By Dave Babbitt – Special to the Sydenham Current
This week’s column was sparked by a recent e-mail from a former music student.
I must start off with my oft repeated phrase, “my goal is to leave this earth with no known enemies” but over time, I’ve come to realize that I am a polarizing figure. While nothing can be done about haters or spiteful people, I do my best to get along with everyone but in one area, I’ve failed miserably.
Confession: I’ve ruined a lot of good music for some people, and surely, they hold that against me.
This is about music, but more about how it is used.
Many years ago, it came up in a staff meeting that students arriving late for class had reached epidemic levels. In my days as a student, if one arrived late to class too often there would be consequences, the dreaded office detentions. However, over time the effectiveness of office detentions was watered down by essentially bartering with students by offering “amnesty days” where one could trade 5 office detentions for one, simply by showing up but I digress. Eventually, arriving late for class had zero consequences and students took advantage of that, so it was no surprise that the “late problem” had become so huge.
At that staff meeting, I came up with an idea and much like the Grinch, I came up with a “wonderful, awful idea”! I was going to use music to get them to class on-time.
I began by searching out songs that had something to do with time, moving along, hurrying up, walking etc. It’s important to realize that this occurred long before YouTube, music sharing platforms, and all of today’s readily available music on the internet, so it was an arduous process to collect what I needed. I scoured my record collection, borrowed from others, and even made a few trips to Sam the Record Man in Toronto to find the music I needed to create what became know as the “five-minute warnings”.
This is how they worked.
Five minutes before class was to begin, a 5-minute warning bell would sound, and office staff would start the recording I had made over the PA system. Each CD would begin with the sound of my voice saying “You have five minutes until class begins”! A clip of the first song such as the Everly Brothers “Bye, Bye Love” would play for about 15 seconds, then fade to silence. Next students would hear “4 minutes” with a different clip then fade out, and so on until it came to the final minute before class began.
When the final minute arrived, a song such as Anne Murray’s “Time Don’t Run Out on Me” or Europe’s “The Final Countdown” would play for the entire final minute. The music would duck at one point when students would hear “30 seconds” and the last 10 seconds were a backward countdown and when the music would suddenly end, the bell would sound followed by the pronouncement, “You’re Late”!
This experiment in attempting to get students to class in a timelier manner paid huge dividends. The students knew exactly when the bell was going to ring and how much time they had remaining to get their books and get to class. The experiment worked so well that I started creating many new 5-minute warnings so that there was variety in the music. These tracks would play before the first period as well as after lunch.
I’ve long owned multi-track recording equipment that made the process of assembling these recordings much easier. As time went on, I created several dozen of the 5-minute warnings including special ones for the first day of school, the last day of school, Cinco de Mayo, Christmas, etc.
After I had exhausted every song that I could think of that had something to do with time, moving along etc., I started to theme the warnings, sometimes by artist or music style. The funny part of all this is that as WDSS school Administrators moved on to different schools, they asked me if they could have copies for their new schools. I provided them with copies, and my voice became a staple in not all, but many LKDSB high schools.
When I attended meetings at different schools, I would often hear myself in the hallways and was careful not to reveal that the annoying voice they were hearing was me as there were two very distinct camps in terms of liking or disliking the recordings. Rather hilarious to me is that while WDSS no longer uses the recordings, I’ve been told that a few other schools are actually still playing them!
Anyway, the gimmick worked for quite awhile at WDSS eventually becoming a game for many students as they’d wait until the final minute or 30 seconds when lockers would slam and students could be seen running in the halls to beat the bell arriving just in the nick of time with a Chesire grin for the teacher that said “you didn’t get me”!
After several years, students stopped worrying about being late again and the recordings simply became an annoyance to both students and office staff who had to be at the ready to play the CD’s when the 5-minute warning bell sounded.
Why do I tell this? Because I ruined a lot of great music for people who now associate many songs with the 5-minute warnings instead of for being the great songs they are. But it’s no different for myself. When I hear Alabama sing “I’m In a Hurry”, all I can think of is rushing to class.
In retrospect, the experiment was polarizing. Some appreciated the recordings while some loathed them.
Former student Mike Brown recently e-mailed me regarding my recent articles about the WDSS Christmas Shows and in a side-note said that he would like to hear one of the 5-minute warnings again which have been off of my radar for several years. Having digital copies of them all, I uploaded them all to my Google Drive and have shared them with him. I hope he annoys his friends with them!
In keeping with my desire to “leave this world with no known enemies”, I want to offer my sincerest apologies to all former WDSS students for destroying so much great music for you, now get going…..
“You have 5-minutes until class begins!”
