Live Effects with a Dead Dog

Edna Rain, Thomas King, Floyd Favel, Joe Mahoney

The following is an excerpt from Joe’s forthcoming memoir “Adventures in the Radio Trade,” available soon from Donovan Street Press.

I have nothing against sound effects per se.

I love sound design, for instance—taking sound effects from different sources and electronically creating worlds out of them that you could fully believe in. But as I’ve mentioned before I never really enjoyed performing sound effects live with actors. It just wasn’t my specialty. We had a couple of guys—Anton Szabo and Matt Willcott—who did specialize in it. They were good at it. Then Matt retired and the rest of us had to divvy up the job. Myself, I preferred recording, or producing, or jabbing forks into my eyes. Anything other than performing sound effects live with actors.

When I was assigned to do sound effects for the Dead Dog Café I was dismayed, but concealed my feelings from Dead Dog producer Kathleen Flaherty. I didn’t want to let her down.  

Making matters worse, I had been shipped a Compaq Armada laptop from Edmonton especially for the Dead Dog Café recording sessions that wasn’t making me happy. It had audio software on it called Dalet. At the time I didn’t much care for Dalet because after working in the radio drama department for a while I had become a snob. I considered Dalet’s editing capabilities inferior to programs like Sonic Solutions and Pro Tools. But really this was ill-informed. Dalet’s strength was its ability to network. Toronto boasted a network of over four hundred Dalet computers and twenty-some servers upon which we relied for most of our radio production, live and otherwise. The system was stable and worked well most of the time.  And I would come to change my mind about Dalet’s editing capabilities after receiving instruction from trainer Brian Dawes, who taught me that Dalet was actually quite powerful once you knew what you were doing.

I was forced to use the laptop because it had been preloaded with many of the music and sound effects cues that I would be required to play back during the taping sessions, and I didn’t have time to come up with an alternative. On the plus side, someone had taken the time to make my life easier by prepping the laptop for me—probably radio technician Eric Wagers, from Edmonton, who had originally performed sound effects for the Dead Dog Café.

I went into the taping session with a sense of dread, afraid that I wasn’t prepared, that everything would go wrong. We were taping on a Sunday morning. Greg DeClute helped me bring in props on the GO Train. He brought his son’s hockey sticks and I brought some umbrellas belonging to my daughters. In the studio, I wheeled out the Dead Dog Café door—the one with the bell attached to it, held together with duct tape and wire—along with several other props. The cast arrived. Gracie (Edna Rain), Jasper Friendly Bear (Floyd Favel Starr), and Tom King (playing a version of himself), along with someone new to the show, a young woman named Portia Jumping Bull (played by Tara Beagan).

I had prepared my sound effects weeks earlier by reading the scripts and getting a sense of the sounds required. I deleted all the dialogue, leaving myself a list of sound cues. Any cues that were kind of vague, I referred back to the script to determine the context. Most cues were obvious. Like, say, “plunger.” How many different kinds of plungers are there?

  Shortly before our recording session I reviewed my list. Seeing a plunger on the list I thought, well, we don’t have any of those kicking around the studio. I’d better bring one in from home. I found one, disinfected it, stuck it in my bag, and carried it all the way in on the train along with the umbrellas and Greg’s hockey sticks. I placed it close by so that when the script called for it, I’d be able to grab it easily.

We started recording a scene. The actors read their lines. We got to the sound cue that said, “SFX: Plunger!” I grabbed the plunger and begin vigorously plunging the floor, making “thwocking” sounds that I considered really quite outstanding.

Producer Kathleen Flaherty immediately called a halt to the proceedings. “Cut! Joe, what on earth are you doing?”

“Making plunging sounds. Is it working?”

It was not.

Turned out the cue was actually calling for a plunger to test Tom King’s blood sugar level. It was a medical device. Which was obvious when I took a closer look at the script.

Fortunately, the Dead Dog Café was a comedy show, and everyone working on it had a good sense of humour. We had a laugh about it and moved on. And I learned to read my scripts more carefully.

We had a guest on the show that day—Margaret Atwood. As I’ve written earlier, I’d once spent four days at Atwood’s house recording her interviewing Victor-Lévy Beaulieu (and vice versa). She didn’t appear to remember me. There was no reason she would have—it wasn’t like we’d stayed in touch, exchanging Christmas cards. But she was friendly and enthusiastic.

I never did warm up to performing sound effects with the cast. And not just because I’d made a silly mistake with a plunger. Whenever I was assigned to perform sound effects live with actors I almost always felt apart from them. Ill-at-ease. Often, the actors all knew one another. At the very least they could relate to one another. I was a part of the cast in that I had to perform with them, but I was not one of them. I was just this guy off to one side smashing plates and tinkling teacups.

Still, it was a privilege to be there. Tom King told us stories in between takes. He talked about his recent weight loss. Upon learning that he had diabetes, he’d dramatically adjusted his diet. For instance, he took great care not to eat bananas that were overly ripe. Of special interest to me, he talked about the craft of writing.

“I like to ask my students to write passages with no adjectives,” he told me.

I tried to do it in this chapter and thought I had succeeded until my editor informed me that, “this chapter has adjectives of quality (“different,” “great,”), and of quantity (“most,” “twenty-some”), subjective complements that are adjectives (“was vague,” “was powerful” etc.), and some plain, old adjectives like “good,” “recent,” and “special.”)

To which I would add “difficult.”

(As in, “Tom’s challenge was more difficult than I expected.”)