NPR vs. NECN

I was contacted this past week by two news agencies that wanted to interview me about my week of trumpet gigs in Baghdad. The front end went smoothly with NECN, and it looks like I'll be fielding questions from Mike Nikita with a split screen production, he from a remote location and myself being broadcast from the Boston Globe newsroom. I'm not sure why they do it that way but they do. There was also an outreach from WBUR, Boston's NPR station, but that thing tanked like New Coke and Ishtar combined.

NECN and WBUR had become aware of the trip through a blog I maintained courtesy of boston.com and the Boston Globe. I think the reason the WBUR interview was eventually dropped was because I was in contact with the segment's reporter, rather than the producer. In dealing with NECN, my contact person, Laura Campbell, produces the segments and thus could answer my questions without a second degree of separation, and likewise, I could find out what ancillary materials she needed from me. She, BTW, is a real pro, very sharp, and I love her to bits.

With WBUR, there was a request for an audio clip from one of the Baghdad shows in the initial email contact. I looked into it and found out that while a tap off the board was attempted, there was an earlier voltage conversion episode that had fried a recording device we had intended to use.

Any musicians out there know that a board tap at a small to medium venue is preposterous anyway, as the only things being given additional amplification in such an environment are quiet signals. Guitar amps are typically loud, so they don't end up high in the board mix because stage volume will usually suffice. The vocals are freakishly loud in the mix, and drums are medium. The trumpet is a horrifically loud thing in the wrong hands, so typically there is little to no trumpet in a soundboard recording in a small to medium-sized venue. Most saxophonists are not terribly loud (unless of course you are Carl Benevides in which case you are louder than most trumpets), and as such tend to be elevated in mixes off the board. You get the picture.

Beside all of that, we are a cover band. We play "Word Up" for Christ's sake! (We didn't in Baghdad). Why record a live presentation of cover material? It doesn't make much sense, unless you were really going to do it right and get a splitter box whose snake runs into a separate mixing console with a second engineer monitoring the input. I kept having to explain these things and she kept having to relay the story to her producer. The band has plenty of available recordings, but the producer kept getting back to needing audio from Baghdad.

My last ditch effort was in trying to get an audio feed from some footage that had been shot of one of our shows, but that did not materialize as of D-day, which was today. I was supposed to interview at 9:15 AM with a live feed to Baghdad to speak with the major. I thought that the Major and I along with some of the band's demos would have made for fine radio indeed. Alas, it was not to be, which is too bad, because I would have liked to have read some of my journal entries on the air, and it would have been nice to meet all those folks, and initiate an association with NPR. I worship Daniel Shore as the one true God.

Posted by Chris Elliott at 01:01 PM | Comments (1)

EFP is the new IED

You may not yet have heard of EFPs, but you will. By now, most everyone knows that IED stands for “improvised explosive device,” and that it can be anything from a crude nail bomb to a bundle of dynamite sticks, to a couple of dud artillery shells wired to blow from a cell phone ping. EFP stands for “explosively formed projectile”, and its utterance is not welcome in the barracks.

Metal tubes with curved seals are packed with explosives and a fitted with a metal charge. These EFPs explode, as do IEDs, creating a tremendous concussion, but they also throw off a superheated molten round, usually either copper or steel, and it can tear through anything..

“We have no Humvee armor that defends against an EFP,” said Petty Officer and E5 Army soldier Josh Blair in a discussion of EFPs in Baghdad last week. “I have some video of an EFP going through armor, engine block, personnel, and right out the back end of a fully up-armored Humvee.”

Major Mike Pacheco, US Army echoes the sense of chill. “Mention an IED to a soldier and he almost shakes it off. A lot of them are poorly made. A lot of them miss. Some of them, we are armored for. IEDs are potentially survivable. But EFPs,” he shook his head. “Nobody likes to hear about EFPs on the road,” Pacheco said.

They are a steel pipe, usually less than a foot long, filled with explosives and sealed at one end. A curved steel or copper round is fitted to the other end, forming an oversized bullet that melts on detonation and kills everything in its path. Again, with a few thousand dollars, the insurgency has gone a long way toward making useless an expenditure of millions of dollars in vehicle and body armor in this increasingly asymmetrical war.

EFPs have caused the deaths of 50 soldiers and Marines in the last month. It’s the new way the insurgency has to kill us and it’s working. Examination of captured ordnance suggest that they appear to have been machined elsewhere and smuggled into Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.

Posted by Chris Elliott at 12:00 PM | Comments (2)