Thirty Years of Wedding Bands Took the Top Off My Left Ear

Every Song You Have Ever Danced To at a Wedding

If you got married in the Western Cape between 1994 and last year, there is a fair chance I played at your reception. Not famously. I was the keyboard player at the back, slightly to the left, behind the singer, in a band that changed its name four times but never its setlist. We did "Sweet Caroline". We did "Pretty Belinda". We did "Jerusalema" four hundred times in 2020 and 2021 until I could play it in my sleep, and sometimes did.

I am fifty-eight. I live in Bellville with my wife, Elmarie, who teaches piano to children, and for three decades my Friday and Saturday nights belonged to other people's happiest days. Wine farms in Stellenbosch. Church halls in Kuils River. A marquee on a beach at Langebaan in a wind so strong it blew the drummer's hi hat into the lagoon.

It was a good life. I want to say that first. But it was loud.

The Wedge at My Feet

For most of those years, the way a band like ours heard itself on stage was through monitor speakers called wedges. They sit on the floor, angled up at you, pumping your own sound and the singer's voice back at you so you can keep in time. Mine sat on the left, near my left foot, because of the way we always set up. The bass amp was usually on my left too.

Every gig, I turned my wedge up a little louder, because the drummer was loud and the crowd was loud and I needed to hear my chords. Every gig, the singer turned hers up a little more, because she could not hear herself over me. Every gig, the whole thing crept upwards like a pot coming to the boil.

I used to come home at two in the morning with my ears ringing like a telephone in an empty house. Elmarie would ask how it went and I would say "What?" and we would both laugh, because it was a joke. Until it was not a joke.

The Child Who Could Not Be Heard

It was a small thing that made me realise. One of Elmarie's piano pupils, a little girl of about eight, was having her lesson in our front room one Tuesday afternoon while I was reading in the kitchen. When the lesson ended, the girl came to say goodbye to me, as she always did, and said something. I saw her lips move. I heard a sound. I could not make out a single word.

I said, "Sorry, sweetheart?" She said it again. I still did not catch it. Elmarie, from the passage, said, "She said she likes your hat, Hennie."

The girl was standing on my left side.

That night I lay in bed and covered my right ear with my palm and listened to the room. The fridge downstairs. A car on Durban Road. A dog somewhere. Then I covered my left ear and did the same. The difference frightened me so badly I got up and made tea at one in the morning and sat in the dark.

My Daughter's Homework

My daughter, Liezl, is twenty-three and doing her final year of audiology at Stellenbosch. When I told her, on the phone, she did not say anything for a moment. Then she said, in a voice that sounded exactly like her mother's, "Pa. I have been telling you this since I was in first year."

She had. I had not listened. You would think a musician would be better at listening.

She came home the following weekend with a portable audiometer from the university, which she was allowed to borrow for practice, and tested me at the dining room table with a pair of headphones and a little clicking button. She was very professional about it, very calm, and then at the end she looked at the graph on her laptop and her face changed, and she was just my daughter again.

My left ear had lost a big chunk of the high frequencies. Not everything, but a lot. The kind of loss that makes children's voices and the letters S and F and T disappear. My right ear was better, but not by as much as she wanted. She called it noise-induced, which I gathered was a polite medical way of saying "thirty years next to a wedge."

She also told me what I did not want to hear, which was that it would not come back. The best I could do was stop it getting worse.

Taking the Wedge Away

I seriously thought about stopping. Retiring, doing session work, teaching, anything that did not involve standing on a stage. But the band had eleven weddings booked through summer, and the bass player had a new baby, and I could not let them down halfway through a season. And also, if I am honest, I did not want to stop. Those wedding nights, when the whole room is singing the chorus of "Sweet Caroline" back at you, are some of the best feelings I know.

Liezl's suggestion was simple. Get the noise off the floor and into my ears, at a volume I could control. She had been going on about in-ear monitors for years, the little earpieces that musicians on television wear, the ones I had always thought were for proper famous people and not for a keyboard player at a reception in Durbanville.

Learning to Hear Through a Small Thing in My Ear

I resisted. I said they would feel strange. I said I would not be able to hear the crowd. I said, and I am a bit embarrassed by this, that they would make me look like I was trying too hard.

Liezl sent me a link to pages of in-ear monitors for sale and a list of questions to think about, with "Pa please" at the end, and Elmarie printed it out and stuck it on the fridge under a magnet shaped like a treble clef. That is how things get done in our house.

The bass player, who is younger than me, already used them, and lent me his spare pair for a rehearsal in his garage in Brackenfell. The first ten minutes were strange. The music was right inside my head instead of out in the room, very clear, very close, like listening to a recording of yourself. I could hear every note I played, which, after thirty years of fighting to hear myself, was a little alarming. I heard mistakes I did not know I made.

But the strangest thing was the quiet. When the song ended and I took them out, there was no ringing. None. I stood in his garage with my hands over my face for a second, just listening to the nothing.

The First Wedding Without the Wedge

I bought my own pair in October and used them at a wedding on a wine farm outside Franschhoek the following Saturday. The rest of the band did too, more or less, over that season, once the singer heard how much better she sounded when she could actually hear herself. We stopped taking the wedges to gigs at all. The drummer complained for about a month and then admitted he liked going home without a headache.

At about eleven that night, during "Pretty Belinda", I took one earpiece out for a few bars, just to hear the room. A hundred and fifty people singing. Glasses clinking. Somebody's uncle whooping at the back. Then I put it back in and finished the song at a volume that was not slowly stealing the rest of my hearing.

What I Tell Younger Players

I am not cured. I still lose the ends of words when people stand on my left. I have learned to arrange myself at braais so that the person I want to hear is on my right, which Elmarie says makes me look like I am always slightly turning away from people. I still miss things the grandchildren of my friends say.

But I stopped the slide. Liezl tests me every six months now, at the dining room table, with her borrowed audiometer, and for two years the graph has stayed the same.

Young musicians sometimes ask me about gear after gigs, usually about keyboards. I tell them about IEMs instead. Most of them nod politely and go back to asking about synthesisers. One or two actually listen, and those are the ones I think about on the drive home, at a volume where I can still hear the indicator ticking.