In late spring 1967, when proceedings transferred to the Hawks' colourful home, dubbed "Big Pink", organist Garth Hudson set up a simple soundscape: three mikes into an Altech mixer, with instruments panned left or right, on to a Nagra reel-to-reel – what Robertson later called "this shitty little recorder" – that had already seen service on their dramatic 1966 world tour with Dylan.
She takes the mike into a tight fist and belts out a tune.
In the course of his work, he has dropped his mike into a beehive, coiled it near a rattlesnake, extended it into a roost of Mexican free-tail bats and gingerly approached elephant seals.
But the M.C.'s of early hip-hop took the verb in a new direction, transforming the microphone (abbreviated in rap circles as mic, not mike) into an emblem of stylish display.
On Monday evening, at a small private party commemorating the magazine's 50th anniversary, held in its Greenwich Village offices, Mr. Scorsese, accompanied by a film crew of about a half dozen, interviewed various current and former writers and dropped boom mikes into clusters of casual cocktail chat.
While orchestra members enter the pit and the audience begins to applaud, E-22 scrambles methodically to get the jack out of his blazer and plug the mikes into the deck, which is inside the unzipped backpack on his lap..
Some mikes are plugged into a PA, but you wish they weren't, because of the range of screams and whistles coming out of the speakers.
While the book and the songs are not particularly well integrated — after a little banter and maybe a flashback to the rough old days, somebody will just step up to the mike and break into a familiar tune — the directors, Mr. Mutrux and Eric Schaeffer, don't ease up on the gas pedal long enough for you to complain.
Then, having convinced us that he's just a nice little hoofer, Glover stuffs his mike into his back pocket and starts laying down the business.
The subjects could hear each crunch as it looped from the mike into the headphones.
