I just got the latest newsletter from AMIA, the Anderson Marsh Interpretive Association, and I was flabbergasted to learn that Bay Area musician Chip Dunbar had died.
The AMIA newsletter indicates that this year”s musical lineup for the Old Time Bluegrass Festival includes the Mighty Chiplings, a band of Chip Dunbar”s former students.
I knew Chip Dunbar in the mid-80s when he handled production for the teen radio ministry Cornerstone Media, Inc. I was one of several teens and junior college students who would produce 60-second spots that featured excerpts from a popular song alternating with a scripted message. It was a very learn-by-doing environment in which we would preview and select the songs, choose the lyrics and write the script.
It was then up to Chip Dunbar to record us at the microphone, splice out the instrumental tracks that could play beneath our voiceovers, cleanly segue to the lyrics and then back again to voiceover. Basically, he made what we scripted on paper into an audible reality that was then shipped to subscribing stations.
When I went to junior college, I was able to get class credits for time spent at Cornerstone Media. Once again, it was up to Chip Dunbar to supervise my education. He taught me how to make splices on reel-to-reel tape and I later used those experiences to lend a realistic element to a Star Trek fan-fiction epic about a rock band in space.
Hey, at least it was good for something! Now, of course, I”d be completely lost because everything is digital and I”m only just beginning to interpret what the squiggly lines mean as representations of sound on a computer screen.
I wrote my fanciful epic with a complete disregard of any notion that technology would ever advance to anything approximating digital. But I”m straying from my point, which is that it was Chip Dunbar who first enabled me to comprehend the linear tracking of sound that could be spliced and manipulated, taken apart and put back together in new ways. And I”m betting that when technology advanced to digital, Dunbar more than kept up. He really knew his stuff!
The other cool thing about Chip Dunbar was that his last name corresponded to an actual place, which meant that I could correctly apply the phrase “Chip Dunbar of that ilk” and have it mean what it”s actually supposed to ? assuming, of course, that Chip Dunbar had ancestors that came from Dunbar, Scotland.
Why was that so thrilling? Well, if you were a serious bird watcher, you might compile something that was called a “life list” of all the bird species you”d viewed and identified. And I”ve always been a really big fan of language.
This is my experience of Chip Dunbar but, as it turns out, he had this whole other life apart from us teens and young adults. He was making sophisticated music and ? what”s more ? was teaching it and he was highly respected and loved.
If you do a Google search on “Chip Dunbar,” you”ll find a number of tributes from various sources. You”ll also have the chance to hear his musical legacy at the Old Time Bluegrass Festival, taking place Saturday, Sept. 13, and Sunday, Sept. 14, at Anderson Marsh State Historic Park.
Contact Cynthia Parkhill at cparkhill@clearlakeobserver.com.
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