Elise Matthesen

It's the time of the year when I play certain recordings while I pack boxes and run labels, and several of those recordings are from the Revels. Depending on the track, at times the voice of John Langstaff rings out, and I am transported back to sometime before or around the turn of the millennium (dang it, however I type that word it just looks wrong) to a couple of very late nights in the MPR building, cheering on and marveling at the work of Roger Gomoll, producer and engineer par excellence, as he did his magic.

I should probably start closer to the beginning. But what came first? I'm pretty sure Roger had enlisted me as a small-time helper for various things, including being an idea fountain (well, that's what I call it) for merch for the premiere of the MPR State Fair broadcasts (the t-shirts with the old-fashioned-radio-shaped ice cream bar on a stick with a bite out of it? mine, and I wish I still had one of those shirts) and writing spots for a pledge drive or two. I don't think it was a pledge drive spot that Langstaff came by for, though I could be wrong. I think Roger was doing a promo for the Revels itself, or at least its first Minnesota incarnation. (It had been going since something like 1971 in various places by then, and eventually the seed was planted here.) I do remember the recording with Langstaff and the editing thereof came before any involvement I had with the Revels, because at the end of the first recording session Langstaff turned to me and told me I must be in the Revels, rehearsals were at x-and-such place on x-and-such nights and to show up and tell them he sent me. So I did. Hey, if Langstaff told you to go somewhere and sing, if you had any sense of adventure at all you did exactly that.

Anyhow, Langstaff ad libbed various things, recited some Revels stuff, and we talked a bit. Over the next couple of days, I took my little hammer-pen and anvil of paper and made some things that ran for the lengths of time Roger wanted. When we got back into the studio, we discovered a thing we had not expected, which was that our scripts were here and Langstaff was there and never the twain would meet. I didn't think I was that bad a writer; I had taken sentences and phrases exactly as he had said them in the initial taping, and one of my goals in scriptwriting carried over from writing feature stories for local publications: do a good enough job that people thanked me for putting down their words exactly. (Especially if they weren't, exactly. But that's a whole 'nother discussion.) There's a trick to capturing the flavor of what someone says and how they say it, and it was always a great satisfaction to get that right. So when Langstaff found such rocky footing on the words I'd assembled, I was apologetic and chagrinned in no small measure. But there was only so much time for recording, so we did what we could.

And thus it was that I watched Roger assembling the spots, working until quite late in the night in the MPR building. It was doubly cool because it was the first time I was around someone using sound editing software that stretched between two computer monitors, which was just trippy and all sensawunda to me. Due to the troubles with recording, there were a LOT of edits. (There was music fading in and out behind things, and a bunch of stuff besides just the voice.) As in, there was a thirty second piece with considerably more than thirty edits. As I recall, we were getting punchy when it was past midnight, and Roger matched up the wavelengths of the last bit by eye without listening to it, set up the edit, grinned at me, and then played it. Perfection.

Langstaff was quite a character. I'm sorry I didn't get to hang out with him more in a non-studio environment. Hanging out with Roger, though, in the studio or in the editing suite, was an education and a delight, and I will always remember it with gladness.

Have you ever gotten to hang out with someone at the top of their game, doing what they do well? Isn't it a delight?