-left rack off a different circuit than front-of-house. The two grounds sit at different potentials, and the difference is riding right up the snake into the console.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: And this is a problem for who.

FIDOMAN: For everyone with ears.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: Then it is a problem for you and the dogs.

FIDOMAN: I can hear the hum.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: Nobody can hear the hum.

FIDOMAN: (pause) I can hear the hum.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: (long pause) ...Fine. So can I. Sit down. You look like a voltmeter that skipped lunch.

*SOUND: WAX PAPER UNFOLDING. A FRAGRANT, GARLICKY SAUSAGE.

FIDOMAN: ...Where did you get that. There's no vendor selling that.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: Correct. There is a vendor selling a "gourmet artisan bratwurst" for fourteen dollars. I brought my own. From home. Wrapped in a sock, for the warmth.

FIDOMAN: A sock.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: A clean sock. I am the chairman, not an animal.

*SOUND: A GUITAR AMP STAGE-LEFT COUGHS TO LIFE. THE HUM SWELLS WITH IT.

FIDOMAN: We're the sponsor. Our banner is on that stage. The headliner is running his harp through our preamp. And it's all floating on top of a fifty-cycle hum.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: Our banner is on that stage because I negotiated the banner onto that stage. For less than the sausage man pays for his tent. Do you know what people will remember tomorrow? The banner. Not your hertz.

FIDOMAN: I can fix the hum. Lift the ground on the stage-left rack —

UNCLE SZLAVIK: You will lift no grounds.

FIDOMAN: — just the audio ground, pin one, at the —

UNCLE SZLAVIK: The last man who lifted a safety ground at a festival to kill a hum is a very quiet man now. We do not sell hum, Fido. We also do not sell electrocuted harmonica players. Bad for the brand.

FIDOMAN: There's a hum eliminator in the road case. Isolation transformers. Breaks the loop, keeps the safety ground. Thirty seconds.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: (grudging) ...Thirty seconds. Then you sit. Then you eat. In that order.

*SOUND: A RACK DRAWER SLIDING. A CABLE SWAP. THE HUM DROPS AWAY — A SUDDEN, CLEAN SILENCE UNDER THE STAGE NOISE.

FIDOMAN: (quiet, reverent) ...There.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: (pause) Huh.

FIDOMAN: You hear it?

UNCLE SZLAVIK: I hear nothing.

FIDOMAN: Exactly.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: No. I mean I hear nothing. The whole field just got smaller.

*SOUND: A SOUNDCHECK — A HARMONICA, CUPPED HARD INTO A BULLET MIC, WAILS ONE LONG BENT NOTE. IT BLEEDS INTO EVERY OTHER CHANNEL ON THE CONSOLE.

FIDOMAN: (wincing) And there's the other thing. The green bullet. He's cupping a Shure 520 into a cranked Bassman, and that capsule is basically omni — it's eating the whole stage. Drum spill, the guitar amp, the crowd. Half of what's in that channel isn't even the harp.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: Yes.

FIDOMAN: I could clean it. The new plug-in — Hÿp — it analyzes the bleed across the mics and pulls the spill right out. I could give you just the harp. Pure. Isolated. Dead quiet around it.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: (long pause) ...Why.

FIDOMAN: Because it would be clean.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: (setting down the sausage) Come here. Look at that man.

FIDOMAN: I'm looking.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: He is sixty-nine years old. He learned that instrument in a room above a bar that smelled of exactly this — sweat, and beer, and a little bit of danger. The reason the whole stage is in his microphone is that he is standing in the middle of the whole stage. The bleed is the band. The bleed is the room. The bleed is the night somebody's uncle put a harmonica in his hand and said: play, or go home.

FIDOMAN: ...

UNCLE SZLAVIK: You want to hand me the harp with the room subtracted. But the room is the blues. Take out the bleed, you take out the bar, the smoke, the danger — you hand me a very clean, very lonely harmonica in an empty box.

FIDOMAN: (slowly) ...But if I left the bleed. And just tightened the low mids on the bullet — warmed the tube stage a hair —

UNCLE SZLAVIK: Now you are listening.

FIDOMAN: — not remove the room. Frame it.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: Frame it. Yes. That, I will pay for. Clean is free and worth every penny of it. Framing — framing is the whole job.

*SOUND: THE HARP PLAYER LAUGHS AT SOMETHING OFFSTAGE. THE BASSMAN IDLES, HUMMING ITS OWN GOOD HUM.

FIDOMAN: You knew it was a 520 from all the way back here.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: (quiet) I know the sound of a cupped bullet the way you know a JFET. (beat) I played. Long time ago. Different country. Different name than the one on my business card. We had one microphone and a guitar amp somebody's cousin carried out of a wedding. It hummed like a beehive.

FIDOMAN: Did you ever fix it?

UNCLE SZLAVIK: We could not afford to. And then one year we could — and we heard the band without the hum, and it sounded like somebody had opened a window in January. So we put the hum back that same night. (beat) Sometimes the flaw is the nail holding the whole thing to the wall.

FIDOMAN: (quietly) ...That's not in any of the manuals.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: No. It is in the sausage. Eat.

*SOUND: A STAGE ANNOUNCEMENT, MUFFLED AND BOOMING. THE CROWD SWELLS. THE HARP HITS THE FIRST REAL NOTE OF THE SET — DIRTY, ENORMOUS, ALIVE, THE WHOLE STAGE BLEEDING GLORIOUSLY INTO ONE MICROPHONE.

FIDOMAN: (over the noise) The hum's gone, though. I'm leaving the hum gone.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: Leave the hum gone. Keep the bleed.

FIDOMAN: One flaw at a time.

UNCLE SZLAVIK: (raising a paper cup) That is the entire business, Fido. One flaw at a time.

*SOUND: TWO PAPER CUPS TOUCH. THE HARMONICA WAILS OVER THE FIELD. SOMEWHERE NEAR THE GATE, A FOURTEEN-DOLLAR BRATWURST GOES UNSOLD.

END.