The Scent of A.I. Oranges

It glued my fingers together like sap.

It was annoying because there shouldn’t have been any adhesive left behind, as that’s the purpose of gaff tape. That’s why it’s $20 a roll. If you cheap out and get the off brand version, you’ve effectively defeated the purpose, as you’re left with a mess to clean if you leave it adhered long enough.

I left mine for about 15 years.

There were multiple layers of it too, as I subconsciously knew I’d have a mess to clean if I peeled it off my cables, so I just kept taping over the previous layer, certain that future me would be rolling in it one day and just buy all new cables.

There are lessons you learn along the way. For instance, there’s a right and wrong way to wrap a cable. And you should spend the extra money on quality cables, as you’ll have them forever, or else spend just as much replacing cheap shit that breaks down over the years. Lastly, never buy off brand gaff tape.

I somehow learned the lesson about the quality of cables early, but skimped out on the gaff, so now I was left with gooey life long cables and my fingers stuck together.

There was a black layer of gaff, numbered in gray sharpie for each corresponding channel on my old mix console. There was a small brown layer, which was to distinguish between my cables and my old partner’s when we’d joined forces and built a studio together. Underneath all that, an orange label.

The orange was the first layer, and it was there to distinguish between a DMX cable and an XLR cable. They look exactly the same, but the shielding on a DMX is slightly higher. To put it in layman’s terms — DMX cables are for lights and XLR cables are for microphones.

We bought the DMX cables in 2007, before heading out on our first co-headlining tour. We’d never headlined before, and this was a big deal. We wanted to show up the other headliner, so we decided to invest in our own lighting rig. This sounds official and fancy, but what this actually meant was going to a local DJ supply store and piecing together something you’d find at a bar-mitzvah on Long Island.

We came home with a set of par cans, which upon powering up, were hot enough to cook a steak on, a few LEDs, a fog machine that we were only allowed to use in about 25% of the places we played due to fire hazards, and some strobes that we thought made us look oh so mysterious.

I washed my hands with Dawn. It’s what they use on the birds in oil spills, so I figured it could probably take care of some knock off gaff tape adhesive. The crumpled orange tape sat on the corner of the sink and I suddenly recalled building the homemade cases for those lights. D worked in construction with his father in between tours, so he was the de facto lead for craft based projects, but he was also neurotic. B couldn’t handle that, and as the whole band pretended to help him as he basically built the cases single handedly, B questioned why he was going to such great lengths to make them aesthetically pleasing on something that, to him, did not need to look aesthetic.

“BECAUSE IT’S NICE TO HAVE NICE THINGS.”

It’s a phrase that lived on for years after that day, eventually becoming a regular exclamation in our joint vocabulary (except D, as he did not find it funny) and surviving for so long that I probably had forgotten it’s birthplace until that ball of orange gaff tape sat at the corner of my sink. I recalled those over-engineered-black-spray-painted-wooden-lighting-cases, and teaching Larry, our tour manager, how to run the lights since we couldn’t afford another crew member. He caught on quick. He made every 300 cap room in this country look like a goddamn laser tag birthday party, and we thought it was killer. The other headliner didn’t. I recalled the drummer pulling me aside one night after he’d had a few too many and calling us out for trying to show them up with the lights. I played dumb.

The adhesive came off, but I had to scrub the cables with Goo Gone, which has an oily consistency and smells like A.I. oranges. It’s a scent that will live inside my nostrils for weeks to come, and while I can definitely afford new cables, I don’t like waste. So, I scrubbed all night, and wired up my new studio, realizing that it’s true — it’s nice to have nice things.