Are You a Farmer? Are You a Star?

Wet Willie on the Midnight Special back in 1974. Aw yeah.

To modern ears, the musical production can sound  “thin.” Recent recordings don’t have any dynamics in them anymore. It’s mixed to make every second of it just as loud as every other second. There’s not much air in it anywhere these days. Not so back in the day.

The voices in the video are just straight into an SM 58 microphone with some reverb. I don’t know any singer that could get along like that now. It’s all pitch corrected, and flanged, delayed and chorused, and who knows what-all to make fourteen voices in a cavern out of any old mumbling that goes into the microphone. You can actually hear Jimmy Hall, and the two off-duty stewardesses, singing the song. It’s a bit of a treat. Bar band writ large.

I doubt any of their amplifiers had a direct line out, to go straight into the mixing board to be processed and sent out through the venue’s bigger sound reinforcement system. I remember buying my first bass amp head in the 80s that had a direct out. It made it easy for the sound man to put me straight out of the PA speakers. My amplifier and speaker weren’t hernia-inducing anymore after that. That’s why the Ampeg bass stack you see in the video is five feet high. It’s gotta make enough noise to hold its own with an electrified band, basically unaided. That’s also why it sounds kinda woolly. Playing with a pick doesn’t help.

The guitar player is playing through some kind of Fender amp you can see there on the floor behind the keyboard player, next to the keyboard amp. A Twin, or a Vibrolux or something. It’s got another SM 58 slung over the amp and hanging down in front of the speakers, to feed the mixing board somewhere offstage. That’s Old Skool sound reinforcement right there.

Every drum is miked nowadays, when it’s not entirely a drum machine, anyway. Back then, you can see the drummer has the classic three-mike setup, with one mike pointing at the space between the snare and the hi-hat cymbals, another one pointed at the drum head of the kick drum, placed on the floor in front of it, and a third on a boom overhead that takes care of the floor tom, the mounted tom (there’s only one, how many do you need?), and the ride cymbal. My children were always short of microphones and had the same setup when they recorded or performed live with their own equipment. It’s all you need, really.

Wet Willie is classified as Southern Rock, but I dunno. It’s as good a handle as any, I guess. They were on Capricorn Records, and opened for the Allman Brothers, so. This song itself is kinda unclassifiable.

The band was a bit of a family affair. Jimmy Hall is singing and playing the harp, his brother is playing bass, and his sister Donna Hall is singing backup. The band used to perform supercharged covers of things like That’s All Right Mama by Arthur Big Boy Crudup.

Like a lot of blues songs, Keep on Smilin’ isn’t overtly a happy song. It sneaks up on you. It’s a form of communal hardship, A problem shared is a problem halved, right? It’s a recitation of common woes, and an exhortation not to let them get you down. The verses of the song are sung over a kind of herky-jerky rhythm that’s as disjointed as life’s little foibles. Then he leads into the soaring bridge with the exhortation: Keep. On… and the girls sing like angels with dirty faces and everyone feels better and you can just float away on it if you like.

Jimmy’s outfit, however, is beyond description, never mind explanation, so I won’t attempt it. Are you a farmer? Are you a star? Indeed.