Giving or Receiving an Earful, Just for Effect

I’ve been having an etiquette problem. How do you tell someone that her gift to you, to put it kindly, sucks sprinkler heads? Yes, I know, the easiest and kindest thing would be to never bring it up, but I suspect there might be another dozen volumes of the thing that she might continue to give me if I say nothing.

I’ve thought this through every which way, and decided that if I’m going to bring it up, hurting feelings and possibly jeopardizing a friendship, I might as well get paid for it. You see, the gift in question is a CD of 75 sound effects, and it was given to me by the editor of this column, who fortunately is such a professional that she’d never let a thing like this interfere with her editing abilities.

She meant well. It isn’t like the CD she bought is titled “75 Really Miserable Sound Effects.” Instead they put spectacular in the title, over a photo of fireworks exploding.

The problem is, most of the effects aren’t that different from each other, and they all sound like they could have been recorded around the house.

For example, everything from “Chopping Tree” to “Galloping Horses” to “Pinball Machine” to “Heartbeat” sounds suspiciously to me like it might actually be “Man Cracking Walnuts With His Shoe,” while “Indian War Whoops” should more realistically be titled “Squeaky Fan Belt.”

You get the picture: “Roaring Lion,” “Tropical Rainfall” and “Dog Growling” sound like home recordings of “Root Beer Up Nose,” “Bacon in Shower” and “Bob Dornan on C-Span,” respectively. I must admit, though, that “Women Laughing” sounds disquietingly like a confab of my former girlfriends, preserved forever in the handy compact disc format.

Aside from being wretched, the CD was quite an insightful gift, since tucked away in my garage I have a sizable stack of sound-effects albums, including sub-genres like steam engine reveries, race car engines--I’m not kidding, I have a whole album of early ‘60s guys revving their motors--and those “environmental” creaking-masts-in-a-rain-forest records.

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You never know when in life you’ll need a good sound effect, so I keep hundreds of them at the ready. Unfortunately, the sounds that might be most apropos to one’s career, such as “Sniveling” and “Man Taking Pay Cut,” are difficult to locate.

I’d like someday to see collections of region-specific sound effects albums, one, say, of sounds indigenous to Orange County. It could contain titles like “Audience at Performing Arts Center Applauding in the Wrong Place,” “BMW Engines Idling at the El Toro Y,” “Man Cracking Walnuts With Automatic Weapons Fire” and “Audience at Performing Arts Center Applauding in the Wrong Place, Again.”

I’ve been a sound-effects buff since I first listened to my favorite record at age 4. It was “Sherri the Squirrel” (the name has been changed to protect us from litigious squirrels), an audio adaptation of a live action film by one of the nation’s leading purveyors of nature films.

Sherri frolicked around the forest, merrily, but for the vicious predators, crashing trees and raging fires trying to do her in, all represented by stirring sound effects. One early example of the discerning mind I since have applied to journalism was the way I would listen, for 15 minutes sometimes, to the forest fire that ended side one of the album. Eventually my mother pointed out that I was actually listening, over and over and over, to the crackling sound of the phonograph needle digging into the center groove of the record.

I was chatting with another of my Times pod-mates recently, and he was telling me of the days he used to work for this particular purveyor of nature films. After regaling me with tales of how a documentary crew once shoveled lemmings off a cliff to get a desired shot, he continued, “Of course, that’s nothing compared to Sherri.”

I knew I didn’t want to hear it, but kept listening as he continued, “You know how the fox almost got Sherri? Well, the fox got Sherri. Same with the fire. They must have gone through hundreds of squirrels.”

It seems that, since it’s hard to direct fires and ravening animals, a lot of Sherris bought the farm before the cameras got the right shot. The daily rushes would be one take of furry carnage after another. From a squirrel’s point of view, “Sherri the Squirrel” must be the von Stroheim’s “Greed” of nature films.

I still have my Sherri album, though I don’t think I could bring myself to listen to it now. That’s OK, I have hundreds of albums I can’t bring myself to listen to, mostly for aesthetic reasons. I buy god-awful records the way some people take in stray cats.

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For example, I have a heap of “tribal” drum records that were briefly popular in the early ‘60s. The recordings were ostensibly African, by a “prince” who was invariably claimed to be the last member of his tribe. Usually, they instead sounded like bored union musicians getting paid scale to bang on stuff. The worst of the bunch, perhaps, was a bongo-happy affair called “The Savage Rhythms of Modesto.” I presume the creators had a hoot naming their “prince” after the then-obscure California town.

I also collect live concert bootlegs, some of which I think are among the most important musical documents of our time, and others of which I have to admit I collect because they are so utterly distorted. There’s a bootleg of the Band in which you’d swear the peerless American group was performing underwater. With wool mittens on.

Another abominable recording was one of Black Sabbath--not entirely the most refined musical outfit to begin with--on a boot called “Love in Chicago” that reputedly was made by the Mafia. Whoever made it, it sounds as if it were recorded at a construction site, maybe in the same city the band was playing in. It’s nonstop rumble. Did I mention it’s a double album?

If I had to pick the most pathetic album I have--and bear in mind, this is from a collection with “Songs of the Humpback Whale” and no fewer than six Yoko albums--it might be “Stay Safe!” Its grooves contain “family” sounds: chairs scraping, food being consumed, and people engaging in insipid bickerings and arguments. According to the cover, it was intended to be played when you’re not home, to give burglars the ambient impression there is a houseful of folks inside. I suspect instead that it was a play that was so ruinously bad that this was the only way they could market it.

I don’t think I’d ever sell this album, largely because I’m positive I’ll never find anyone who would want to buy it. Given time, I suppose I’ll come to have a similar warm regard for my “75 Spectacular Sound Effects” CD.